SILVER
REEF
Today there is little left of the town which was once the largest in Washington County. The Wells Fargo Express Company Building of cut stone and the adobe house of John H. Rice remain unchanged, but everywhere else the desert has taken over. The land looks now much as it did before the Buckeye Reef, Bonanza Flat, Tecumseh Hill, and the thirty other mining claims were being operated. The reef, a white upthrust, runs in an undulating line dirough the valley like the backbone of a gigantic fish lying a little on its side; die desert vegetation covers the ruins and scars, and except for a few skeletal walls, all traces of the busy life of Silver Reef have been wiped out. Stories and legends of this fabulous mining camp still persist, for everything about its history seems fantastic. For one tiling, the discovery of silver in sandstone gave the lie to all the geological theories of the time, so diat its being there justified the story of one Tom McNalley, a spiritualist, who said he had learned of it through Divine guidance. Some Mormons thought that God had kept the wealth hidden to test their ability to survive in a forbidding land, and then brought it forth in answer to their great need. One story of the discovery of silver centers on an assayer at Pioche, Nevada, who gave out such uniformly favorable reports of all the ore he tested diat some of the prospectors named him "Metalliferous Murphy" and wagered that he would pronounce even a piece of grindstone valuable. They accordingly purchased a stone from a Leeds peddler, broke off some pieces and took them to be assayed. Sure enough, Murphy declared that they had a high silver content. That did it! The prospectors took him to the edge of town, showed him the road, and told him to get going, punctuating their talk with bullets aimed in die general direction of his feet to make him step lively. Murphy, however, had learned of the origin of the grindstone and proceeded to go prospecting in the Leeds area. A second legend is to the effect that a stranger seeking shelter in a Mormon home in Leeds watched the oozing of drops of silver from the
