Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 129, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 May 1913 — MINE ROMANCES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA [ARTICLE]

MINE ROMANCES IN BRITISH COLUMBIA

//AEEKING for treasure.” The • words are as a magnet in the power they have over the minds of men. Let an explorer come home to tell of gold mines, of gems, and of pearls to he found in some region of utter desolation, amid peril, discomfort and solitude, and the great and small, gentle and simple rush in thousands overseas 'in pursuit of the golden spoil. Perhaps nowhere has the romance of seeking treasure been kept so actively alive as in the northern gold-produc-ing regions of North America. Even stranger than fiction is the tale told by Charles McLeod, as Edmonton prospector, who, while leading a party of gold-seekers through the wastes of the northwest section of British Columbia, stumbled over the bones of his two brothers and hit upon a location of auriferous quartz now bringing him in a colossal fortune. One night In 1908, while “making camp” with his fellow-prospectors, McLeod found traces of an old campfire in the forest nearby, and in idle curiosity began to scrape among the ashes and bids of charred wood, presently to find on the trunk of a pine near at hand an inscription consisting of the date, “May, 1905,” and the initials of bis two brothers, who had been missing for several years. Later on, the discovery was made of two skeletons under a tree a little distance off the trail, and not far from the tree McLeod picked up a watch, which he at once recognized as having belonged to his brother Frank. On the trees In the vicinity being closely examined a “blazed” trunk was found with much carving, but very few of the words were readable. Near the foot of the tree McLeod managed to make out sufficient to lead him to believe that a complete deciphering would probably mean his fortune. The words that had remained decipherable referred to the locating of a gold "shaft," but the murderers, who were presumed to have been Indians, had net only taken the precautions to remove from their victims all means of identification, but had also cut the tree in such a manner as to make the carving unintelligible. Near

at hand, however, McLeod chanced on a shaft, which had apparently been sunk in recent years and from which a considerable quantity of gold had been extracted. Subsequently some Indians claimed that they had sunk this shaft, but the matter was determined in McLeod’s favor. At the present day the prospectors’ camps in southwest Oregon are haunted by a little old man, who seldom comes In, and who when approached threatens with his rifle and then slinks off into the tall timber and scrub at hand. The camp to which he attaches himself he watches most carefully, following one man after another as they leave to look for game. _ Something like thirty years ago this ghost-like man was a stout, strong, young German, who came into Oregon to seek gold. He did find a very valuable "prospect,” and bad begun to work It when the Indians surprised him. His one companion was killed, but the young man escaped and made h!s way to Rogue river, still hugging some pieces of auriferous quartz. It was years before he came back with money enough to reopen his mine, the knowledge of which had made him rich during all the weary time of hard work and self-denial when he was laying up the “grubstake” which was to keep him from the necessity of sharing bis wealth with a partner. But he could not find his mine! The frost and the snow, a landslip or two, and the overflowing of the cascading stream had .obliterated his landmarks. At last, his money being exhausted, he told others of his mine and showed them the specimens which he had kept by him all the years. The miners of southwest Oregon are tired now of Looking for the lost mine, but the German still moves about the bills in a state of fear lest any one should find before he does the “Crazy Dutchman^tnine.” In the early days of the Yukon goldseekers much search was made for an alluvial source from which the Indiana, early in the nineteenth century, must have obtained the gold dust which for a time they disposed of to trappers, the Hudson Bay company and others. One morning a prospector, Joe Carver, when camping with an Indian hunter, was told by him that, seeing the rising sun gleam on the rocks, qt the base of which ran a stream, brought to his memory that the place had been called by his forefathers the “Rocks of Gold.” Bearch revealed the great hoard which Nature had been accumulating in the bed or the stream there for Innumerable centuries.

About eight years ago Isaac Newton Fowler, a Brooklyn man, while hunting In Chihuahua, Mexico, found an old tunnel, the mouth of which had been walled up at some remote time. There was the usual local tradition of a lost mine In the neighborhood, worked by the Spaniards of old and abandoned by them in consequence of the hostility of the Apaches. The discoverers qf the walled-up tfinnel decided this was It, and have found It to be an exceedingly paying one. A still richer find was that of a prospector on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, near Fort Hancock, Tex. An old “dump” of worked rock had been there so long that nobody knew who had taken the rock out Not even a tradition was associated with It A prospector interested capitalists, and the old workings were reopened. On the face of the hill being cleared for the tunnel, the miners were surprised to find a solid wall of masonry, laid in cement, and so hard that they had to blow it down by means of dynamite. Once through this wall they discovered a tunnel that a few feet further on was closed by a massive door of hardwood logs fastened by a huge lock of antique Spanish workmanship. They broke in and found that the tunnel ran about 400 feet to a breast of ore many timee richer than any found for many yean. A revolution or Indian rising had probably caused the mine to be abandoned, and the workers with the characteristic subtlety of their time had hidden the bonanza, leaving exposed only the waste product on the surface.