Silver Reef

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 through the valley like the backbone of a gigantic fish lying a little on its side; the 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 that 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 that 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 the 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 back of the fireplace; a third says he found silver on the road where a frieghter had locked his wagon wheels and melted the metal from the slick sandstone hillside.

One thing is sure: William Tecumseh Barbee came into the district in 1875, staked out some claims, and by October of the next year had netted over $40,000. By this time the boom was on, and during the next quarter of a century a total of some $10,500,000 worth of silver was shipped out of this valley, and more than fifteen hundred people came into it.

Almost over night a town sprang up. Five mills were running and thirty-three claims being worked; to support them were nine grocery stores; two drug stores; five restaurants besides the Harris House, which provided board and room for fifty men; six saloons; one bilfiard hall; two dance halls; a Citizen's Hall for public meetings; and a Catholic church with a hospital in the basement. The weekly paper, the Silver Reef Miner, carried advertisements for forty businesses, including a blacksmith, a shoemaker, an undertaker, lawyers, and a doctor.

The Mormons in the nearby villages had been counseled against mining, but wages at $1.50 a day in St. George compared to $450 a day at Silver Reef, made them disregard the counsel. Many of the men cut and hauled wood, for the mills must run, and this was their first fuel. Others hauled loads of clear rock salt from the salt mountain near St. Thomas, Nevada. Better still, the Mormons now had a market for their crops — butter, cheese, eggs, poultry, fruit, and vegetables, but most of all for their wine. This beverage became widely known as a most pleasant drink in spite of its violent aftermath, and was much in demand at high prices. Now for the first time the people of the Dixie area knew the feel of hard money between their fingers, and could buy more of the necessities and even a few luxuries.

By September, 1882, the mines of Silver Reef were producing fabulous sums and the future looked rosy. The question now arose: Should not Silver Reef be the county seat of Washington County rather than the sleepy little Mormon village of St. George? True the courthouse was there and had been in use for some fifteen years, but so much of the business, especially the big business, came from Silver Reef. Clearly the Silver Reef, predominantly Gentile inhabited, could outvote the Mormons in the county. But Erastus Snow on September 30 changed the county line to include the up-the-river settlements of Toquerville, Grafton, Virgin, and Rockville, so that the center of county government remained were it was.

Top: Old Wells Fargo building at Silver Reef now used by a modern company. Bottom: The Western Gold and Uranium Company operations where uranium and silver are extracted from the old mines of Silver Reef.

With the beginning of the polygamy raids in the mid-1880's, Silver Reef offered another advantage to the Mormons. The marshals traveling south in their buggys always stopped at Silver Reef to rest and feed their teams, often to stay over night. Immediately the telegraph operator there would send a code message to the operator at St. George, "Send up two chairs," the number of chairs corresponding to the number of officers en route. Immediately every man who had more than one wife would be notified so that he had at least three or four hours in which to escape, and the marshals would arrive in a town where not one polygamist could be found.

Until 1900 the Reef remained a busy, bustling place with trains of burros hauling down wood, freight wagons and peddlers' wagons filling the streets, the daily stage hurrying through. Guarded wagons pulled out loaded with silver bars, each of which weighed approximately twenty-five pounds and were worth between $450.00 and $500.00. Each bar was encased in a leather bag strapped at the top and with handles for lifting and carrying. Horse racing and wrestling, dancing, and drinking filled in the extra time of the miners.

Silver Reef represented a cosmopolitan citizenry. Among them were "Nigger" Johnson, a big man who was so gentle with the sick and so helpful that everyone loved him; Hank Parrish, who had so many notches on his gun that people feared him; and Bart Nolan, an Irishman who had been educated to be a priest but had instead become a miner. During the work days Nolan kept his beard rolled on a heavy string and tied around his neck, but on Sunday he shampooed it and displayed it, covering his chest in a waving cascade, the ends resting in his lap as he sat. The doctor was a familiar figure as he made his rounds in a light buggy, his hitching post a heavy piece of iron at his feet, fastened by a piece of rope to the horse's bit. As he stopped at a house, the doctor had only to throw this piece of iron out and the horse was securely fastened. Then there was Sam Wing, the Chinese Mandarin who was the acknowledged leader of his countrymen in Chinatown. He operated his own laundry, but had time to sit outside his door and read his strange up-and-down newspaper. When one of his people died, he led the procession to the cemetery, a group of men behind him scattering torn bits of paper to confuse the evil spirits and disguise the path to the grave.

He placed on the mound the offering of food and wine for the attendant good spirits, seemingly unconscious of the fact that the watchful Indians would get it all as soon as the procession started home.

There was romance here, and sudden fortune, but often there were also tragedy and heartbreak. There was a duel in which both men lay dead on the steps of the improvised courthouse, all because one had sharply ordered the other to remove his hat when he entered the court. Best known of all the murders was that of Mike Carbis, foreman of one of the mines. Silver prices had dropped, the vein was almost worked out, and he had laid off several of his men. Young Tom Forrest, desperate because he was out of work and angry that he should have been one to be dismissed, waited beside the trail, and as Carbis came along stepped out and knifed him, slitting his abdomen from hip to hip. Forrest was arrested at once and taken to the jail at St. George to await trial, but in the night a group of miners forced the door, took him out, and hanged him from the branch of a mock orange tree, where the people found him dangling the next morning.

One disastrous fire at the Reef, the drop in the price of silver, and the fact that the ore veins had run out, caused a complete close-down before 1908. Now the local settlers began to buy the buildings in order to get the lumber. In the foundation of one of these Albert Anderson found a cache of money, which was guessed to be anywhere from two to twenty thousand dollars. Now the work of razing the buildings proceeded at a greatly accelerated pace — until soon there were none left.

Today the very names — Bonanza Flat, Tecumseh Hill, Buckeye Reef, and the others — carry a strange and foreign sound as from a fife and a world long past. They melt into the breeze along with the aroma of sage and fade into the distance along with the white ridge of the Reef.

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