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Slime Wars I

“THE ANIMAS RIVER WAS ONCE A BEAUTIFUL, CLEAR AND SPARKLING FLOW of wholesome water, and the home of the finest specimens of mountain trout in the state,” wrote Durango Democrat editor David F. Day in the spring of 1900. “The flow of the Animas River is rapidly being destroyed as a beverage and agency for irrigation by the absolute and unlawful recklessness of Silverton mill men and steps should be taken at once to force the mill operators to either impound their tailings or cease to run.”

With this blistering editorial targeting the Silverton-area mines and mills, Day had yanked the communities along the Animas River into a statewide row over the dumping of mill tailings into Colorado streams. By that time, Front Range farmers had been battling upstream mines and mills for decades, trying to get state lawmakers to clamp down on mine-related pollution. Mostly it was for naught. But with the irascible Day in the fray, the anti-pollution crowd had gained a potent weapon.

IF THE RAILROAD WAS THE CATALYST FOR INDUSTRIALIZATION of the region’s landscape, then large-scale milling had an even more profound effect on the mines around Silverton and, consequently, on the water that spills out of the mountains here. When Olaf Nelson and Jonathan Peterson were hit by their first landslide in 1879, San Juan mines were mostly small-scale operations. Nelson and his colleague followed the vein using hand tools and dynamite, then sorted through the ore by hand, picking only the chunks with the highest concentrations of metals, which they took by wagon or burro to the nearest smelter, where the metals would be cooked out of the rock.

While the miners could scale up their side of the operation by adding more laborers or using more efficient means of transporting ore, they were still limited by the smelting process. Smelting only works on high-grade ores, those containing relatively high concentrations of valuable metals. That meant that the miners had to leave the low-grade ore in the mountain or toss it aside in waste dumps. For the first decade or so, that wasn’t a problem; there was an ample supply of high-grade ore. But there was a lot more low-grade ore to be had, if only it could be smelted. This is where milling—an intermediate step between mining and smelting—comes in.

Milling ore is simple in concept: You grind up the rocks and separate the valuable stuff out from the “chaff.” But in the late 1800s, engineers still struggled to make it work on a large scale in the San Juans. Mills were constructed at various mines in the Silverton Caldera throughout the 1880s, but none really achieved the desired economies-of-scale until Edward and Lena Stoiber built their revolutionary mill.

Stoiber and his brother Gustav, German engineers, came to Silverton in the early 1880s to get a foothold in the nascent mining boom. They acquired a group of claims on the shores of Silver Lake, a classic, high alpine gem northeast of Silverton in a hanging basin ringed on three sides by steep, rocky peaks. In 1888, Edward was married to Lena Allen, a young divorceé whom he met in either Silverton or Denver. Soon after, Lena bought into the Silver Lake Mine, becoming an equal partner in the venture with her husband.

The veins were not especially rich at the Silver Lake, but Stoiber figured he could make a profit there anyway, with proper engineering. In 1890 he had a mill constructed on the shores of the lake, designed specifically to go after low-grade ore, along with a hydropower plant far below on the Animas River to supply the juice to run the thing. While it wasn’t the most efficient operation, it worked well enough to turn a profit from rock that had once been considered worthless, and soon other mines were following the Stoibers’ lead.

The mills that emerged during this era were enormous, dangerous, noisy structures, usually built up a slope so that gravity could help move the ore through the byzantine process. At the Silver Lake mill, the high-grade ore was sorted out by hand to go directly to the smelter. The rest of the rock went through two crushers before it was further pulverized by fifty stamps, each of which weighed hundreds of pounds, crashing down at high repetitions. The crushed ore was ground down even further by four sets of cylindrical rolls. The resulting fine-grained material was then mixed with water and moved through shaker tables and jigs in order to separate the valuable metals from the rest of the powdered rock. Some mills used mercury-coated plates to capture the gold via amalgamation.

Put a ton of ore in one side of a mill and, after a bunch of crushing, stamping, screening, shaking, and amalgamation, several pounds of concentrates—a sandy form of high-grade ore that can be smelted—emerge from the other end. That leaves hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of sludge-like leftovers, or industrial waste, known as fines, tailings, or “mill slimes.” The slimes are not benign. Mills in the Silverton Caldera kicked out wastes containing mostly iron pyrite, the main ingredient of acid mine drainage; large quantities of zinc, which wasn’t marketable until about 1916 and is toxic to aquatic life; and other toxic metals, such as copper and lead, that didn’t shake out in the inefficient milling process.

Nearly all of the slimes—tons each day—along with their acid-generating sulfides and toxic metals, were dumped without second thought into the nearest creek, river, lake, or floodplain. Mills, like slaughterhouses and sawmills and power plants, were built near rivers to utilize the water for power or processing raw materials, and because rivers made handy sewers: Dump your crap in there and watch it wash downstream into oblivion or, in this case, to Durango, Farmington, the Navajo Nation, and southeast Utah’s Mormon country.

Even if it doesn’t contain otherwise toxic materials, the turbidity from the tailings is harmful. The thick sediment clogs and cuts up fishes’ gills, reducing oxygen uptake, it can coat eggs and hurt their viability, and it blocks sunlight from reaching aquatic plants and algae that are an important part of the aquatic food chain. The silt can clog up farmers’ ditches, town water pumps, and hydropower turbines. And tons of this was dumped into the rivers. It was like the Gold King spill, of a less vivid hue, repeated day after day on nearly every watercourse in the state of Colorado and across the mining country of the West. Naturally, the downstreamers weren’t happy about it, and that ignited a region-wide cold war that would simmer for decades.

COLORADO MINING GOT ITS START AT THE END OF THE 1850S ON THE FRONT RANGE of the state, in the mountains west of what is now Denver and Colorado Springs, and pollution problems cropped up there first. Clear Creek, a stream that gets its start up on the Continental Divide above what is now the Eisenhower Tunnel on Interstate 70 and then follows the freeway through Georgetown and Idaho Springs, was the initial battleground. The mining-turned-gambling towns of Black Hawk and Central City sit on North Clear Creek, which joins the main stem above Golden. Today, the gargantuan Coors Brewery straddles Clear Creek’s waters in Golden, and the stream joins the South Platte River in an industrial part of north Denver.

Mines, and then mills, swarmed the upper reaches of Clear Creek, and farms sprouted along the lower sections out in the foothills and plains, drawing water from the stream for irrigation. By the 1880s, Clear Creek no longer lived up to its moniker, and in 1882, the Colorado Transcript ran one of the first articles about an attempt to get the miners to clean up their act, and the water:

Farmers of Jefferson County are interested in securing legislative action for the purpose of preventing the pollution of the waters of Clear Creek by the mills and mines of adjoining counties . . . the condition of the waters in Clear Creek is becoming more damaging to the farming lands along the creek; that the large amount of sediment carried in the water, coming from the quartz mills along the creek in such quantities and being of a mineral character, whereby it covers and chokes the soil wherever it settles, suffocating vegetation and preventing all growth of any plants, while the pyrites and other minerals contained therein when spread out and exposed to the action of the air, decompose, chemical action occurs in connection with the alkali and salts of the earth, and the copper, arsenic and other deadly and poisonous elements are set free, rendered soluble, and thus with every rain and use of water spreads the destruction over a wider domain of the lands.

The farmers’ representative, engineer E. L. Berthoud (for whom the Colorado pass and town were named), even offered a partial solution: build a series of settling ponds along North Clear Creek just below the mills. Berthoud acknowledged that this would merely get rid of the particulates, not the acidity and dissolved heavy metals. But it was a start, or it could have been had anyone acted on the suggestion. They did not. Colorado lawmakers made no move to stop the sullying of the state’s waters for years, and the mine managers weren’t about to fix the problem themselves.

Finally, in 1887, the state gave those battling pollution a foothold, albeit a tiny one: it passed a statute making it unlawful to kill any “food fish” in public waters except for the purpose of eating the fish right away. The new statute didn’t mention tailings or pollution, however, and was premised not on the intrinsic value of water or wildlife or even food, but on the notion that food fish are a type of game, and therefore belong to the state. A decade later the state expanded and sharpened the statute by passing the Forestry, Game, and Fish Law. It read, in part: “Proprietors of saw mills, stamp and reduction mills, and placer mines are notified to so dispose of their sawdust and tailings as not to pollute the waters containing food fish.”

That 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.