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Anvil Spring
Anvil Spring and Anvil Canyon derived their names from the fact that Sergeant Neal of the Bendire expedition in 1867 discovered an anvil, some wagon rims, and bits of old iron scattered about where the spring is situated in Butte Valley. While some have speculated that these were remnants of a blacksmith equipment outfit that was brought into Death Valley by Asabel Bennett in 1849, it seems that in fact they were a later addition to the spring.
Milo Page, describing some of the earliest mining camps in Inyo County, tells us that in the autumn of 1858, being a discharged government teamster, he and some other men in the same circumstances bought a team and some provisions at Salt Lake City and set out for San Bernardino via an old Mormon trail. Soon after they left the Kingston Mountain Range, the party encountered a group of four or five Mormons who had a six-mule team hauling a wagon that was well loaded with silver-lead bullion which they were taking to Salt Lake to be refined.
When asked as to where their discovery was they replied that, acting under the instructions of Church leaders, they had gone out "to see what they could find," and had been successful in finding a deposit of carbonate ore, near which they had built a rough furnace for smelting. (Page reports that in 1874 he saw the ruins of the old furnace close to Anvil Spring.)
Eight years subsequent to the time the Mormons operated this mine, a number of men who had learned of their discovery set out from San Bernardino under the direction of a Joseph Clews. Among their equipment was a large anvil. Close to the carbonate mine, "on the west side of a small valley," there was a big spring where they camped; when they left the area a few months later, they tossed the anvil into the spring, where it was clearly later spotted by the Bendire expedition and from which it was recovered for use by a Judge Hanson in 1880.
Reference - NPS
INVENTORY OF HISTORICAL RESOURCES THE WEST SIDE
