Lee's Ferry was an interesting place, both for its old and its new associations. This had long been the home of John D. Lee, well known for the part he took in the Mountain Meadow Massacre, and for which he afterwards paid the death penalty. Here Lee had lived for many years, making few visits to the small settlements to the north, but on one of these visits he was captured. There were six or seven other buildings near the large stone building where we took our meals, so arranged that they made a short street, the upper row being built against a cliff of rock and shale, the other row being placed halfway between this row and the river. These buildings were all of rock, of which there was no lack, plastered with adobe, or mud. One, we were told, had been Lee's stronghold, it was a square building, with a few very small windows, and with loopholes in the sides. At the time of our visit it was occupied by two men; one, a young Englishman, recently arrived from South Africa--a remittance-man, in search of novelty--the other a grizzled forty-niner. Much could be written about this interesting group of men, and their alluring employment. There were some who had followed this work through all the camps of the West--to Colorado, to California, and to distant Alaska as well, they had journeyed; but it is doubtful if, in all their wanderings, they had seen any camp more strangely located than this, hemmed in with canyon walls. To us, their dredge and the steamboat up the river seemed as if they had been taken from the pages of some romance, or bit of fiction, and placed before us for our entertainment.
There were other men as well, just as interesting m their way as the "old-timers," the sons of some of the owners of this proposition,--clean-cut young fellows,--working side by side with the veterans, as enthusiastic as if on their college campus.
One feature about the dredge interested us greatly. This was a tube, or sucker, held suspended by a derrick above a float, and operated by compressed air. The tube was dropped into the sand at the bottom of the river, and would eat its way into it, bringing up rocks the size of one's fist, along with the gravel and sand. In a few hours a hole, ten or fifteen feet in depth and ten feet in diameter, would be excavated. Then the tube was raised, the float was moved, and the work started again. The coarse sand and gravel, carried by a stream of water, was returned to the river, after passing over the riffles; the screenings which remained passed over square metal plates--looking like sheets of tin--covered with quicksilver. These plates were cleaned with a rubber window-cleaner, and the entire residue was saved in a heavy metal pot, ready for the chemist.