Research into Pearce's Ferry…The Other Lee's Ferry
My research buddy and I met up a couple of weekends ago at the site of what was Pearce's Ferry on the Colorado River. Doing online research we found this old black and white photo of a ferry from the University of Las Vegas with a motor boat in the background. (A very exciting discovery for us.) This photo was probably taken in the late 1930s as Boulder Dam was completed and Lake Mead began backing up to the western end of the Grand Canyon at the Grand Wash Cliffs.
The photo below it is part of one I took at Pierce Ferry Rapid. (You will note there are different spellings of this location. The person who founded the first ferry at this site was named Harrison Pearce. We prefer using that name but we have decades of erroneously spelled maps to contend with) While the two locations are not exact (there is 200 feet of lake sediment that you see in the flats pictured in the new photo), you can tell if you look closely at the skyline (which is the Grand Wash Cliffs) in both photos that there is enough similarity to verify both photos were taken in the same location.
The online archives we found the old photo had flipped the image and dated it to the 1960s. Based on the file kindly sent to us from the university I surmise what they have in their possession is a slide from the 1960s that was taken of the original photo and that the original photo no longer exists.
Oh…why do we call it "The Other Lee's Ferry"? You will have to attend the talk we are giving at the Grand Canyon History Symposium, February 20-24, 2019 to find out.