Durango Read Free

wouldn’t hold my breath, Mr. Murphy finally said. If he’s not his old self by now, he probably won’t ever be…and even so, Ms. Chandler would be the one to know. He nodded across the street to where she was parking her car.
    3.
    In 1868, the federal government entered into a treaty with the consolidated bands of Ute people. Within a few decades, federal policies and the pressures of western expansion would divide the Ute people into three distinct tribes, one of which is the Southern Ute Tribe. By the late twentieth century, the tribe was down to fewer than 1,500 members, though well before the Spanish came, their ancestors had migrated around and across most of what became Colorado and large parts of New Mexico and Utah. In the late nineteenth century, the Ute Strip, basically desert land roughly fifteen miles wide and seventy-five miles long, was created by the government and became the permanent Southern Ute reservation. By the mid-1930s, even that rough terrain near the corner of Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico was half-owned by non-Indians. And the whites had managed to get much of the prime land near the several rivers and streams crossing the Southern Ute reservation.
    Like everywhere else in the arid and semiarid West, there was little that could be done with the land unless you had water. A few cows might be grazed on the scrub brush and clumps of weeds, but there would be no crops for sale or gardens for family food without water. And the water did not ordinarily come from rainfall. It resulted from the high mountain snows and it had to be stored when the spring runoff from the San Juan Mountain range, just north and east of the reservation, came. The Animas and La Plata rivers, as well as the Florida and lesser streams, transited the reservation. But the tribe had no storage facilities for irrigation or domestic use. If you did not have property along one of those streams, and the means to divert it, you were living a life dominated by wind and dust, and little else.
    Up until the 1960s, the Southern Utes, with few exceptions, lived pretty much hand to mouth. The small tribal treasury provided no more than one or two hundred dollars a year per tribal member. And by and large, members of the tribe were at the end of the employment chain in and around town.
    By the 1960s, however, things began to change. Tourism in the spectacularly beautiful region, with its national forests and then wilderness areas, jagged peaks, ancient Native American ruins, wild streams, partially restored mining towns, nature and horse-riding trails, and plentiful campgrounds, brought a wave of economic growth. Increasing numbers of city dwellers, confronting urban crowding and pollution, visited the region, went back home and sold out, and moved to the area permanently. But all this activity and all these new people needed more of what was already lacking: water.
    Not too long thereafter, a vast national search for energy resources began. As early as the 1950s, areas around Durango were mined for a new vital resource—uranium—first for nuclear weapons and then for nuclear power plants. But there was also coal, and there was oil and natural gas.
    The confluence of tourism, urban escapees, and energy development meant that water from the San Juan snows could not continue to run off down the streambeds to New Mexico and Arizona. It had to be stored. And the only way to store it was to build dams, more particularly a dam collecting water from the Animas and La Plata rivers.
    The federal government, in the form of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation, was only too glad to help. It was beginning to run out of places to build dams in the West. But as planning began for the Animas–La Plata Dam around 1968, resistance arose. All those people who had recently moved into the area, now having put their roots down, were less than enthusiastic about increasing the water supply that would then encourage