People

Articles about the historic people of Silver Reef

William Tecumseh Barbee

April 29, 2026

Besides John Kemple, the next most significant person responsible for developing Silver Reef into the boom town it became, was William Tecumseh Barbee. With the help (funding) of his partners, Barbee would develop two mining areas in Silver Reef: Tecumseh Hill, which he would sell its collection of mines to the Christy Mining and Milling Company. Following that, he developed the Barbee & Walker Mine and Mill that would continue to operate until 1916.

Barbee’s Beginnings

Unfortunately, no known picture of Barbee exists. He was born December 1831 in Greencastle, Warren County, Kentucky. In 1847, the family moved to Weston, Platte County, Missouri. At age 28, he served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War being a private in the First Missouri Cavalry.

By October 1869, Barbee was the mining recorder for the Clifton Mining District near Tooele, Utah. The next year he was engaged in mining in Tintic, Utah. In the nearby Ophir District, he discovered and located the Silveropolis and Silver Chief claims. He served on the committee that prepared a code of mining laws for that district. In 1874, he built himself a prospecting cabin. Eventually, he sold the Silveropolis mine to the Walker Brothers for $27,000.

Sent to Silver Reef

In 1875, a prospector from Silver Reef sent a sample of horn silver to the Walker Brothers. These were four affluent brothers in Salt Lake City firmly involved with banking and State politics. Knowing Barbee’s expertise in the silver mining business, they dispatched him to what was known then as the Harrisburg Mining District to investigate.

Arriving in June 1875, Barbee was enthused when he found this unusual circumstance of silver in sandstone. He even reported that silver was found inside petrified wood. He located 22 claims on what he called, using his middle name, Tecumseh Ridge. He then hurried back to Salt Lake City for supplies.

Returning in October, knowing that there could be a potential silver rush, he laid out a proposed townsite named Bonanza City, hoping to also cash in on a potential real estate development. It would have been situated just south and east of current-day Silver Reef. His plan included a racetrack, assay office, blacksmith shop, sampling works, boarding house, and several wick-a-ups. He even planned a miner’s supply store. But the land Barbee offered for sale in the new town was expensive, so nobody bought his land. Instead, a tent city arose nearby, called the Rockpile. When the rush occurred, Rockpile became Silver Reef City.

Spotting pipe across street from museum points out location of Tecumseh Hill

Tecumseh Hill in the near distance

View of Tecumseh Hill looking to the southeast

Ruins of mines on Tecumseh Hill from the late 1870s

Tecumseh Hill seen along road to cemeteries

Tecumseh Hill & Bonanza City

On August 23, 1875, Barbee recorded the Barbee mine for himself and the Walker claim for one of the Walker brothers, Joseph R. Walker. He returned to Salt Lake City in September to obtain supplies and funding. The Walker brothers had no faith in the mining district and turned over their claim to Barbee and they refused to finance him further.

The following month, Barbee returned to Silver Reef. In November, when Barbee was passing by a resident in a wagon, it skidded, tearing up soft rock in the road for several feet. Barbee stopped to inspect the rock and found it to be rich in chlorides of horn silver.

By December, Barbee filed several more claims near the area where the wagon skidded. It was also about this time when he began setting up his real estate venture of Bonanza City close by. As this was going on, Barbee continued to report his doings to people in Salt Lake City, and a flood of prospectors soon arrived and staked more claims.

It was also in December that Barbee shipped his first ten and one-half tons of ore to Salt Lake City for milling. The ore was assayed at $502 per ton, looking very appealing to would-be prospectors. In reality though, Barbee sent ore that was already sorted and was “high grade” to make it look more valuable. It wasn’t ore that was taken directly out of the ground.

Later, Barbee sent more ore for milling to Pioche, Nevada. This ended up bringing more attention to miners there that later resulted in what would become known as the Pioche Stampede (to Silver Reef).

The End

Although Barbee bought and sold stakes in mining claims and operations, making big amounts of money along the way, he died in 1896 of heart failure without a cent to his name.

A Unique Union of Religions

Cliff Bandringa / History, People /

March 10, 2026

Although the area surrounding Silver Reef was predominantly Mormon, the miners who arrived during the boom years came from many different religious backgrounds. Most were not from Utah. Many, such as the skilled Cornish miners, were immigrants from England and Ireland, Protestants and Catholics respectively. As a result, Silver Reef quickly developed a wide range of religious beliefs.

The new Catholic residents, mostly miners, hoped to organize a Catholic High Mass. But there was no proper church to hold it in, nor any choir capable of singing Latin.

Father Lawrence Scanlan

Born in 1843 in County Tipperary, Ireland, Father Lawrence Scanlan was ordained in 1868 and soon volunteered for missionary work in the American West. He arrived in Utah in 1873 and became the first long‑term Catholic priest assigned to the region, traveling constantly to serve scattered mining communities.

