Pitt Lake Gold
Encyclopedia
Pitt Lake's Lost Gold Mine is a legendary lost mine said to be near Pitt Lake
, British Columbia
, Canada
, the supposed wealth of which has held the imagination of people worldwide for more than a century. The mysterious riches have also been known as Slumach
’s Lost Mine, or Lost Creek Mine. Ever since the years of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
prospectors and adventurers have been looking for the mine, and a few of those gold hunters have never returned from the mountains. Still, the search goes on.
, when a number of maps were published in San Francisco promoting the gold fields of British Columbia. Two of these maps show the words "gold" and "Indian diggings" in the country above Pitt Lake. Another map from that time shows the words "much gold bearing quartz rock” on the north side of Pitt Lake, where a decade later, in 1869, an Indian brought “... a good prospect of gold…which he states he found in a little stream on the north side of Pitt Lake” to New Westminster. The report created “great excitement” in the city, and parties set out to find the diggings.
In 1903, George Moody, who had been a witness called by the defence in the Slumach
case in 1890, claimed to have found a rich placer at Pitt Lake
, returning with $1,200 in course gold.
In 1905, a newspaper, reviving the Moody story, reported that in 1902 "an Indian" had exchanged gold dust for $1,600 in bills in New Westminster. Several months later the same Indian came back, this time with $1,800 in gold dust. Again he disappeared and returned, now with $1,400 in gold. He did not want to tell where he got it and attempts to follow him failed. Then the Indian took sick, probably because of his exposure to inclement weather on expeditions in the mountains and a doctor told him he was going to die. The Indian told a relative the secret source of his gold — a rich placer at Pitt Lake — and described its location, giving the landmarks and tracing a crude map of the locality. After he died, his relative, who had no money, sought the assistance of a white man. They were unable to trace the spot where the Indian said he had found the gold. With the secret now out “there have been expeditions every year in an attempt to locate the mysterious placer.” Again in 1906 another such expedition failed to find the gold. The participants had information that an old man had found some valuable placer ground in the Pitt Lake country and that he had hidden a substantial amount of gold nuggets under a rock. Before he died, he had left directions where the treasure and the placer ground were to be found. It was “a rough trip as the weather was rainy, and sleeping out did not remind one of dreams between Dutch feather beds.”
A Washington prospector, Wilbur Armstrong, who for ten year had guided search parties into the Pitt Lake area to find the legendary treasure located "within 20 miles of the head of Pitt Lake" claimed in 1915 that Slumach
was the first discoverer of the mine and that in 1901 a man called Walter Jackson became the second discoverer. Following the usual pattern in these stories, Walter Jackson fell ill, but before he died he left a letter to a friend describing his find's location saying "in going upstream [the creek] I found a place where the bedrock is bare, and you will hardly believe me when I tell you the bedrock was yellow with gold. In a few days I gathered thousands, and there was thousands more in sight. Some of the nuggets were as big as walnuts....I saw there were millions practically at the surface. I buried part of the gold under a tent-shaped rock with a mark cut on the face.” The story did not appear in newspapers in Canada but was published by several local newspapers in the US.
After a long silence the stories about Pitt Lake and its treasures started to appear again beginning with a story in Vancouver's Province in 1925 that combined elements of the 1905 story about the Indian who found gold, became ill and died, and the 1906 story about the old man’s placer grounds and the gold nuggets hidden under a rock. The story told that for 24 years dozens of prospectors had been looking in vain for “untold wealth” in placer gold somewhere back of Pitt Lake and they also sought for a treasure of placer gold washed from the gravel of the lost mine in one season and buried under a rock by a prospector called Shotwell--the man named Walter Jackson in Armstrong's story. Shotwell came out of the Pitt Lake area in the fall of 1901 and went to San Francisco where, according to the records at the United States mint, he deposited more than $8,000 in placer gold. But, as did the poor Indian in the 1906 story, and his alter ego Walter Jackson in 1915, Shotwell fell ill and his physician told him that he had not long to live. Before the prospector died he sent a letter to an unnamed partner from his Alaska days, letting him know that he had found “fabulous rich placer ground in the mountains back of Pitt Lake.” Shotwell said, he had buried a sack of gold “under a tent-shaped rock, in a valley overlooked by three mountain peaks standing close together.” The letter gave directions to where the “golden cache” was buried and the grounds that Shotwell had worked.
