The Purple Mountains’ Fading Majesty (June 1968 | Volume: 19, Issue: 4)

The Purple Mountains’ Fading Majesty

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Authors: David Lavender

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June 1968 | Volume 19, Issue 4

The period between the First and Second World Wars was, for the Rockies, a time of cruel suspension and uncertain change. Not even we children could pull the covers over our heads and pretend that the bogeymen were not there, for we were surrounded with the wreckage of hopes that once had blossomed as brightly as our own.

The most graphic of the ruins lay in Colorado’s Red Mountain district, a six-mile sprawl of abandoned workings along one of the headwater streams of the Uncompahgre River. By horseback across the intervening high ridges, Red Mountain was not far from TeIluride, where I lived, but by car it was a long drive around through Ouray and up the resounding Uncompahgre Gorge. Occasionally my stepfather would go there to examine moribund mining claims in which he held an interest, and the trip gave my brother and me and perhaps a friend or two an opportunity to scamper off along the weed-grown bed of the silent narrow-gauge railway for an hour of delicious prowling amidst acres of junk.

Laced among lifeless cabins were long dumps of waste rock, running like petrified tongues from the mouths of the deserted mines that the railroad had once served. Weighted down by each winter’s heavy snowfall, the mill and mine buildings, the stores, the little bell-towered church—everything—leaned a little more perilously each year, until one summer we returned to find that another landmark had collapsed into a heap of splintered boards.

We never found much inside the cabins except broken-handled implements, cracked dishes, and oddments of homemade furniture, for the departing residents had removed whatever was usable. Now and then among the waterlogged layers of newspaper that had been tacked to the walls for insulation we would notice a section of print that was still legible, and we would read, without much interest, of what had been happening down in Silverton in 1906. We investigated the wooden snowsheds that led from each house to its privy. We stirred our shoe toes through the heaps of crumbling tin cans outside the kitchen doors and occasionally saw, without being aware of their value as collectors’ items, old whiskey and catsup bottles whose glass had been stained a delicate purple by years of sunshine. Then we’d hear my stepfather honking the car horn and we’d scurry back. We sensed vaguely that we had brushed across lost dreams, and after we returned to Telluride we realized, during uneasy moments, that the stuff of our own lives was slipping away just as inexorably.

For we could detect the grim note that came into the voices of our elders when they mentioned that another mine up in Marshall Basin had closed. We stood around with our mothers while they watched the neighbors across the street move away, leaving behind a For Sale sign that no one ever lifted from the desiccated lawn. Then another, and another, and pretty soon one of the groceries