River of Lost Souls. Jonathan P. Thompson

same year the legal case for impounding tailings was further bolstered by a state court ruling. The owners of the Ames hydroelectric plant near Telluride had sued an upstream mill operator because the latter’s tailings were mucking up its operations.²² A district court judge ruled in favor of the electric company, and in 1897 the Colorado State Court of Appeals upheld the decision, further ruling, “The operators of stamp mills must use reasonable means to prevent the flow of tailings into streams where others would be materially injured nearby.”

      The law and ruling seemed to be of little concern to the mill operators, however, who did virtually nothing to clean up their mess. Still, local news outlets across the state gave the issue plenty of ink. “Owners of stamp mills concentrating works and placer mines, situated along the Roaring Fork in the Aspen neighborhood, have defied the authority of Commissioner Swan of the Fish, Forestry, and Game Department in his efforts to purify the waters of that stream,” noted the Fort Collins Courier in June 1897. The Aspen Tribune, in November 1898, had a more dire take: “Upon examination of river water, sufficient arsenic, together with other poisonous minerals, was found to kill a human being. . . . Ores treated at the new Smuggler and Gibson concentrator are largely zinc, with a heavy showing of arsenic, and tailings have been dumped into the river regardless of danger to human life. . . . All summer long ranchers living on the banks of the Roaring Fork have reported the death of cattle from poisoning.”

      THE ANIMAS RIVER DID NOT BECOME A REAL FRONT OF THE TAILINGS WAR until 1900, when Durango Democrat editor David F. Day got involved. If anyone was equipped to face down the powerful mining interests, it was Day. The Ohio native signed up with the Union Army in 1862, when he was just fourteen years old, to fight in the Civil War. He was captured, wounded, and sent into seemingly hopeless situations multiple times, only to emerge as a war hero—all before he turned eighteen. When he heard about the raucous mining towns in Colorado, Day headed west in 1879 and started the Solid Muldoon newspaper in Ouray. He quickly became notorious for his irreverent, pointed prose, and for the dozens of libel suits against him.

      After riling up folks on that side of the San Juans for more than a decade, Day was lured across the mountains to Durango, a Republican stronghold, where in 1892 he fired up the presses of the Durango Democrat. In photos, Day, a stout, mustachioed man with a cowboy hat and round-rimmed spectacles, resembles Teddy Roosevelt. The two seem to have shared some personality traits as well. Day, with an iron will, was once described as “a mingling of the chivalry of the South and the broad-minded, free-heartedness of the West.”²³

      In the pages of the Democrat, Day kept flogging at the mine owners for months, but the pollution only grew worse. Finally, in 1902, officials from the City of Durango couldn’t ignore the problem any longer. Nearly all of the citizens’ household water came from the river, and the water in it was growing nastier and nastier by the day. The City considered taking legal action against the miners; after all, the law was clearly on the downstreamers’ side. Tailings weren’t the only offensive pollutant in the river. Silverton’s town dump was in the Animas River floodplain, boardinghouse toilet vaults were perched over streams, and much of the county’s sewage eventually made it to the river.

      Up until this point, Silverton mining interests had mostly ignored Day’s concerns. But now that he had gotten an official audience, they lashed back, with the Silverton Standard as their mouthpiece. That May, the Standard ran a piece headlined, “Would Kill the Goose That Laid the Golden Egg”:

      As to mill tailings, there can be no controversy except that no one but the law of gravitation has committed an open ‘violation of the law.’ It is true that the tailings from the half-dozen mills in San Juan County, and the impregnated water therefrom, eventually reaches the Animas River.

      But there is reason in all things. We do not deny the proposition that the pollution of the waters of the streams of the state in any manner is contrary to law. Neither do we deny that mill tailings in a stream to a certain extent pollutes it—not of course the pollution that sewage is, but rather a filling of the water with mineral matter that makes its use extremely obnoxious if not positively dangerous to health.

      But is the practice, under the existing conditions, a willful violation of the law, as Colonel Day suggests? Here are a half-dozen mills giving employment directly and indirectly to 1,000 men, whose work in turn gives employment to another 1,000 men in Durango. They are public benefactors to the extent that perhaps 5,000 people are and have been depending on their operation for a living. To compel the owners to build settling tanks and handle the settlings would be at best but a costly experiment and would result in ruining the mining industry of the San Juan County, as her ores are essentially a low grade milling proposition.