Durango Read Free Page A

their former neighbors back East to come out and join them, thus bringing the congestion they themselves had only recently and eagerly escaped. The newcomers soon joined old-timers who already thought Durango overcrowded to organize opposition to the dam. Both newcomers and old-timers found support from traditional conservation and newer environmental groups opposed to dams virtually anywhere. By the late 1970s they found a political champion in Jimmy Carter.
    The town of Durango itself had begun to emerge in 1880 when an entrepreneur named William Jackson Palmer brought the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad all the way to southwestern Colorado. He played a central role in laying out the very grid that would become the town, surveying and selling lots, and he saw to it that there were people out there on his railroad line who would take his trains back and forth to Silverton and Denver, miners who would come to work at the smelter built there a few years after, goods that would fill his outbound boxcars, and cattle that would crowd the inbound cattle cars back to Denver.
    Over the years a frontier mystique grew up around Durango as embodying an ideal western small-town-America style of living that was human scale. People knew each other. They attended their various churches with those they worked with during the week. Parents knew teachers. Shopkeepers knew customers. Insurance agents, auto dealers, repair shops, bankers, lawyers, and cowboys mixed and mingled. It was an honest place. It was solid and trustworthy. It was about as close to perfect as a place could get.
    Who wanted mining trucks, oil rigs, gypsy roughnecks breaking up Saturday night bars, bigger, noisier hotels, big chain stores, and eventually, inevitably, back-office service representatives in Bangladesh handling your insurance claims? Stop development. Stop the dam. So, peaceful Durango, representing western America if not all America in the second half of the twentieth century, found itself deeply divided.
    There was one more element in this equation, however, that came into play. The Southern Ute Tribe had historic claims to water rights on the Animas and the La Plata. If any dams were built upstream for the Durango city folk, a proportionate share had to go to the Utes. And finally, after decades of hanging on in at best marginal conditions, the Utes saw the dam as offering the possibility of a major step up.
    Now the equation was complicated. The pro-dam development faction had the Indian tribes on its side. And the anti-dam, anti-development faction—who by nature would normally have found themselves on the side of the hapless, downtrodden, neglected, and cheated Native Americans—found themselves opposing a substantial means for Ute improvement and self-advancement.
    Out of a mixture of water and minerals emerged a serpent of greed that threatened to poison this idyllic community.
    4.
    Sheridan made room at his drugstore table for Caroline Chandler. You’ve already had plenty of caffeine with the boys, she said.
    A little, he said. But on a Monday morning there’s always need for more.
    Without being asked, the waitress brought two large mugs of very strong coffee. Her raised eyebrows asked, Anything else? They both shook their heads.
    Had my annual spring roundup with Harv Waldron, he said presently. I’m gettin’ too old for this. It’s my good deed for the week.
    Oh, Daniel, she said, patting his rough hand, you’ll be bringing Harv’s cows down decades from now.
    Hope to God not, he said. Though the only good part was that the excursion in the blizzard gave me an excuse for an extra Jameson.
    It is good sleep medicine, she said with a tone of experience.
    How’re things up at your place? he asked.
    No complaints, she said. I think I owe you a dinner.
    He chuckled. That’s usually a signal that you’ve got a big rock that needs moving or a board loose somewhere.
    She looked offended. Now, that’s cruel.