Dawna E. Ferris was an archeologist with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Reclamation between 1986 and 2024. During those years, she did archeological field work, recorded sites, and conducted archival research in Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. Her curiosity about the history of the late 19th-early 20th century Ferguson gold mining district and its principal camp of DeLamar, Nevada was piqued in 1989, when she was working for the Bureau of Land Management. While documenting the district’s two historic cemeteries, she observed that there were very few gravesites in either cemetery. During its boom years, DeLamar had a population over 1,500 souls and it had the reputation of being a notorious “Widow-maker.” So why weren’t there more graves in each cemetery? Unable to find answers in the few published histories of this mining district, Ferris began researching this question. Based on her findings, she prepared a brief historical overview of the Ferguson district and DeLamar for a thesis submitted in support of an M.A. in Anthropology that was awarded by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 1991.
Recognizing that much of DeLamar’s history remained untold, she and co-author William G. White have recently collaborated to tell more of that story. Using new information from regional historic period newspapers, archival sources, and online biographical databases, the authors are now able to provide a very detailed history of life in one of Nevada’s most productive gold mining districts and one of its most notorious mining camps in this new book.
Today, Dawna Ferris is retired and lives with her husband Peter D. Rowley, a couple of horses, dogs, and barn cats in New Harmony, Utah.