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Telluride Environmental History

1984 Words8 Pages

Mikayla Anderson
Dr. Thomas Finger
HIS 397
April 16, 2017
Local Environmental History of Telluride, Colorado

“If you want to find a species wholly new to science and have your name inscribed Latinly in some secular version of an eternal rollbook, then your best bet is to come to the southern Appalachians, climb some obscure and snakey mountain where, as the saying goes, "the hand of man has never set foot," and start turning over rocks” (Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek). Telluride, Colorado, a city that began its journey in 1875 as a mining town, is now one of the most populous cities in San Miguel County, located in the Southwestern portion of Colorado. This small town has been manipulated by humans for the past century in hopes to extract …show more content…

Very quickly, the population soared to nearly 5,0000 residents, including many very diverse groups of immigrants. The Telluride Basin became a melting pot for Chinese, Irish, French, Germans and Swedes. This quick influx of population quickly depleted much of the local wildlife, as the town was stripped to establish housing and local animals were hunted for their food or subsistence. Miners also rapidly established an upwards of 350 miles of multi-level tunnels in the far east end of town, near Bridal Veil Falls. Telluride was originally named "Columbia", but there was high confusion with another similar mining town in California under the same name, so the name was changed to be more fitting. The town was named after valuable ore compounds of the chemical element tellurium, a metalloid element which forms natural tellurides, the most notable of which are telluride ores of gold and silver. Although genuine gold telluride minerals were never located in the mountains near Telluride, the area's mines were rich in other valuable resources, including zinc, lead, copper, and silver.
Telluride took time to establish as a large, flourishing city because of its isolated and hard to reach location, which is still true for today. In 1881, a toll road was opened by Otto Mears which allowed wagons to go where only pack mules could go before, which increased the number of people in Telluride, but it was still extremely expensive to get gold-rich ore out of the valley for use in trade and

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