I’ve been reading about Lee’s Ferry, and puzzling over the different ways to refer to it. It’s the spot on the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam that today is the put-in for Grand Canyon river trips. It used to be the only reasonable river crossing for hundreds of miles in either direction, a ferry crossing set up by old John D. Lee back in the 1870s. It also is marks the line between upper and lower basin states for the purpose of division of Colorado River water.

My confusion: on maps and in books it’s alternatively “Lee’s Ferry” or “Lees Ferry” or “Lee Ferry.” Found an answer of sorts this weekend in “A Crossing on the Colorado: Lee’s Ferry” by Evelyn Brack Measeles:

The name was officially declared to be Lees Feery (no apostrophe) in the Sixth Report of the United States Geographic Board.*

* Rusho, W.L. “Living History at Lees Ferry,” Journal of the West, Vol. VII, No. 1, Jan. 1968

So it’s officially “Lees Ferry,” but Measeles doesn’t like it. “His has always been the pervading presence,” she writes, “no matter how many other people touched it.” So she give’s it the posessive. I agree.