Durango (6 page)

Patrick brought her back from her memories. So, he said, Mr. Sheridan was maneuvering—

Being maneuvered, she corrected.

—being maneuvered into a candidacy for governor, the vultures were circling—

And some of them landing, she added.

—and some of them landing. And then the roof fell in on Sheridan.

As our paper reported, she said, he was accused of accepting payment, taking bribes, for using his county commission office—by then he was chairman of the commission—for arranging financial contracts with the Southern Ute Tribe. Naturally, he denied it and opened his account at the Bank of Durango to prove it. His accusers promptly responded that there were other banks, including in Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, where money could be readily deposited.

That means he had to prove a negative, Patrick exclaimed.

Exactly, she responded.

They must have had some other evidence.

There were two members of the tribal council who offered to testify that he had given them money to support a bid by a large and powerful investment fund to manage the tribe's resource development projects. They opened their bank accounts, new ones, and there the money was in the amount they claimed he gave them.

That's not enough evidence to convict him, Patrick nearly shouted.

Ah, Patrick. Young man. You don't know our man Mr. Sheridan. He was—he is—an old-fashioned man of honor. His honor is more important to him than that land he got from his father, or his horse, or his dog, or his pickup truck, or just about anything else. He did not intend to have his honor besmirched. He resigned from the La Plata County Commission and ordered his friends to close down the blossoming political campaign. He simply went back up to the top of Florida Road, and that's where he's been ever since.

Patrick shook his head. I don't know, Mrs. Farnsworth, there's something else here. There were all kinds of other dark insinuations around this time, including in the
Herald.
There seemed to be other things going on as well. That's what I'm trying to find out about. No one wants to talk about it.

Almost exactly at this time, she said, studying him directly, we received a letter—Murray and I—at the paper. It alleged in considerable detail that Mr. Sheridan had accepted the payments, and distributed them, because he needed the money to pay blackmail.

Blackmail! Patrick's eyes widened.

You are not going to write this, Patrick. At least you are not going to write it for my newspaper, she said.

Blackmail for what? he stammered.

The letter said that he was having an affair with the wife of a prominent man. A very prominent man. And that Mr. Sheridan needed the payoff money to keep the blackmailer from disclosing this.

That's crazy, Patrick said. Nobody cares about that kind of stuff anymore.

They did then, Patrick. And that wasn't too long ago in years. But it was a century ago in public attitudes. She paused and looked out into her garden, studying the bright moonlit flowers. Besides, now someone else's reputation was at stake, not just his own. He's old-fashioned in many ways, our Mr. Sheridan. He believed, I'm sure still does, that a man has a duty to protect the honor of a woman if her honor is brought into question. The letter said the alleged blackmailer was threatening to disclose her name.

Did you show him the letter? Patrick asked.

Didn't have to, she said. By this time he had resigned from office and retreated into private life and whoever wrote the letter had achieved his purpose.

“
His
purpose,” you said.

Yes, his purpose. Mrs. Farnsworth studied his face.
His
purpose. Because Murray and I were convinced—though we couldn't prove it—that the husband of the woman in question wrote the defaming letter to destroy Mr. Sheridan. And for all public purposes, Mr. Sheridan was destroyed.

You know who it was, don't you, Patrick stated.

Yes, she said. The woman was Caroline Chandler.

10.

Twelve years earlier, shortly after poking his finger in the eye of the Nature's Capital officials, Dan Sheridan had invited Leonard Cloud to have breakfast at the café that would shortly become the venue of the Monday and Friday coffee club.

Leonard, he had said, I'd be very careful about how you handle these East Coast money types that are showing up. Sheridan related the story of his confrontational lunch with the Nature's Capital men, leaving out much of the conclusion and departing confrontation.

The tribal chairman said, Dan, I understand what's going on now and what will continue to go on until we get ourselves established. Mr. Maynard may be a small-town Durango lawyer, but he's very shrewd where these money men are concerned. Besides, word got around about your wrestling match with the big wallets.

Leonard Cloud and Sam Maynard had played high school basketball against each other, and in one of his first moves after he was selected tribal chairman in the late 1960s, the young Cloud had selected Maynard as tribal attorney. They had now been attorney and client, and close friends, for twenty-five years or more. But in the presence of any third party, including friends of both, they referred to each other in professional terms. Sam Maynard was never known to refer to the Southern Ute chairman as anything other than Mr. Cloud.

Well, I suspected you'd be covering your six, Sheridan said, knowing the Ute chairman would understand the combat pilot reference from his US Air Force days.

Leonard Cloud chuckled. Haven't heard that term in awhile.

Tell me what you have in mind to do with the resource revenues, Sheridan asked, in case it's any of my business.

Of course it is, Dan, Cloud said. How we manage this situation will be important to La Plata County and Durango. Mr. Maynard and I have discussed creating a new tribal investment fund, a kind of trust for ourselves and future generations. The council has agreed that these minerals—these riches—don't belong to just us. We have a responsibility to our kids, and their kids, and many generations to come.

Some of your folks will want to have a party, a pretty big party I'd imagine, Sheridan said. And given your history, it's pretty easy to understand why.

Cloud said, My job—the council's job—is to convince them that the party has to be one where we improve our houses and schools and hospital first. Once we get a decent roof over everyone's head and pay our teachers and nurses better, there'll be enough for singing and dancing. First things first.

Sheridan nodded. He wasn't surprised. Leonard Cloud was one of the most thoughtful individuals he'd ever met.

Cloud continued, We're not the only ones who are going to be romanced. Your story about that New York outfit is just the first. They'll be all over the local officials. Yourself and the county commission and the city council. You're going to get a lot of arguments about how you have to supervise us and look after us poor dumb Indians so we don't all get drunk and tear the place up.

I can handle that, Sheridan said. The rest of the commissioners can too.

After breakfast they got in Cloud's pickup, even dustier than Sheridan's, and drove the twenty miles or so down to Ignacio. Whatever money was on its way, Sheridan noted, had yet to be spent on reservation improvements. Much of the territory was open, undeveloped, and possessed but little in the way of growing things. Ignacio, the tribal headquarters, was home to only a few shops and stores and not much affected by late-twentieth-century progress.

Cloud drove up and down the dusty streets, pointing out where a new grade school would be built and where the modest hospital, not much more than a clinic, would be substantially expanded. Sheridan imagined his friend's visions of up-to-date medical equipment, full-scale surgery capabilities, and treatment for the routine illnesses of a denied people. As they passed, Sheridan and Cloud recognized familiar faces and gave solemn waves.

As Cloud drove him back to Durango, Sheridan said, Leonard, something tells me the politics of this revolution are not going down quietly. Too much at stake. I have a terrible feeling some people are going to get trampled by this stampede before it's all over.

Cloud nodded in agreement. I'm concerned about our people. But some of you people there in Durango better be careful as well. We have a saying that there's no clear skies without a storm first.

11.

Water and energy finally came together for the Southern Utes in the 1980s and 1990s, with the help of Congress and the federal courts. The semidormant Animas–La Plata water project could not by now justify itself solely on traditional agricultural economic grounds. Theoretically, at least, the federal Bureau of Reclamation had to make the semblance of a case for any new dam on the grounds that it would repay its costs through stimulation of agricultural development. Despite Reclamation's exploration of elaborate pump-storage methods, whereby water would be pumped from the Animas to a high storage reservoir and then released when needed for crops and consumers, the economics of the Animas–La Plata project were making increasingly less sense.

Then federal energy policy began to change in response to OPEC oil embargoes of the late 1970s. And Indian tribes began to assert their rights to control their own energy resources and to demand fair treatment where water resources were concerned. In 1974 the Southern Utes, partly under the advice of their attorney, Sam Maynard, demanded a moratorium on the development of their vast natural gas deposits, and a year later they joined a consortium of two dozen Indian tribes in forming CERT, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes. Almost everything about Native American tribes involves a certain degree of irony, and CERT, modeled on the OPEC consortium that had brought the US economy to its knees, was no different. In contrast to its Persian Gulf model, however, it represented the original Americans who now laid claim to energy supplies under their largely forsaken reservations.

In response, in 1982 Congress passed the Indian Mineral Development Act, acknowledging the authority of the various tribes to negotiate their own mineral leases without the oversight of the Department of the Interior and its Bureau of Indian Affairs. Coincidentally, that same year the Supreme Court ruled that the Apache Tribe had the right to impose a severance tax on oil and gas produced from its land. For an energy-rich tribe like the Southern Utes, this judicial decision greatly expanded its potential revenue base.

Almost simultaneously, Indian water rights were being addressed by the federal government as well. In 1988, Congress took up the Indian Water Rights Settlement Act, which sought to resolve age-old disputes about what water rights, if any, Indian tribes were entitled to. Colorado, like certain other Western states, had early on adopted the so-called appropriation doctrine—shorthanded as “first in time, first in right”—to determine water rights during the frontier days. This doctrine evolved over decades into a complex system for guaranteeing water rights based on who got there first and how much they used. It did not, however, resolve the rights of those who had been using water for centuries before the white man trekked west on his horse and in his covered wagon.

After considerable deliberation, the Southern Utes agreed to forgo their senior water rights in exchange for water from the stalemated Animas–La Plata project. This had the sudden and unexpected effect of substantially altering the economics of the project and giving it a whole new lease on life. Virtually overnight, a lot of farmers, developers, and local boosters discovered the Southern Utes as their new best friends. One writer in a newspaper called
Westword
summed up this revolution with these words: “Conservative white farmers and ranchers, as well as ‘good ol' boy' developers in Durango, started championing Native American rights like born liberals.”

So, with energy and water reaching a dynamic political mix, Southern Ute tribal chairman Leonard Cloud and his council created their own resource development company in 1992 using funds received from the federal government under the Colorado Ute Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement. They called the company Red Willow. In 1995 the Southern Utes assumed ownership of fifty-four natural gas wells, and they increased production fourfold in less than a year. Unlike private production companies, which were required to pay property and severance taxes to the state and county and income taxes to the federal government, the tribe was exempt from these taxes and thus would reap substantially larger profits on these and future projects.

After more than a century of virtual isolation, within a decade or so the Southern Utes found themselves in the modern commercial world and able to command much of their own destiny. If not overnight, then figuratively close to it, they had emerging wealth, social status, and political importance. Now, when all-party discussions about the Animas–La Plata project were held, tribal representatives were near the head of the table. When plans for future economic development in La Plata County and southwestern Colorado were being drawn up, Leonard Cloud or his representatives were invited as full partners.

And throughout the 1970s and beyond, Leonard Cloud and other tribal officials, largely at the urging of Sam Maynard, were periodic visitors to Washington. They arranged visits with their Colorado congressional delegation to seek support in their late dependency days and even more so during and after the water and energy revolutions that greatly elevated their status.

Eventually the Utes acquired principled and dedicated professional financial advice, and Maynard could call on other top-flight legal experts as required. During the heady transition days, however, the vultures did circle, as Dan Sheridan's experience proved. It was by no means certain in the late 1970s and 1980s that the Utes would not be picked over and picked apart by the emerging army of the unscrupulous.

Sheridan's concern throughout that time was for his friend Leonard Cloud and the tribe his grandfather had befriended in the late nineteenth century. He felt it was somehow symbolic that the Florida River that arose above the ancestral Sheridan ranch as a small rivulet and flowed through it as a somewhat larger stream united with the Animas River below Ignacio on the Southern Ute reservation. The Animas was the major artery for not only Durango but also those early mining towns of Silverton and Ouray above it to the north. The Florida had been dammed to create the Lemon Reservoir just below the Sheridan ranch and was the somewhat smaller artery for ranchers to the northeast of Durango. Durango did not share in the waters stored in the Lemon Reservoir, but the Utes did.