Finding Slumach's Gold

by Brian Dunning
September 3, 2024

When it comes to writing books, there are two basic kinds of researchers: first, there is the person who works diligently to uncover the real facts wherever they may lead; and second, there is the person who digs only far enough to put together a good story. Between them, they've given us a massive literature consisting of countless volumes of fantastic tales, plus a much smaller subset of meticulous skeptical literature which, as often as not, ends up poking holes in the majority of storytelling books. Today's treasure hunting story is one born of this ecosystem, a mishmash of actual historical record, historical record enhanced by storytellers, and brought somewhat back down to Earth by skeptical researchers. It is the story of Slumach's gold.

Slumach (usually pronounced SLOO-mack and spelled various ways) was a First Nations man of the Katzie Nation, probably born about 1810 in British Columbia. He spent most of his life in the region around Pitt Lake, near Vancouver. He mostly made his living as a hunter, hiking on foot and living off the land. But the thing that put Slumach in the history books came late in life. On September 8, 1890, Slumach had a dispute (cause unknown) with another man, Louis Bee. With a single shot of his rifle from close range, Slumach settled the dispute. He was arrested for murder, convicted, and hanged on January 16, 1891. His remains are still where he was planted following his execution, in a numbered but unmarked grave in New Westminster, British Columbia, a few miles downriver from where he spent his life.

And that's the story of Slumach. You may notice something appears to be missing. There was no mention of any gold or of a fabulous lost mine. That's because what I just told you are the established facts of Slumach's life. Anything else you might have heard, most likely on TV series on the pseudohistory TV networks, had never been a part of the story until the years following Slumach's execution. It began with local lore, but was quickly magnified by local newspapers, then pulp fiction authors, then storytelling authors masquerading as historians, and finally to the TV shows where hardly any differentiation is made between fact and whole-cloth fiction.

These stories began with a mysterious curse that Slumach was said to have uttered on the gallows. According to legend but not to any contemporary accounts, Slumach is recorded to have said (in his native language) "Nika memloose, mine memloose," which is claimed to mean "When I die, the mine dies," and which some later authors have inexplicably reinterpreted as "Whoever tries to find my mine will die" — but how they arrived at that meaning is not made clear.

The stories continued that Slumach had a habit of coming down out of the mountains and spending money lavishly in the saloons of New Westminster, going so far as to scatter gold nuggets across the floor. (Mining in the area was placer mining, meaning gold dust and the occasional nugget could be found by panning in the rivers, or by the use of a sluice box.) Some greedy prospectors would follow Slumach into the hills from time to time, their murdered bodies later found floating down the river. Following one of his spending sprees, a beautiful woman named Molly Tynan heard of these opulences and vowed to get in on that action. She struck out into the hills to claim Slumach for herself, but then her own body was found in the river, with Slumach's own knife still in it. It was the murder of Molly Tynan, legend says, that Slumach was actually hanged for.

But all of this, it turns out, appears to have been fiction. There are no records of murdered miners, no record of their bodies, and no record of a Molly Tynan. Researchers have hunted everywhere and come up empty handed. And, moreover, it's in clear black and white that Louis Bee was the murder victim who sent Slumach to the gallows.

Yet the stories only grew. Perhaps on the strength of this renewed interest in a heavily fictionalized Slumach, an advertisement appeared in the local British Colonist newspaper in 1897, six years after the hanging. It was a stock offering in something called the Slumach Mining Company, an effort to raise up to half a million dollars in $1 shares; and researchers found that its board members included the mayor, the city clerk, an editor, and Slumach's own defense attorney. Surely such a venture wouldn't exist unless there was an exceedingly rich Slumach's Mine up in those hills somewhere, right? —and surely it wouldn't have all those illustrious names attached unless these people knew Slumach and his mine were legit?

Well, not so fast. Anyone familiar with how the business of mining worked in the gold rush days would be very familiar with this. As Mark Twain noted in his famous book Roughing It, "Modesty of nomenclature is not a prominent feature in the mines," so if there was a famous name floating about, and if you hoped to attract investment in your mine, you gave your mine that famous name — in this case, that of a guy known for allegedly casting gold nuggets about willy-nilly in the saloons. So why the illustrious and well-respected names: the mayor, the lawyer, and such? Again, publicity. You throw each of those guys a few hundred shares to agree to be listed, and now it appears to investors that a lot of very serious people find this company worthy of their association. Scoring Slumach's own attorney — whom investors might assume knew all of his secrets — was just a cherry on top. I never did learn what became of the Slumach Mining Company, but if its unnamed proprietors ever did manage to secure any significant investment, it's likely they packed it up and vamoosed.

