Origins
The story of Pitt Lake gold begins in 1858, the year of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush, when a number of maps were published in San Francisco promoting the gold fields of British Columbia. Two of these maps show the words "gold" and "Indian diggings" in the country above Pitt Lake. Another map from that time shows the words "much gold bearing quartz rock” on the north side of Pitt Lake, where a decade later, in 1869, an Indian brought “... a good prospect of gold…which he states he found in a little stream on the north side of Pitt Lake” to New Westminster. The report created “great excitement” in the city, and parties set out to find the diggings. In 1903, a newspaper in New Westminster BC reported that a man called George Moody, had claimed to have found a rich placer deposit at Pitt Lake, and had returned to town with $1,200 in coarse gold to prove it. That was all that was published about Moody's find. In 1905 it was told that in 1902 "an Indian" had exchanged gold dust for $1,600 in bills in New Westminster. Several months later he came back with $1,800 in gold dust, and again now with $1,400 in gold. He did not want to tell where he got it and attempts to follow him failed. Then the Indian took sick, probably because of his exposure to inclement weather on expeditions in the mountains and a doctor told him he was going to die. The Indian told a relative the secret source of his gold — a rich placer at Pitt Lake — and described its location, giving the landmarks and tracing a crude map of the locality. After the unnamed Indian died, his relative, who had no money, sought the assistance of a white man. They were unable to trace the spot where the Indian said he had found the gold. With the secret now out “there have been expeditions every year in an attempt to locate the mysterious placer.” In 1906 another such expedition again failed to find the gold. The participants had information that an old man had found some valuable placer ground in the Pitt Lake country and that he had hidden a substantial amount of gold nuggets under a rock. Before he died, he had left directions where the treasure and the placer ground were to be found. It was “a rough trip as the weather was rainy, and sleeping out did not remind one of dreams between Dutch feather beds.”
Read more about this topic: Pitt Lake's Lost Gold Mine
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)