Slumach’s lost creek gold

British Columbia’s great lost mine. Slumach, a Katzie man, was hanged in New Westminster in 1891 for murder, and in the decades after his death a story grew that he had been bringing coarse gold out of a hidden creek somewhere above Pitt Lake and had cursed the place from the gallows. The curse and the gold are both later inventions layered onto a real man and a real trial, which is worth saying plainly. The country itself is genuinely dangerous: steep, wet, avalanche-prone coastal mountains that have killed searchers.