He became well known in the silver mining town of Pioche, Nevada. When the Pioche stampede to Silver Reef occurred in October 1876, residents were delighted when Scanlan visited in 1877. He held Mass in homes, baptized children, and provided pastoral care to a community living far from familiar traditions. Recognizing the need for a permanent church, he organized fundraising efforts in 1878.

Construction of a church and hospital for Silver Reef was underway, but Scanlan still hoped to hold a High Mass for his growing congregation.

Father Lawrence Scanlan

John Menzies Macfarlane

The Washington County surveyor at the time, John Menzies Macfarlane, was also the choir director at the St. George Mormon Tabernacle. Formerly of Cedar City, he had been called by Erastus Snow (the Latter-day Saint leader for whom Snow Canyon is named) to organize a choir in St. George to lift the community’s morale in the harsh desert environment.

While surveying mining properties in Silver Reef, Macfarlane often stayed in a local boarding house rather than traveling back to St. George. It was there that he met Scanlan, and the two quickly became friends. When Macfarlane learned of Scanlan’s dilemma, their unlikely friendship set the stage for one of the most astonishing moments in early Utah history.

John Menzies Macfarlane

Macfarlane was involved in laying out and surveying the townsite of Babylon when the Stormont Mill was being built. In this 1877 tract map of Babylon, you can clearly read his signature and notes.

Babylon townsite tractmMap

Catholic High Mass in a Momon Tabernacle?

When Scanlan prepared to celebrate a full Catholic High Mass, he approached Macfarlane with a bold request that would ripple through the community: Would the St. George Tabernacle Choir, composed entirely of Latter day Saints, learn a Latin Mass and perform it in the Tabernacle?

Macfarlane didn’t hesitate. He sought permission from Erastus Snow, then studied the score, gathered his singers, and rehearsed the unfamiliar Latin until it rose through the soaring interior of the new Tabernacle, a space built for bold sound, now suddenly filled with something entirely unexpected. A Catholic Mass in the Tabernacle was unheard of, and word spread quickly because everyone wanted to see whether it would really happen.

Mormon Tabernacle, St. George, Utah

On the appointed day in May 1879, the Tabernacle filled with miners, townspeople, Catholics, Latter‑day Saints, and curious onlookers. Careful not to offend, Scanlan began by saying, “I think you are wrong and you think I am wrong, but this should not prevent us from treating each other with due consideration and respect.”

Scanlan celebrated the High Mass with solemn beauty. Macfarlane’s choir responded with soaring harmonies that stunned the room. For a brief moment, the boundaries that usually defined frontier life simply fell away.

It wasn’t intended as a grand gesture. It was the natural result of respect, friendship, and two communities choosing cooperation over division. It became one of the most remarkable stories in southern Utah’s history: A Catholic High Mass, sung by a Latter-day Saint choir, held inside the St. George Tabernacle.

St. George Choir circa 1870s – Macfarlane is in the middle of the back row

Today, the Silver Reef Museum preserves this moment as a reminder of what can happen when people meet with trust and goodwill. It’s a story as surprising as it is inspiring, and one that still echoes throughout southern Utah.

The Story Comes to Life

The video below dramatizes this unique story of two religions coming together to address a need in their community. This video was produced by the Silver Reef Foundation LLC nonprofit organization in 2023.

How You Can Learn More

If you’d like to read more of the details regarding this unique story, get yourself a copy of the book Silver, Sinners and Saints, A History of Old Silver Reef, Utah. Along with the Scanlan / Macfarlane story, there are many other fascinating historical stories that occurred in Silver Reef included in this book.

The book is available for purchase in the Silver Reef Gift Shop.

John Kemple

Cliff Bandringa / History, Mining, People /

February 17, 2026

Many stories circulate about who first discovered silver in Silver Reef, but the one figure consistently documented as finding silver ore was John Kemple. In 1866, Kemple rode into the Leeds–Harrisburg area during a prospecting journey from Montana. Though he never struck a major bonanza, he was an exceptionally skilled prospector and assayer, able to read rock the way others read a map.

Not far from where he was staying in Harrisburg, he recognized a specimen known to contain silver — with one complication. The ore was embedded in sandstone, a rock type widely believed at the time to be incapable of hosting precious minerals. That single contradiction set off a chain of events that would ignite the rush to Silver Reef.

John Kemple was born December 11, 1835 in New Jersey. He was the only son and second of six children of George Kemple and Hannah Foster. The family moved to West Virginia and then Marshall, Virginia, by 1840. His mother died when he was ten, and his father remarried and had seven more children. On the 1850 census, he was living with his family in Marshall, Virginia. He had difficulty getting along with his stepmother, so in 1850 he left for California’s gold rush at age fifteen.

A biography of John by his great grandson includes the following: “John followed up every new camp that was started but never found the big one. He joined the rush to Alaska and the Klondike gold fields but was also unsuccessful there. One year in Alaska he was so far north that winter caught his party on the polar ice pack. They would have starved, except that he discovered a mammoth, frozen in the ice. They managed to dig in far enough to cut meat from the pre-historic beast and eat it. He told also of another, smaller figure, deeper in the ice, which he said looked like a human. A few years later he tried to lead a scientific expedition back to the place but couldn’t find it again.”

In 1866, John rode into the Leeds-Harrisburg area with a small string of horses, on a prospecting journey from Montana. He rented a room with the Orson Adams family of Harrisburg for the winter. John had assay equipment with him, and probably assayed materials that seemed to hold possible ores. In the spring of that year, he left for White Pine (near Ely), Nevada. He sent some ore samples from Harrisburg to another assayer, H. H. Smith of Beaver County, Utah. Smith refused to assay it, claiming: “Kemple must be crazy to ask me to assay a sand rock”. John found silver float that assayed over $17,000 per ton. However, he didn’t seem to know its source.

See the separate article on Harrisburg

This type of sandstone rock contains “horn silver”, similar to what Kemple found

Reminiscing many years later, John visited David McMullin in his blacksmith shop at Leeds and told the story of his life. He asked, “Dave, you remember that soap-stone vein in the White Reef on the north side of the pass through which Quail creek flows, and is now covered with a swamp? You got soap-stone there and made slate pencils. That is where I got the ore from which I extracted the silver button I showed you nearly forty years ago. The soap-stone assayed 36 ounces in silver”.

Returning to Harrisburg to spend the winter again in 1868, Kemple made more silver discoveries. Most of the ore he found was in the flat area near Quail Creek and east of the White Reef. The ore was simply scattered around. Knowing that the ore probably fell and rolled down from a possible vein at a higher location, he started searching the area nearer the mountains to the west.

Makes First Mining Claim

Finally, in February 1871, after finding the source of the silver ore, Kemple made his first mining claim on a ledge just a half mile northeast from the current entrance station to the Red Cliffs Recreation Area. That same month, Kemple and several others organized the Union Mining District. Between February 1871 and October 1872, a total of 16 claims were recorded in the district. Shortly after, Federal mining laws changed, so they reorganized the district with a new chapter and renamed it the Harrisburg Mining District. This would be the district that Silver Reef was known for being in.

After the district was reorganized, Kemple made a more official mining claim in 1874. Others followed suit and, interestingly, many of the new claims were made in the names of wives from Harrisburg and Leeds. The reason for this was possibly a way men could make claims to potential riches, while not upsetting stern direction from the church’s leader, Brigham Young, who was against members of the church from practicing the extraction of valuable minerals (other than coal or iron) on account of it not being a sustainable way to make a living.

John married in 1874 and became a member of the Mormon Church. He and his wife moved to Silver Reef just as the rush was beginning the following year, where he was employed in the mines. In 1879, he moved his family north to Beaver County.

Still infected with the prospecting bug, Kemple moved his family again in 1891, this time to White Hills, Arizona, halfway between Hoover Dam and Kingman. It wasn’t long before he was broke and asking around for “grubstakes” to fund his next mining venture. Unable to support his family, which by now included five children, his wife divorced him.

Shortly after his divorce, Kemple really did strike it rich from a gold and silver discovery nearby. It became known as Kemple Camp and can be found on a map today. Kemple continued to live in this area and passed away in Kingman on October 14, 1918 and buried in the Kingman Cemetery.

Cemeteries

Cliff Bandringa / History, People, Places /

February 13, 2026

Between Silver Reef, Leeds and Harrisburg, there were a total of five cemeteries, four of which that can still be visited today. Mostly Mormons were buried in the Leeds cemetery located on the southwest side of town. Most people associated with the Silver Reef boom years were buried in either the Catholic or Protestant cemetery. There was also a Chinese cemetery.

About the Cemeteries

During those years, members of the Catholic church outnumbered the others, including members of the more prominent Mormon church, mainly because of the large number of Irish people working in the mines and mills. A fair number of people were splintered between the various Protestant denominations such as Presbyterian. The cemetery in Harrisburg consisted mostly of people from the Mormon Church.

The Chinese established their own cemetery. Archeological evidence suggests its location was adjacent to and on the east side of the Catholic cemetery. After Silver Reef declined, all the bodies were exhumed and sent to China, as it is their belief that their deceased should rest in their homeland.

According to records, the Catholic cemetery has 3 graves with tombstones and 15 graves with “unknown markers, whereas the Protestant cemetery has 11 graves with tombstones and 32 graves with “unknown” markers.

The Catholic and Protestant cemeteries were restored by the Leeds Lion’s Club in 1998. Much of the white picket fences and walls you see today were constructed then.