In 1926 Slumach
’s name was mentioned in connection with Pitt Lake gold in an article by Victor Harbord Harbord who interviewed Jason Allard, a court interpreter during the Slumach trial.. Harbord Harbord commented: “Slumach died and with him died the secret of a great gold mine somewhere up in that wild Pitt Lake country. Had Mr. Allard only known that this prisoner knew of its existence, he might have become a very wealthy man, for the murderer … would undoubtedly have told him where it was.”
Again there was silence in the press for quite some years with the exception of the stories about R.A. “Volcanic” Brown
, a colourful prospector who disappeared in the mountains between Pitt Lake
and Harrison Lake
in 1931, purportedly looking for the lost mine.
Only in 1939 did Slumach become a permanent fixture in the Pitt Lake Gold legend starting with a pivotal article written by Jack Mahony
who interviewed pioneer Hugh Murray. “Slummock” in Hugh Murray’s story is a middle-aged “half-breed Red River Indian” who was hanged for murdering another half-breed prospector by drowning. Of course the real Slumach had no Red River origins but was of Katzie ancestry, was not a half-breed, did not kill Louie Bee by drowning—a gunshot killed Bee— and was not middle-aged but rather an old man when he died at the gallows. Hugh Murray grew up in Port Moody and was in his thirties when Slumach died and he must have known better. This is, to use Mahony’s words “romantic fiction.” Both Murray and Mahony must have known that the information was incorrect and this was probably a “readers beware” signal not to take everything in the story as the truth—a signal mostly ignored.
Murray’s “Slummock” prospected in the Pitt Lake mountains for many years, struck it rich in the late nineties and frequently came to New Westminster with “a well-filled ‘poke’ of nuggets,” spending his money freely, but keeping its source a secret—just as the Indian who came into New Westminster in 1902 with bags of gold dust. In the days of the real Slumach’s imprisonment there were unsubstantiated rumours that in his lifetime he had killed other men. Hugh Murray adds a new dimension to this: “…it was believed but never proven, that he [‘Slummock’] had drowned three of his Indian ‘wives’ near Shiwash Rock at the mouth of Pitt Lake to prevent them from divulging the location [of his gold mine].” That last theme grew out into gothic tales such as “The Bluebeard of Lost Creek Mine” and “The gold mine murders of nine British Columbian women.”
It is unlikely that the elderly Slumach would have painted the town red or even ventured into New Westminster. That is why Mahony and Murray presented “Slummock” as a middle-aged man, still capable of looking for gold in the mountains and showing up in town from time to time with his treasures. Without the “nuggets” the tale that Slumach knew about a rich mine is clearly inaccurate. Only showing real gold would link him to gold findings. Hugh Murray states that a local physician, a Dr. Hall visited “Slummock” in his death cell trying to find out, but he went to his death “with the burning question of the community unanswered.” The old man probably did not know anything about the bonanza that later would carry his name.
During this same interview in 1939, Hugh Murray retold the 1925 story of Shotwell, his rich placer gold findings and the cache of gold under a tent-shaped rock. In this account it was a man called John Jackson, a veteran Alaskan prospector, who in 1903, hearing about the Slumach legend (the word used in the article) set out for the Pitt Lake area and returned three months later with a very heavy pack-sack. Jackson deposited $8700 in gold in the Bank of British North America in San Francisco—not the United States mint as Shotwell did. As the unnamed Indian and Shotwell in the previous stories, Jackson never recovered from the hardships of the search.. When Jackson’s doctor told him that end was near, he sent a letter and a map with the information of the location of the treasures to a friend in Seattle. That man was called Shotwell. This Shotwell, being an old man and not able to search for the gold himself, sold a share to a fellow Seattle man who went to the Pitt Lake region looking for Jackson’s creek “but returned without success when the map became partially damaged.” Others, including Hugh Murray, tried and tried again to find Jackson’s creek without success. The damaged map can’t have been of much use and Jackson’s letter was not much of a help either.
The 1939 article quotes Murray as saying that his belief in the gold was strengthened by unspecified additional evidence and he mentioned meeting “… an old Indian woman at the Indian camp at the head of Pitt Lake [who] remembered Jackson staying with them in 1903…” with his very heavy pack that he would not let out of sight. Prospector Stanford Corey said in 1926 that in the thirty years he prospected there he had “not seen the marks of any other person ever having entered the land.”
