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in Monument Valley, where searching parties from Colorado soon afterward found their bodies and some specimens of silver ore. The legendary silver mine of the Navajos now became identified with the presumed discovery by Merrick and Mitchell. The elements of a first rate lost mine story are there: the hazy Spanish background, the massacre, and the wild country where the Indians guard the secret of their mine. The Merrick-Mitchell mine was a lodestone for prospecting parties for at least 25 years. Indeed the mining history of the Glen Canyon region opens with this incident. It advertised the mineral possibilities of the area and within the next 20 years prospectors had pretty thoroughly explored the canyons and plateaus, and the five adjacent laccolithic mountain masses: Navajo Mountain, Carrizo Mountains, Abajo Mountains, La Sal Mountains, and Henry Mountains. The first focus of interest was the Monument Valley Navajo Mountain section but failure to locate the Merrick-Mitchell mine and the hostility of Indians soon deflected attention to other areas. Among those who had prospected the Monument Valley-Navajo Mountain region was Cass Hite, who had been a miner in Montana and Colorado. When the friendly Navajo chief Hoskininni told him that gold might be found on the Colorado, Hite gave up the search for the Merrick-Mitchell mine (later called the Pish-la-ki mine after the name the Navajos gave to Cass Hite: White Silver Hunter, or Worker in Silver) and, probably following the trail made by the Hole-in-the-Rock party from the San Juan River to the head of Grand Gulch, he descended White Canyon to the place later called Hite (site 73) (Fig.21) where he arrived in September, 1883. Hite is said to have named the Crossing of the Colorado River at this point "Dandy Crossing". Easily reached from the east by White Canyon and from the west by Trachyte Creek and North Wash, Dandy Crossing is the best in Glen Canyon above Lees Ferry. From the number of archeological sites in the vicinity noted by the Powell expeditions, the crossing was well known to prehistoric peoples, as it was to the Navajos who directed Hite to the locality. And it was probably used by whites before Hite's arrival. Hite discovered placer gold in the gravels in the banks on both sides of the river near the crossing and more extended explorations soon led to additional finds. Although there appears to have been some prospecting in the canyons below Moab and Green River and above Lees Ferry during -17-Epson Perfection 4870 Photo, 400 dpi, 8 bit, 14,047,232 byte