Offering a glimpse into the past of the western San Juans, San Juan Sampler showcases the landscape and culture of 19th- and 20th-century life throughout the region. Featured essays highlight Telluride, Ophir, Silverton, Durango, Ouray and the Million Dollar Highway, magnificently illustrated through these historic postcards. The essays featured were written by researches and top scholars in their local communities, including our own local resident and San Miguel County Commissioner, Art Goodtimes. Goodtimes will also be on hand Saturday to discuss his essay on Telluride featured in San Juan Sampler, as well as delight us with some of his colorful poetry.
The Center of Southwest Studies, in conjunction with the Durango Herald Small Press, published this book as one of the numerous projects to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College in Durango.
Everyone is encouraged to bring their historic postcards to share during this special evening. Take a fascinating journey with these essays and the accompanying historic postcards and learn why so many of us are proud to call these mountain towns "home."
Mining the Gold
In Telluride, it was always about the gold.
For the Utes, the golden-leaved aspen made the San Juans part of their "Shining Mountains," and for them San Miguel Park where Telluride now thrives was a wild box canyon of bear, trout and eagle. A good place to hunt, if not to live. Spectacular country, boasting two stunning waterfalls and a cirque of Fourteeners, but forbidding in the long winter, with mud slides, cloudbursts, avalanches, and rocky terrain.
For the Spanish, gold was the Cibola they sought everywhere in the New World. And in the San Juans they looked for it, but didn't find much. Arrastres (from Mexican Spanish for a "stone mill," used in Territorial New Mexico by goldseekers for "a mortar and pestle method of crushing ore"1) were the first technology to mar the alpine landscape of the region, with slave traders from Santa Fe doing most of the exploring about the high peaks and steep canyons. They found some color in the streams, but never enough to make anyone rich.
For the Anglo fur trappers, beaver was the gold they found in abundance – pelts worth a pretty penny on the East Coast drew them deep into the West's interior. Constantly on the move, they'd lay their trap lines, harvest out the plentiful beaver, skin the hides, and haul them back to the trading posts. Hard, lonely work. But the profits could be formidable.
For the American settlers, it too was precious metal that brought them into the mountains that the new nation had avoided on its first pass across the landscape. The Rockies were too forbidding for the first pioneers, intent on the easy land pickings to be found in California or Oregon. But rumors of silver and gold brought one rush, and then another. And soon, in spite of treaties, few trails, and inhospitable conditions the prospectors found their way into the isolated San Miguel Park.
Finally, long after the mining era had passed and Telluride had devolved into a skeleton of its mining camp heyday, snow was the white gold that drew urban refugees to rumors of a new ski area about to launch. Jackson Hole, Aspen, Vail were all successful resorts, and Telluride was poised to take off for anyone willing to get in on the ground floor. That was back in the 70s, and thirty years later Telluride now ranks up there with some of the most popular ski resorts in North America.
I was one of those last wave refugees from the urban madness of California. Looking for beauty and a good place to work and raise children. I woke up one morning after hitch-hiking into Telluride to visit friends, took one look at the ivory-mantled high peaks, and I was snared. Colorado had me in its golden grip.
Give me the trembling aspen on Coonskin Hill any day, with their litter of gold and fractured sunlight. The fields of dandelions that cover the Valley Floor in the spring. Those rust bucket ruins in the high country above town that were once pounding mills and mines, marmots dashing now through the splayed cable and broken-down shanties. Ore heaps where I'd find quartz, crystals and maybe just a fleck of fool's gold. But even as a newcomer, I was drawn to the region's history.
My mother had been a Native Daughter of the Golden West. She could trace her family back seven generations in California. Back to a Spanish jefe de policia in Monterey in the 1790s. And San Francisco had been our home for the last four of those generations – where I was born, my mother was born, my grandfather and my great-grandfather, whose body lies in the cemetery at the Presidio to this day.
My dad was of immigrant stock. One generation removed from the Old Country. Italy. Naples and Abruzzi. And his ethnic family clan had moved from the Bronx to the Bay Area back in the 20s, when he was a small child.
Telluride's history appealed to me. The story of the Italian union miners organizing a strike and battling the ruthless mine-owners resonated in my own Italian blood. And the many local Spanish place names reminded me of my own Spanish roots.
One of the first things I did when I came to stay was join the local historical society board – a mostly social group of old-timers with hardly enough money in hand to keep the doors open but charged with preserving a rag-tag collection of local memorabilia housed in a dilapidated stone ex-hospital building in serious danger of collapse. I was secretary, and one of my duties, besides taking notes, was cleaning the clinkers out of the coal furnace. Quickly I got in touch with the region's bygone era – hearing the stories, handling the artifacts, lifting fused vitreous matter from out the dead embers of the antique coal hearth.
Later, taking up as a journalist, I began writing the first historical column in many a year in the pages of the upstart San Miguel Journal.
In transforming a busted almost-ghost town into a bustling ski metropolis, local entrepreneurs had hit upon the idea of making the downtown core a National Historic Landmark District. In a few years, an Historic and Architectural Review Commission was formed, and all the mining-camp Victorian buildings on the alluvial fan of tempestuous Cornet Creek were protected from inconsistent development.
Truth was, most folks who moved into Telluride in the 70s and 80s were from somewhere else. History may have been a selling point for the realtors and a market niche for the resort. But few of the real old-timers were left in town who cared deeply about the history of the area and worked to preserve it.
Elvira Wunderlich and Irene Visitin were among the exceptions. Happy to see the town rescued from obscurity, but wary of the new wealth and urban émigrés flooding the valley, they began in 1976 publishing a monthly newsletter about this special place they called "The Most Beautiful Spot on Earth." It was an interesting and always useful compendium of selected news, accounts of travel by-, and updates on-, former residents (part of the wider Telluride diaspora), plus the sisters' own historically-minded takes on local events. Only quite recently, after 26 years of effort, have they finally ceased monthly publication. But one would be hard-pressed to find local residents more intimately in touch with Telluride's past than Elvira and Irene.
Thus, I began a column tracking one of the local papers from a hundred years earlier – from a Save-the-Union Republican weekly called the San Miguel Examiner. Lots of sifting through the week's news and selecting out the more interesting tidbits and unique tales from the past. Occasionally making a few of my own comments.
I learned about a tram car that was turned into a postal conveyance, the only ore bucket post office in the nation, or so the paper from back then opined. And I followed the run-up to, the accounts of, and the aftermath relating to the Labor Struggles of 1901-04.
How Western Federation of Miners labor activist Vincent St. John bare-handedly disarmed mine-owner thug Shadigee Bill on Colorado Avenue as he discharged his pistol, preventing anyone from being harmed when the tough guy tried to strong-arm a few reluctant scabs that St. John had been educating. Or how Examiner Editor/Publisher George Sumner was relieved of publication for supporting striking union members (a local judge best known for drinking took over the paper's reins) and run out of town at gunpoint. Or how they handcuffed a union man to a telephone pole and it went out all over the country on the wire services.
Telluride's colorful history began to come alive.
It's not known if the Clovis or Folsom peoples spent any time in the region. If so, they left no trace. Unlike over in the Gunnison Basin, where the Tenderfoot and Mountaineer sites have left their archaeological trove of lithic scatter2.
Part One in a series. For more information on this and other Telluride Historical Museum programs, call 728-3344 or visit www.telluridemuseum.org
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