In summary, Jack Mahony’s 1939 article is not more than an assemblage of earlier fables about Pitt Lake gold with some minor changes. Here, for the first time, Slumach is introduced as a component to the legends. However, Mahony added to the reality of an Indian who was hanged for murder such irresistible elements as even more murders, hidden gold and maidens. These themes were absorbed and further developed in the imaginative legends that followed in the press over the next 75 years. The legendary Slumach was accused of crimes the real Slumach never committed and the discovery of Pitt Lake gold he never put an eye on. In many ways this Slumach is as much invented as Jackson alias Shotwell.
for many years. Corey did not believe there would be a possibility of any great strike in that region and modern geologists agree.
Pitt Lake
Pitt Lake is the second-largest lake in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, being about 53.5 square kilometres in area. It is about 25 km long and about 4.5 km wide at its widest, and is also one of the world's largest tidal lakes, its confluence with the Fraser being only a few miles upstream...
, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
, the supposed wealth of which has held the imagination of people worldwide for more than a century. The mysterious riches have also been known as Slumach
Slumach
Slumach who died on the gallows in New Westminster, BC, in 1891 was an elderly Katzie First Nations man. Baptized moments before his death he was given the first name "Peter", a name never used in his lifetime. His unmarked grave is in St. Peter's Cemetery in Sapperton...
’s Lost Mine, or Lost Creek Mine. Ever since the years of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
Fraser Canyon Gold Rush
The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, began in 1858 after gold was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River. This was a few miles upstream from the Thompson's confluence with the Fraser River at present-day Lytton...
prospectors and adventurers have been looking for the mine, and a few of those gold hunters have never returned from the mountains. Still, the search goes on.
History
The story of Pitt Lake gold begins in 1858, the year of the Fraser Canyon Gold RushFraser Canyon Gold Rush
The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, began in 1858 after gold was discovered on the Thompson River in British Columbia at its confluence with the Nicoamen River. This was a few miles upstream from the Thompson's confluence with the Fraser River at present-day Lytton...
, when a number of maps were published in San Francisco promoting the gold fields of British Columbia. Two of these maps show the words "gold" and "Indian diggings" in the country above Pitt Lake. Another map from that time shows the words "much gold bearing quartz rock” on the north side of Pitt Lake, where a decade later, in 1869, an Indian brought “... a good prospect of gold…which he states he found in a little stream on the north side of Pitt Lake” to New Westminster. The report created “great excitement” in the city, and parties set out to find the diggings.
In 1903, George Moody, who had been a witness called by the defence in the Slumach
Slumach
Slumach who died on the gallows in New Westminster, BC, in 1891 was an elderly Katzie First Nations man. Baptized moments before his death he was given the first name "Peter", a name never used in his lifetime. His unmarked grave is in St. Peter's Cemetery in Sapperton...
case in 1890, claimed to have found a rich placer at Pitt Lake
Pitt Lake
Pitt Lake is the second-largest lake in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, being about 53.5 square kilometres in area. It is about 25 km long and about 4.5 km wide at its widest, and is also one of the world's largest tidal lakes, its confluence with the Fraser being only a few miles upstream...
, returning with $1,200 in course gold.
In 1905, a newspaper, reviving the Moody story, reported that in 1902 "an Indian" had exchanged gold dust for $1,600 in bills in New Westminster. Several months later the same Indian came back, this time with $1,800 in gold dust. Again he disappeared and returned, now with $1,400 in gold. He did not want to tell where he got it and attempts to follow him failed. Then the Indian took sick, probably because of his exposure to inclement weather on expeditions in the mountains and a doctor told him he was going to die. The Indian told a relative the secret source of his gold — a rich placer at Pitt Lake — and described its location, giving the landmarks and tracing a crude map of the locality. After he died, his relative, who had no money, sought the assistance of a white man. They were unable to trace the spot where the Indian said he had found the gold. With the secret now out “there have been expeditions every year in an attempt to locate the mysterious placer.” Again in 1906 another such expedition failed to find the gold. The participants had information that an old man had found some valuable placer ground in the Pitt Lake country and that he had hidden a substantial amount of gold nuggets under a rock. Before he died, he had left directions where the treasure and the placer ground were to be found. It was “a rough trip as the weather was rainy, and sleeping out did not remind one of dreams between Dutch feather beds.”
