Silverton in 1918 was a mining town of around two thousand people at 9,300 feet, reached by a single railroad up the Animas Canyon and by mountain roads closed half the year. Its isolation was supposed to protect it. When word of the influenza spreading across the country reached town that autumn, the schools were closed in early October as a precaution. It was not enough.
The sickness
The flu came anyway, carried on the train or by travelers, into a town short of men and short of help: at least 150 of Silverton's young men, around one in twelve residents, were in the army in France, and the mines were scrambling for labor. Local historians believe a crowded street celebration that autumn helped spread it. By some estimates three in four people in town fell ill.
By the end of October more than 125 people had died. The Miners' Union Hospital filled; the Red Cross turned City Hall into a second hospital. The town declared martial law, ordered people to stay in their homes, stopped the trains and barred miners from coming down from the high mines. The local paper called it the blackest week ever known.
The burials
The dead came faster than the town could bury them. Many were young adults in the prime of life, parents of small children; in some cases whole families died. A wagon made daily rounds to collect bodies from homes. The local undertaker fell ill himself, and undertakers came from Durango and from New Mexico to help. Coffins ran out. Temperatures fell below zero and the ground at Hillside Cemetery, on the slope north of town, froze nearly too hard to dig. Victims were wrapped in blankets and laid in trench graves. The Swedish miner who dug the graves caught the flu and was buried in one.
Estimates of the final toll vary, from about 130 to nearly 250 people, but every count comes to roughly a tenth of the town. For comparison, La Plata County, downriver around Durango, lost a little over 200 people out of some 11,000. Silverton's rate is thought to be among the highest of any community in the United States.
Hillside Cemetery
Some families later recovered their dead from the mass graves, but an unknown number still lie there unidentified. The San Juan County Historical Society has spent decades caring for Hillside Cemetery, where some 3,000 graves record the town's life, from childhood diseases and the snow slides of 1906 to the trench graves of 1918, now marked by a memorial. Silverton's mines faltered in the years after the war, and the town never again approached its 1918 size.
The cemetery lies just north of town, past the courthouse. From Silverton, US-550 climbs north over Red Mountain Pass toward Ouray, through the mining country whose men came down to be buried here.