< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
I've lived in various mountain towns for 15 years, and I've never lived in one where you couldn't eat fresh venison any time of the year. I don't condone poaching, but I know that jacklighting a buck whenever the family larder is low is a traditional part of a traditional way of life in America: rural poverty.
The Division of Wildlife takes a different view. It's not that the division cares all that much about the welfare of its big-game animals. Deer and elk have been starving in Middle Park all winter, and ranchers there will be starving next summer, since the surviving animals are eating out the feed the ranchers planned to use for their cattle.
The Division doesn't care when hundreds of animals starve to death out of season. But when animals are shot out of season, the Division becomes quite concerned. Down in San Luis, the Division was so concerned that it sent in an agent who stayed undercover for nearly three years. When the arrests came, the San Luis area was invaded by 275 armed agents who also seized the property used in the commission of crimes -- such as the battered old pickups that are the mainstay of mountain transportation.
Makes you proud to be a Coloradan, doesn't it? Another reason for pride is that the Division said its undercover operation did not involve any entrapment.
Here was a John Morgan
offering money for
illegally killed game. He was in San Luis, where there
aren't a lot of ways to make money. The molybdenum mine at
nearby Cuesta, N.M., is shut down. The sawmill offers
sporadic minimum wage jobs. Few farms are sufficiently
profitable to hire help, and seasonal farm labor doesn't
pay all that well, anyway.
If you had a family to feed and no job, and it was common knowledge that any time you showed up at Morgan's with a carcass, you could sell it for $100 or more, no questions asked -- how many of us could resist?
That kind of law enforcement begets the very crimes that
it is supposed to reduce. About 15 years ago, the Drug
Enforcement Agency set up Operation Snowflake
in
Aspen. Undercover agents arrived in town, paying premium
prices for cocaine and buying all they could get their
hands on. Given a guaranteed market at a profitable price,
is it any wonder that cocaine began to pour into Aspen? Was
Aspen any better off because it thereby became a center for
cocaine merchants?
The pity in all this is that San Luis is a town that really has been trying to help itself by using art as a tool for economic development, by developing galleries to showcase the work of local artists and artisans, and by encouraging other artists to settle there. There's also Father Patrick Valdez and his continuing work to build a shrine atop the mesa that the town sits under, which is only part of his efforts to help San Luis prosper.
Another community leader is Felix Romero, the Supreme Colorado Native. San Luis was founded in 1851, which makes it the oldest town in Colorado. The irrigation ditch its founders dug holds the most senior water right in Colorado. On the main street of San Luis is the R&R Market, which opened its doors in 1856. Colorado's oldest business was founded by Romero's great-great-grandfather, and it has been in the family ever since. Romero is head of the local economic development council.
San Luis remains a beautiful little town, despite the
shuttered shop windows and other glaring evidence of
grinding poverty. San Luis has been struggling furiously to
gain some prosperity without losing those things that make
it special. Spend a day or two there, and you'll see what I
mean. It's evidence that all of Colorado doesn't have to be
condos and fast-food stands in order to offer the
re-creation
and change of pace that a vacation
should provide.
And isn't it marvelous that when the state and federal governments decide to spend money in San Luis, they do it by offering cash for breaking the law? Makes you feel good about how your money gets spent, doesn't it?
< PREVIOUS ] [ 1989 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >