In Review: The River of Lost Souls

Like much of the best nonfiction about the American West, Jonathan P. Thompson's River of Lost Souls: The Science, Politics, and Greed Behind the Gold King Mine Disaster (Torrey House Press, 2018) offers an intimate portrait of place—and place despoiled. Thompson is a native of southwestern Colorado and a longtime writer for High Country News, and his roots in the area inform his eloquent exploration of the mine-tailings spill that made headlines in August 2015 when the blue-green waters of the Animas River turned a caustic orange.

Thompson's narrative about the Animas—the book's eponymous "river of lost souls"—meanders from memoir to science reportage and from nature writing to investigative journalism. The author digs deep into the obscure history of the Gold King Mine, which operated intermittently for 40 years in the San Juan Mountains. This history covers the 1872 General Mining Act, which spurred an extractive rush that pincushioned the West with mines, through to the mostly ineffectual efforts of regulators to control the lead, cadmium, and arsenic oozing from Gold King. "Mining is hard," Thompson writes. "Putting the earth back together again afterwards is a hell of a lot harder."

Thompson's investigative chops are impressive. But the book is most evocative when the author negotiates the strange eddies of his personal connections to this landscape; for example, his great-great-great-grandmother Julia Mead served as a doctor and a midwife in Durango, Colorado. 

Thompson's focus never falters, and he always returns to the river and its troubled watershed. In the end, the author leaves readers with a wriggling of hope. It comes at the bottom of a researcher's net, in the scales of a rainbow trout "glimmering in the sun like a precious and intelligent metal."

This article appeared in the July/August 2018 edition with the headline "Disaster in the Making."