The Lost Lemon Mine

Alberta’s famous lost mine, with no supporting geology

The Lost Lemon Mine is Alberta's great lost mine, a ledge of gold said to lie somewhere on the eastern slopes of the Rockies between the Highwood River and the Crowsnest Pass. It comes in many contradictory versions, of murder, madness and curses, but all of them agree that the gold is still up there.

The best known version was published in the spring of 1946 in the Alberta Folklore Quarterly by Senator Dan Riley of High River, who had heard it for decades from his friend Lafayette French, a buffalo hunter, trader and early rancher. In 1870, it runs, two prospectors called Lemon and Blackjack left a party on the North Saskatchewan and followed an old Indian trail up the High River into the mountains, where they found a creek rich in gold and then its source, a rock ledge streaked with it. That night they argued over whether to dig at once or come back in spring, and when Blackjack fell asleep Lemon killed him with an axe. Lemon spent the night pacing beside a huge fire, hearing ghostly wails, unaware that two young Stoney men, William and Daniel Bendow, were watching from the brush. They told their chief, Bearspaw, who swore them to secrecy rather than risk a gold rush on Stoney land.

Lemon never found the place again; every time he led a party back, he came apart as he got close. A frontiersman sent to bury Blackjack drank himself to death at a whiskey fort before he could guide the next expedition, and a forest fire turned another back. French searched for some 30 years. William Bendow agreed in 1912 to lead him to the spot and died suddenly that night, and his son-in-law the same way soon after. French went on anyway, wrote to a friend that he had found it, and was badly burned when the cabin he slept in caught fire. He crawled two miles through the snow for help, told Riley at the High River hospital that he knew all about the Lost Lemon Mine now, and died before morning.

The historian Hugh Dempsey went looking for the facts. He found newspaper accounts from 1870 and 1886 of a much plainer story: an American named Frank Lemmon and his partner, Old George, who split from a prospecting party near present-day Nanton in 1868 to look for a pass to the Wild Horse Creek gold fields. Dempsey suggests the dramatic version passed by word of mouth to French, who passed it to Riley. Geologists long held that no gold worth the name could lie on the eastern slopes, though Ron Stewart has argued that the Crowsnest Volcanics could have carried it there.