The foreman of the placer mines called us into his office that evening, and suggested that it might be a good plan to go over our boats thoroughly before we left, and offered us the privilege of using their workshop, with all its conveniences, for any needed repairs.  He also let us have a room in one of the buildings for our photographic work.

This foreman mourned the loss of a friend who had recently been drowned at the ferry.  It seemed that the floods which had preceded us, especially that part which came down the San Juan River, had been something tremendous, rising 45 feet at the ferry, where the river was 400 feet wide; and rising much higher in the narrow portions of Glen Canyon.  Great masses of driftwood had floated down, looking almost like a continuous raft.  When the river had subsided somewhat, an attempt was made to cross with the ferry.  The foreman and his friend, with two others, and a team of horses hitched to a wagon, were on the ferry.  When in midstream it overturned in the swollen current.  Three of the men escaped, the other man and the horses were drowned.

A careful search had been made for the body to a point a few miles down the river, then the canyon closed in and they could go no farther.  The body was never recovered.  It is seldom that the Colorado River gives up its dead.  The heavy sands collect in the clothes, and a body sinks much quicker than in ordinary water.  Any object lodged on the bottom is soon covered with a sand-bar.  The foreman knew this, of course; yet he wished us to keep a lookout for the body, which might, by some chance, have caught on the shore, when the water receded.  This was as little as any one would do, and we gave him our promise to keep a careful watch.

CHAPTER XVII

A NIGHT OF THRILLS

We declined the offer of a roof that night, preferring to sleep in the open here, for the evening was quite warm.  We went to work the next morning when the whistle sounded at the dredge.  Beyond caulking a few leaks in the boats, little was done with them.  The tin receptacles holding our photographic plates and films were carefully coated with a covering of melted paraffine; for almost anything might happen, in the one hundred miles of rapid water that separated us from our home.

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