The growth of the legend was exemplified nowhere better than with the story of W. Jackson, a miner who supposedly showed up in New Westminster in 1901 and became obsessed with what he heard of Slumach's magnificent gold mine. When he learned all he could, he packed up into the hills and was gone for the better part of a year. When he returned, he told fabulous tales of the wealth he found; but he was sick and dying, presumably from the trials of his prospecting. He was rumored to have deposited at least $8,000 in gold into the San Francisco banks, then returned to New Westminster, where he died of his gold-induced illnesses. But not before writing a letter to a dear friend, a benefactor from his earlier days named Shotwell, in which he told where to find Slumach's gold and even drew a map.

Given the price of gold in the early 1900s, which was very stable at just under $19 per troy ounce, Jackson's $8,000 in gold dust would have represented about 12 kilograms, or 26 pounds. It's hard to estimate the volume that would have required, as gold dust is found in granules mostly about the size of coarse sand; but it wouldn't have been very large physically given gold's great weight. Jackson was said to always keep his pack with him, and that 12 kilograms is not outside the realm of plausibility for a really good prospecting tour. It may well have been 10 years of panning also. Basically, a deposit of $8,000 was not so extraordinary that an exotic explanation is needed.

But there's even more. If such a deposit was ever made, no record exists of it — thanks to the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire that destroyed all bank records. It has never been possible to search documentary evidence to either prove or disprove Jackson's deposit. But on top of that, it appears that Jackson himself was apocryphal. There is no evidence he ever existed, until stories about him appeared in books written after his alleged death. There are also no original or authentic copies of the thankful soliloquy he penned to Shotwell, or the map he drew. Various versions, differing in significant details, have been reproduced in different authors' books. One version was said to be in the possession of a man named Volcanic Brown who revealed the fact in 1924, but never shared the text of it — and later died of exposure searching for the gold, in a search that itself became fodder for much pulp fiction. Another was in the possession of a local historian, Bill Barlee, who wrote about it in 1970, but also never shared it. Prospector Dick Carter showed off the best known version of the letter in 1940. Fraser McDonald, who had been New Westminster's gold commissioner for 22 years, told the authors of the 2024 edition of the book Slumach's Gold that he'd personally seen at least a dozen versions of Jackson's map, each showing a different location for the mine — including some sold in gift shops to tourists.

But we could go on endlessly if we were to mention every personality, every little side story, every expedition, every sensationalizing author that have been associated with the story of Slumach's gold mine. They are countless.

But it's been the TV shows that have really brought Slumach's gold out from being a smaller story known mostly to Canadians and into a larger spotlight seen by people everywhere. One of the earliest came from Bill Barlee, holder of one of the maps, who featured the story in his 1980s Canadian series Gold Trails & Ghost Towns. 1994 saw a TV docudrama about it, Curse of the Lost Gold Mine. It got its first big boost in 2002 when a popular series about flying, Wings Over Canada, flew to the sites mentioned in the Slumach legend. But it really went big time in 2015 when the History Channel and Animal Planet aired the series Curse of the Frozen Gold, and then History told the same story again in 2022's Deadman's Curse. If you've heard of Slumach's story before, it's likely from one of these series.

It's really these TV producers — who make these shows that give every crazy little twist anyone ever added to the story as if it's a proven historical fact — and these book authors with the silly fake letters and maps from the fake Jackson to the fake Shotwell, who represent the kinds of researchers I talked about at the top of the show: those who are only interested in learning just enough to tell a wild story. The others, the careful investigators who genuinely want to know what really happened and do the work to prove it or disprove it, are represented by authors such as Antonson, Trainer, and Antonson who wrote the book I mentioned early, the 2024 Slumach's Gold. It's a dense volume and it follows every thread you might want to know about.

But the main reason I want to mention it is that they tell a story of being contacted by the producers of what would become Curse of the Frozen Gold, and the producer told them their 2007 edition had been "a valuable resource" and would they like to contribute more material. I had to laugh because I still get this call twice a year — some production company has been developing a show about some ancient mystery, using one of my Skeptoid podcast transcript as the primary source material (always uncredited, of course) — and then they ask if I'd like to volunteer to help them develop the material further. It just made me laugh. Doing the hard version of research is a thankless job.

Correction: An earlier version of this said Slumach had an earlier conviction for selling alcohol to First Nations people. Not true; this was an associate of Louis Bee's named Charlie Seymour. In my native mental aberrance, I misread Seymour for Slumach. It has been plausibility speculated that Bee & Seymour's illegal activities were a motive for Slumach's slaying of Bee. —BD

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning