Slumach’s lost creek gold

A real man and a real trial; the gold and the curse were added afterwards

Slumach was a Katzie man, born around 1810 or 1816, who spent most of his long life around Pitt Lake, near what is now Vancouver, living mostly as a hunter on foot off the land. On 8 September 1890, at what is now Addington Point on the west shore of the Pitt River, he shot a man named Louis Bee, who was sitting in a canoe with a fellow fisherman called Seymour. There were no other witnesses, and the motive was probably liquor rather than gold; both Bee and Seymour had done hard labour for selling liquor to First Nations people. Slumach evaded capture for months and gave himself up as winter came on. His lawyers argued self-defence and tried to delay the trial until spring, in the hope that the old man would die in custody first. Both efforts failed. He was baptised Peter shortly before the end, a name he never used, and hanged at New Westminster on 16 January 1891, aged about 75. He lies in an unmarked grave in St. Peter's Cemetery in Sapperton.

Nothing in that record mentions gold. The legend came afterwards, beginning as local lore and magnified by local newspapers, pulp fiction and storytelling authors. They added the rest: Slumach scattering nuggets across saloon floors in New Westminster, prospectors who followed him found floating in the river, a beautiful woman named Molly Tynan killed with his knife, and a curse from the gallows, "Nika memloose, mine memloose," When I die, the mine dies. None of it appears in any contemporary record, and no trace has been found of the dead miners or of Molly Tynan.

Then the legend took on a life of its own. In 1897 a Slumach Mining Company advertised half a million $1 shares, with the mayor and Slumach's own defence lawyer on its board, an old trick of borrowing a famous name to sell stock. A miner called W. Jackson was said to have come out of the hills dying around 1901, banked $8,000 in gold in San Francisco and written a letter with a map, but no evidence shows he existed, and a former New Westminster gold commissioner said he had seen at least a dozen versions of the map, each with the mine in a different place. A searcher called Volcanic Brown died of exposure looking for it.

Television carried it around the world, from Bill Barlee's 1980s series Gold Trails & Ghost Towns to Curse of the Frozen Gold in 2015 and Deadman's Curse in 2022. The gold has never been found.