Durango Colorado and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge

Day 8: Welcome to the Twilight Zone

When I was in grade school, my mother and her new husband moved me to the mountains of southern Colorado. I had already spent the majority of my school years as a fish out of water, so the move to the Four Corners region didn’t make my life much worse than it had been before. But the new town did feel…strange. There was something eerie about Durango, Colorado that I could never quite put my finger on, growing up.

I wrote it off all through grade school and middle school as culture shock. My earliest experiences of school and pre-school were in Manhattan, after all. My grandparents all lived on the other side of the Mississippi in major cities, and both my parents were college-educated people with STEM-related jobs both before and after their divorce. So, for a kid from that background to end up on a ranch in the middle of the high arid desert, driving cattle on horseback and running branding irons from a campfire? That was always going to be an adjustment. I was bound to feel a little unsettled.

As time went on, however, and I was heading into high school, I started to become more interested in the history of the town. Durango was founded in the late 1800’s as a railroad hub to provide access to a silver mining region deeper in the Rocky mountains. From the 1890’s to the 1930’s it was a rollicking working class party town with a main drag full of hotels, saloons, shops and businesses. The town was built to serve the needs of miners, farmers and ranchers, to provide a rest stop and railroad hub, and for fifty years benefited from an active smelter that processed coke, lead, silver, gold and copper.

When I looked around at Durango in the 1980’s, I saw a town struggling to reinvent itself. The industrial foundation of the town was long dead; the smelter had shut down in 1930, destroyed by the Great Depression and the dwindling accessibility of viable ore in the surrounding mountains. The railroad had lost its charter to deliver mail in 1950, as delivery by automobile and truck was widely adopted nationwide. Big trains no longer had a reason to come to a railroad hub in Durango; the small rail station in the historic downtown district was saved only because its surviving narrow-gage rail line to Silverton was declared a Heritage site, and kept open as a tourist attraction.

It was in tourism that 1980’s Durango saw its future, and developers were moving in to realize that vision. Condominiums were rising in the hills, built to house visitors who would come for summer hikes and winter skiing in the mountains. The historic district was upgraded with fancy chocolate shops and ice cream parlors to provide treats for tourists riding the narrow gage train. Slowly, one by one, the crumbling low-brow monuments of the 1950’s-1970’s Main Street were demolished and replaced by sleek, sanitized modern businesses. The Gold Slipper, the oldest bar on Main Street, toppled and fell. A sleazy pinball alley gave way to an antiseptic mini-mall.

And yet.

Under the surface, something was still rotten about the town. Even as the evidence of its unsavory past was swept away, I kept asking questions and sifting through stories for some hint as to what went wrong. Was the town haunted? Cursed? Radioactive? What the hell was it about Durango that made my hair stand up on end?

But as it turned out—what was wrong with Durango Colorado wasn’t subtle at all. It only struck me as a vague, constant sense of malaise because I was White. Otherwise it would have hit me like a blaring klaxon from Day One, the first time I walked down a city street:

Durango, Colorado had no Black people.

In a country with a Black population of 13-14% per capita, the Black population of Durango even today is estimated to be less than 1%. When I was growing up there, that ratio may have been even worse; I cannot recall seeing more than two or three Black faces throughout all the years I lived in the town.

My AP history teacher in high school had been researching Durango’s history for years. When I asked him if he had found anything that could explain the strange local demographics, he told me a story that was completely horrifying, completely plausible…and unfortunately, completely impossible to verify, although I did try.

He said that Durango had once had a small but thriving Black community, complete with local businesses and an African Methodist Church. But the KKK, which was extremely powerful in the region and the town in the early 20th century, had driven them out. His story was that the majority of the Black population had lived along the west bank of the Animas River, in a slum that was half shanty-town and half garbage dump. In one fiery night of arson, assault and possible murder, the entire community went up in smoke—houses, churches, businesses burned to the ground. Any survivors of the attack had fled the town immediately, never to return.

And the scene of the crime? Quietly buried beneath the sod of a series of quiet grassy parks along the west side of the Animas River. If this story was true, those innocent-looking grassy areas would be a monument to the biggest hate crime in the history of the county—a hate crime that had been literally covered up for decades.

In the years before I finally left Durango for good, I tried to find some proof that this story was true. It seemed very strange to me that something so outrageously violent could be done, even to marginalized people, and leave no survivor accounts pointing the finger. But it also seemed very strange that a town which offered so much opportunity for working class people would not have had any Black residents.

