Читать книгу River of Lost Souls - Jonathan P. Thompson - Страница 15

Dandelion Brew

A FEW YEARS AFTER RHODA PASSED THROUGH, my maternal great-great-great-grandmother, Julia Mead, her daughter Emily, and son-in-law Harry Hathaway, joined the fledgling Animas Valley community. They came from Bourbon County, Kansas, leaving shortly after the death of Julia’s husband, Joseph, making the arduous trek by wagon from Kansas to the San Luis Valley, east of the San Juan Mountains, and over Cumbres Pass to Chama, New Mexico. From there they followed roughly the same well-trodden path that Rivera had taken a century earlier.¹⁴

Our family creation story does not explain why a sixty-seven-year-old widow would venture into a land so fraught with uncertainty and danger. But by most accounts she was strong-willed, independent, and adventurous. Nor do we know why she and her companions chose to stop here in the Animas Valley. I suspect they had heard news of the San Juan rush and the flood of opportunity spilling out of the mountains. Or maybe they knew that any westward journey would soon get more rugged as they passed into Utah’s canyon country and then into Latter-day Saints territory, where just two decades before more than one hundred gentile travelers had been massacred by a group of Mormons.

I like to think that they came down the little gulch south of the not-yet-born Durango in the early evening, just after the sun had settled behind Carbon Mountain. That’s when the water gets dark and smooth and wrinkles up against the rocks as if it is made of molten glass. Nighthawks boom through the lavender sky hunting insects. Mayflies bounce across the river’s surface, and metallic-looking trout shoot skyward in pursuit, momentarily blemishing the big, moving mirror. Maybe in the uncanny calm of that moment between light and dark, Julia, a spiritualist who spoke with the dead, heard the river’s souls speaking to her, beckoning her to remain.

They headed upstream on the east side of the river, across the low, sagebrush-covered mesas on which Durango’s residential neighborhoods would sprout several years later, past a new Animas City that was taking root on the glacial moraine at the Animas Valley’s south edge, and onward several miles more to a place where towering red cliffs watched over ponderosas and scrub oak. They carved a cave out of the sandy river bank, and lived there until they upgraded to a small cabin nearby, which Julia described as a “well insulated chicken house.” Henry made a claim on a 160-acre homestead on the east side of the Animas River, adjacent to the confluence with Hermosa Creek.

Some called Julia a witch. And it’s true that, being of a spiritualist bent, she attended séances. More importantly, she was a healer. Still a largely unsettled land, the valley lacked the professional medical resources to serve the growing population. Julia Mead filled in the gaps, serving as doctor, nurse, and, most notably, midwife. She supervised the births of countless babies in Hermosa and its surroundings and she tended to the sick with elixirs made from roots and flowers gathered from the fields and hillsides. A half century after her death, old-timers still spoke of the healing powers of Julia’s pitch plaster and her Oregon grape root and dandelion brews. Some even blamed her for spreading noxious dandelions throughout the valley. I hope it’s true.

After a year or two, Julia’s son, Ervin Washington Mead, his wife Emily, and their son Ervin (Lyman), followed mother, sibling, and in-laws west. The Hathaways eventually went back to Iowa, and apparently sold the homestead, but Julia and the others stayed. With the money she had earned from her medical practice, Julia bought forty acres of land south of Hermosa Creek, a tributary of the Animas that runs in from the northwest side of the valley, and started a small farm there.

As she grew older, Julia liked to sit in the shade of a towering ponderosa pine on a corner of the farm on warm summer afternoons. She asked her son Ervin to bury her under the tree, so that her body could mingle with the old giant’s roots, but when she died in 1894 he went against her wishes, and she was interred in the staid and manicured cemetery above Durango, instead. Legend has it that some years after Julia died, Ervin heard a voice telling him to dig under the ponderosa. When he did so, he found a box full of money left by his mother.