A Washington prospector, Wilbur Armstrong, who for ten year had guided search parties into the Pitt Lake area to find the legendary treasure located "within 20 miles of the head of Pitt Lake" claimed in 1915 that Slumach
Slumach
Slumach who died on the gallows in New Westminster, BC, in 1891 was an elderly Katzie First Nations man. Baptized moments before his death he was given the first name "Peter", a name never used in his lifetime. His unmarked grave is in St. Peter's Cemetery in Sapperton...
was the first discoverer of the mine and that in 1901 a man called Walter Jackson became the second discoverer. Following the usual pattern in these stories, Walter Jackson fell ill, but before he died he left a letter to a friend describing his find's location saying "in going upstream [the creek] I found a place where the bedrock is bare, and you will hardly believe me when I tell you the bedrock was yellow with gold. In a few days I gathered thousands, and there was thousands more in sight. Some of the nuggets were as big as walnuts....I saw there were millions practically at the surface. I buried part of the gold under a tent-shaped rock with a mark cut on the face.” The story did not appear in newspapers in Canada but was published by several local newspapers in the US.
After a long silence the stories about Pitt Lake and its treasures started to appear again beginning with a story in Vancouver's Province in 1925 that combined elements of the 1905 story about the Indian who found gold, became ill and died, and the 1906 story about the old man’s placer grounds and the gold nuggets hidden under a rock. The story told that for 24 years dozens of prospectors had been looking in vain for “untold wealth” in placer gold somewhere back of Pitt Lake and they also sought for a treasure of placer gold washed from the gravel of the lost mine in one season and buried under a rock by a prospector called Shotwell--the man named Walter Jackson in Armstrong's story. Shotwell came out of the Pitt Lake area in the fall of 1901 and went to San Francisco where, according to the records at the United States mint, he deposited more than $8,000 in placer gold. But, as did the poor Indian in the 1906 story, and his alter ego Walter Jackson in 1915, Shotwell fell ill and his physician told him that he had not long to live. Before the prospector died he sent a letter to an unnamed partner from his Alaska days, letting him know that he had found “fabulous rich placer ground in the mountains back of Pitt Lake.” Shotwell said, he had buried a sack of gold “under a tent-shaped rock, in a valley overlooked by three mountain peaks standing close together.” The letter gave directions to where the “golden cache” was buried and the grounds that Shotwell had worked.
In 1926 Slumach
Slumach
Slumach who died on the gallows in New Westminster, BC, in 1891 was an elderly Katzie First Nations man. Baptized moments before his death he was given the first name "Peter", a name never used in his lifetime. His unmarked grave is in St. Peter's Cemetery in Sapperton...
’s name was mentioned in connection with Pitt Lake gold in an article by Victor Harbord Harbord who interviewed Jason Allard, a court interpreter during the Slumach trial.. Harbord Harbord commented: “Slumach died and with him died the secret of a great gold mine somewhere up in that wild Pitt Lake country. Had Mr. Allard only known that this prisoner knew of its existence, he might have become a very wealthy man, for the murderer … would undoubtedly have told him where it was.”
Again there was silence in the press for quite some years with the exception of the stories about R.A. “Volcanic” Brown
Robert Allan Brown
Robert Allan Brown was a well-known and flamboyant prospector and speculator in 19th and early 20th Century in the Canadian province of British Columbia...
, a colourful prospector who disappeared in the mountains between Pitt Lake
Pitt Lake
Pitt Lake is the second-largest lake in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, being about 53.5 square kilometres in area. It is about 25 km long and about 4.5 km wide at its widest, and is also one of the world's largest tidal lakes, its confluence with the Fraser being only a few miles upstream...
and Harrison Lake
Harrison Lake
Harrison Lake is the largest lake in the southern Coast Mountains of Canada, being about 250 square kilometres in area. It is about 60 km in length and at its widest almost 9 km across. Its southern end, at the resort community of Harrison Hot Springs, is c. 95 km east of...
in 1931, purportedly looking for the lost mine.
Only in 1939 did Slumach become a permanent fixture in the Pitt Lake Gold legend starting with a pivotal article written by Jack Mahony
John Keefer Mahony
John Keefer Mahony VC was a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.-Details:...
who interviewed pioneer Hugh Murray. “Slummock” in Hugh Murray’s story is a middle-aged “half-breed Red River Indian” who was hanged for murdering another half-breed prospector by drowning. Of course the real Slumach had no Red River origins but was of Katzie ancestry, was not a half-breed, did not kill Louie Bee by drowning—a gunshot killed Bee— and was not middle-aged but rather an old man when he died at the gallows. Hugh Murray grew up in Port Moody and was in his thirties when Slumach died and he must have known better. This is, to use Mahony’s words “romantic fiction.” Both Murray and Mahony must have known that the information was incorrect and this was probably a “readers beware” signal not to take everything in the story as the truth—a signal mostly ignored.
Murray’s “Slummock” prospected in the Pitt Lake mountains for many years, struck it rich in the late nineties and frequently came to New Westminster with “a well-filled ‘poke’ of nuggets,” spending his money freely, but keeping its source a secret—just as the Indian who came into New Westminster in 1902 with bags of gold dust. In the days of the real Slumach’s imprisonment there were unsubstantiated rumours that in his lifetime he had killed other men. Hugh Murray adds a new dimension to this: “…it was believed but never proven, that he [‘Slummock’] had drowned three of his Indian ‘wives’ near Shiwash Rock at the mouth of Pitt Lake to prevent them from divulging the location [of his gold mine].” That last theme grew out into gothic tales such as “The Bluebeard of Lost Creek Mine” and “The gold mine murders of nine British Columbian women.”
It is unlikely that the elderly Slumach would have painted the town red or even ventured into New Westminster. That is why Mahony and Murray presented “Slummock” as a middle-aged man, still capable of looking for gold in the mountains and showing up in town from time to time with his treasures. Without the “nuggets” the tale that Slumach knew about a rich mine is clearly inaccurate. Only showing real gold would link him to gold findings. Hugh Murray states that a local physician, a Dr. Hall visited “Slummock” in his death cell trying to find out, but he went to his death “with the burning question of the community unanswered.” The old man probably did not know anything about the bonanza that later would carry his name.
During this same interview in 1939, Hugh Murray retold the 1925 story of Shotwell, his rich placer gold findings and the cache of gold under a tent-shaped rock. In this account it was a man called John Jackson, a veteran Alaskan prospector, who in 1903, hearing about the Slumach legend (the word used in the article) set out for the Pitt Lake area and returned three months later with a very heavy pack-sack. Jackson deposited $8700 in gold in the Bank of British North America in San Francisco—not the United States mint as Shotwell did. As the unnamed Indian and Shotwell in the previous stories, Jackson never recovered from the hardships of the search.. When Jackson’s doctor told him that end was near, he sent a letter and a map with the information of the location of the treasures to a friend in Seattle. That man was called Shotwell. This Shotwell, being an old man and not able to search for the gold himself, sold a share to a fellow Seattle man who went to the Pitt Lake region looking for Jackson’s creek “but returned without success when the map became partially damaged.” Others, including Hugh Murray, tried and tried again to find Jackson’s creek without success. The damaged map can’t have been of much use and Jackson’s letter was not much of a help either.
The 1939 article quotes Murray as saying that his belief in the gold was strengthened by unspecified additional evidence and he mentioned meeting “… an old Indian woman at the Indian camp at the head of Pitt Lake [who] remembered Jackson staying with them in 1903…” with his very heavy pack that he would not let out of sight. Prospector Stanford Corey said in 1926 that in the thirty years he prospected there he had “not seen the marks of any other person ever having entered the land.”
In summary, Jack Mahony’s 1939 article is not more than an assemblage of earlier fables about Pitt Lake gold with some minor changes. Here, for the first time, Slumach is introduced as a component to the legends. However, Mahony added to the reality of an Indian who was hanged for murder such irresistible elements as even more murders, hidden gold and maidens. These themes were absorbed and further developed in the imaginative legends that followed in the press over the next 75 years. The legendary Slumach was accused of crimes the real Slumach never committed and the discovery of Pitt Lake gold he never put an eye on. In many ways this Slumach is as much invented as Jackson alias Shotwell.
Reality or fable?
The location of the mythical mine remains elusive. There were always skeptics such as Stanford Corey who was an experienced prospector and had searched for minerals in the area between Pitt Lake and SquamishSquamish, British Columbia
Squamish is a community and a district municipality in the Canadian province of British Columbia, located at the north end of Howe Sound on the Sea to Sky Highway...
for many years. Corey did not believe there would be a possibility of any great strike in that region and modern geologists agree.
Further reading
- Rick Antonson, Mary Trainer, and Brian Antonson, Slumach’s Gold: In Search of a Legend (Surrey BC: Heritage House, 2007)
External links
- Slumach, contains transcripts of the references and records mentioned.