Pitt Lake's Lost Gold Mine - Jackson Alias Shotwell

Jackson Alias Shotwell

For a decade Washington prospector Wilbur Armstrong guided search parties into the Pitt Lake area to find the legendary treasure located "within 20 miles of the head of Pitt Lake.” When interviewed in 1915 Armstrong mentioned that in 1901 a white man called Walter Jackson found the mine. As in the other stories Jackson fell gravely ill after discovering the gold and before he died he wrote a letter to a friend describing his find's location and this description of the treasures: "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 of a white man discovering the gold of Pitt Lake initially only appeared in newspapers in the United States. Ten years later an article appeared in the Vancouver Province reporting that for 24 years dozens of prospectors had been looking in vain for “untold wealth” in placer gold somewhere back of Pitt Lake. They were also looking for a treasure of placer gold 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. Following the familiar pattern 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 an interview in 1939, Hugh Murray of New Westminster retold the story about a white prospector, his rich placer gold findings and the cache of gold under a tent-shaped rock. In Murray’s account the man was called John Jackson, a veteran Alaskan prospector, who in 1903, hearing about the Slumach legend set out for the Pitt Lake area and returned three months later with a very heavy pack-sack. Jackson deposited $8,700 in gold in the Bank of British North America in San Francisco—an affiliate of a Canadian bank. Before he died, Jackson, suffering from the hardships of the search, sent a letter and a map with the information about the location of the treasure to a friend in Seattle called Shotwell. Being an old man, Shotwell himself was unable to search for the gold, and he 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.” The damaged map can’t have been of much use and Jackson’s letter was not much of a help either. But Murray, among others, kept believing and searching. His belief was strengthened after meeting “… an old Indian woman at the Indian camp at the head of Pitt Lake remembered Jackson staying with them in 1903…” with his very heavy pack that he would not let out of sight. Nowhere but in these stories is there any evidence that Jackson or Shotwell ever existed.