Gold Mining in Glen Canyon: Charles Spencer's Camp and Steamboat

Charles Harvey Spencer, born in 1872, was an entrepreneur who tried his luck at mining in and around Glen Canyon. In December 1909 he and his crew — mining specialists, labourers and cooks — set up a small camp by the San Juan River. In May 1910 they moved to a more productive spot at Lee's Ferry, inside what is now Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, and built a permanent camp there. Some of its remains can still be seen, and National Park Service archeologists have studied the sites tied to the company.

Spencer's crew in front of the Lee's Ferry fort. From Carrell, Bradford and Rusho (1987), Fig. 3.1, National Park Service.

The camp

The camp had many buildings: three bunkhouses, a mess hall and kitchen with a fireplace, a separate cook's house, a blacksmith shop and a laboratory. Archeologists also found two root cellar holes, which may have belonged to two small houses where married workers lived with their wives. The venture was abandoned in 1912 and many of the buildings were destroyed afterwards. In 1967 the Park Service began preserving the two original Spencer buildings that were left.

The mining itself left its own traces:

• two boilers;
• 18 pieces of flume support;
• a piece of hose;
• two small cuts or platforms on the hillside, where sleds or frames held the monitors, or hose nozzles, used to sluice the gravel.

A 1963 view, with the remains of the Charles H. Spencer steamboat in the foreground, an old ferry road and USGS buildings. From Carrell, Bradford and Rusho (1987), Fig. 3.25, National Park Service.

The steamboat

The boilers burned coal, and the coal came from the Warm Creek mine, 28 miles away, aboard a paddle-wheel steamboat, the Charles H. Spencer. It was built in 1911 at the Shultze, Robertson, Shultze shipyard in South San Francisco, then over six months taken apart, moved and put back together at Warm Creek.

How many trips it made between Warm Creek and the mine at Lee's Ferry is still unclear, although several oral accounts mention it, including testimony in the Supreme Court case United States v. Utah. What is certain is that it made its last run between the mine and Lee's Ferry sometime in the spring or summer of 1912 and was then tied up on the bank. Archeologists who studied the wreck, now under water, concluded that at some point afterwards the boat slid sideways off the bank, struck a large boulder and sank. Parts of its upper deck were later salvaged, as saw marks in its framing show.

The Charles H. Spencer steamboat in 1912 (left) and 1963 (right). From Carrell, Bradford and Rusho (1987), Figs. 6.2 and 6.5, National Park Service.

Visiting

Archeologists have kept watch on the wreck and the other remains of the Spencer era for decades. Visitors can follow an interpretive trail to see them. They are only a little over a century old rather than thousands of years, but they open a window on an important period in Glen Canyon's long history.

Sources

Based on "Archeology and Industry: Gold Mining in Glen Canyon," published by the National Park Service, Glen Canyon National Recreation Area; rewritten in hubnx's own words.

• The article draws on, and its photographs come from, Toni Carrell, ed., James E. Bradford and W. L. Rusho, Submerged Cultural Resources Site Report: Charles H. Spencer Mining Operation and Paddle Wheel Steamboat, Southwest Cultural Resources Professional Papers No. 13, Southwest Cultural Resources Center, National Park Service, 1987.
• The article dates United States v. Utah to 1929; the year is left out here.