Durango had been a place for miners, railroad workers, smelter workers, farm and ranch labor. Black Americans were often over-represented in all of those professions, historically. This was so common that half of the legends and songs associated with railroads and mines are about Black men—”John Henry”, “Big John”, “16 Tons”, etc..

When you looked deeper into the history of the area, you even found that Black soldiers were some of the first settlers in this part of Colorado. The famous 9th Cavalry, the Buffalo Soldiers of the Civil War, had been stationed at Fort Lewis in 1882. So…if Black people had never seen fit to come to Durango in any great numbers….why not? And if they had come to Durango and settled there for a time…where did they go?

To be clear...there is some evidence to corroborate the story that my teacher told me. There are accounts of the early town that state that the west bank of the Animas was a flood plain where the city’s poorest residents lived. It is described as half slum, half shanty town, the sort of community which is always called an eyesore by a prosperous White middle-class.

By the 1980’s, any trace that such a shanty town or slum had ever existed was long gone. The parks certainly did stand in its place. But exactly WHEN had that shanty town disappeared? Exactly when and how were those parks built?

To those questions, I found no answer. And to this day I have a sickening sense of dread, half-believing that the wild story was true. Part of me still thinks that if they were to launch an archaeological excavation into those city parks, they would quickly find ashes and bones.

There is also evidence of a “Great Fire” in Durango, which burned some parts of the historic city. And there is ample proof that the KKK was a powerful, dominant force in La Plata County in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, the accounts of the fire and the rise of the Klan don’t match, in terms of constructing a timeline for the exodus of the Black population of Durango.

The Great Fire took place in 1889. But historical accounts claim that it started on the east side of the river, in the more reputable part of town. Several blocks of buildings were lost, with damages estimated at 500 million; arson was suspected, but there is no mention of a fire burning on the other side of the river.

As for the Klan? They were extremely popular in Colorado for several years, and La Plata County was one of their great strongholds. The organization which had been slapped down immediately after the Civil War had revived itself in 1915, spurred by the release of the infamous racist propaganda film “Birth of a Nation”. Colorado had the second-highest per capita membership in the USA throughout the 1920’s, and there were branches of the organization in every county in the state.

Record of Klan activities in La Plata County were recovered in 1984 in Bayfield, Colorado, a smaller town to the east of Durango. Those papers were donated to the Southwest Studies center of Fort Lewis College, which also holds digitized copies of “The Durango Klansmen”, an anonymous newspaper which was published and distributed in the town in 1925.

In the 1980’s, Catholic residents of Durango still remembered the Klan. Italian-American witnesses did not mention any deaths, but they certainly remembered being afraid: the public parades, the rallies and speeches, the constant barrage of burning crosses. One of the most famous historical photographs of Durango is a picture of a burning cross on Smelter Mountain in 1925. Given the distance from the camera and the size of the tailings mound that I remembered from the 1980’s, that cross looks enormous to me—perhaps as tall as the smokestacks of the Smelter itself.

April 22, 1925. The burning 125-foot cross on Smelter Mountain was lit by the Ku Klux Klan as part of their “festivities” surrounding the speech given by National Klan secretary and Berwind, Colorado, Presbyterian minister Herbert Markley to a standing-room-only crowd at Durango’s Gem Theater.

As the years have passed, I have learned a lot more about the ways that American towns and cities have created a segregated landscape. Sundown Towns, Redlining, intimidation, harassment, murder and outright war, including air strikes, are all part of the 20th century history of the USA. But Durango will always hold a special place in my heart—a dark, cold place where foreboding and dread take root and flower into existential terror.

Durango was the first American town that ever gave me that eerie “Twilight Zone” feeling—the sense that I had stepped into another world. Despite its surface resemblance to a normal place, this alternate reality was a terrible place—a lie, a trap, a murderous conspiracy hidden behind fake smiles and bleached perms. It was a place where awful things could and would happen—but always out of sight, just around the corner, in the dark of night where no one would see, or hear, or tell.

A place where people would vanish, and never be heard from again.

A world without Black people.

Resources:

Wikipedia: The Durango Smelter

KSJD: Uncovering The Shrouded History Of The Ku Klux Klan In Southwestern Colorado

Colorado Historic Newspapers: The Durango Klansman

Center for Southwest Studies, KKK Records

Durango Herald: Smelter Mountain Fiery Cross

Animas Museum: The Great Fire Tour

Denver7.com: Sundown Towns in Colorado

Philip Dehudy: Black Ethnic History of Colorado

The Durango Telegraph: Not Just Seeing Things - Haunted Durango

Mesa Country Libraries: the Gold Slipper