Gold fever’s cautionary legacies

Slumach’s Gold: In Search of a Legend—and a Curse
by Brian Antonson, Mary Trainer, and Rick Antonson

Victoria: Heritage House, 2024
$32.95 / 9781772035186

Reviewed by Daniel Gawthrop

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As brothers attending summer camp in 1957, Brian and Rick Antonson were nine and eight years of age when they sat around a campfire and listened with rapt amazement to “the greatest campfire story ever told.” Little could they have imagined that, fifteen years later, they would team up with another young writer, Mary Trainer, to co-author a book about it. The trio, in turn, could not have dreamed that the story they shared would spawn multiple TV mini-series, documentaries, podcasts, a website, and other treatments—much less a second edition of their own book in 2007, and now—fifty-two years after the original—this third and final edition.

Over the years, Slumach’s Gold has become its own motherlode of fascinating personal stories, enduring mysteries, and dark legacies surrounding one of B.C.’s most captivating gold mining legends. This 210-page coffee table book, which recaptures all the intrigue and the large cast of characters who’ve heeded the call of Slumach’s gold over the decades, is also a reckoning with the way the story has been told. Replete with full-page photos of the breathtaking mountains, lakes and streams that lie between the borders of Golden Ears and Garibaldi provincial parks, it also contains archival photos and graphics, smaller maps, and a two-page spread of “Slumach Country” that shows all the key locations from the narrative.

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The story of Peter Slumach, an Indigenous man from the Katzie First Nation who in 1891 was charged with murder and hanged in New Westminster for killing a man on the banks of the lower Pitt River, has been shrouded in mystery since his execution. This is largely because of the institutional racism that dominated the criminal justice system, the newspaper industry and official B.C. historical narratives, feeding the legends of both the hidden gold Slumach was said to have discovered near Pitt Lake and of the “curse” he was believed to have placed, moments before his hanging, on anyone who tried to find it.

A compelling irony of this edition—which the authors say is their final word on the subject—surrounds the extent of their own complicity in mythologizing both Slumach and his rumoured gold stash simply by amplifying the legend. Admirably, the Antonsons and Trainer are accountable for their own errors, and—cognisant of the sensitivity that Reconciliation requires for all storytelling—provide much context for how bigotry victimized Slumach in life and rendered him invisible after death.

Newspaper reports described Slumach as “an insane Indian,” an “incarnate demon,” and a “maniac.” Such racist media only stoked the public’s interest in locating his missing gold. The authors zero in on a yellow journalist named C.V. Tench, known in the 1940s and 50s for writing sensational stories guaranteed to sell newspapers. “Tench is likely the one who started the lurid lies and gloomy distortions portraying Slumach as a nefarious, cheating, gambling womanizer,” they write. “A Tench story in Wide World Magazine in Australia shows a sketched ‘Slumack’ surrounded by dancehall girls. It was a time when the shameless besmirching of an Indigenous man went without scrutiny or scruples. It is reasonable to suggest Tench knew he was lying.”

From such hostile media, and the rumour-mongering of white bar owners recalling his visits to their New Westminster saloons, to the cruelty of the courts in rushing to conviction without defense witnesses (Slumach may have shot and killed his victim, Louis Bee, in self defense), sentencing an eighty-year-old man to death, Slumach never had a chance to set the record straight—either about himself or about the “glory hole” of gold nuggets he was believed to have found. If he held the secret about that gold’s location, it died with him.

The book nicely illustrates how media sensationalism fuelled international interest in the possibilities of a hidden motherlode. In the beginning there was W. Jackson, a miner from San Francisco who, a decade after Slumach’s death, showed up in New Westminster and heard about the gold. After looking for it near Slumach’s land and apparently finding it, he returned to San Francisco and deposited $10,000 worth of gold in a local branch of the Bank of British North America. (Evidence of such a deposit would have been destroyed during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which reduced the bank to rubble.) At some point a letter by Jackson emerged in which he wrote to another man about the gold’s location and provided a map to it. The late noted B.C. historian Bill Barlee, a provincial NDP cabinet minister during the 1990s, is identified as one of many who claimed to possess the original Jackson letter, given to his father. In the end, even Jackson’s existence is in doubt.

After covering a range of gold seekers from the 1930s through the 60s—hapless adventurers whose search for the gold ends in disappointment and, in a few cases, death—the authors insert themselves into the narrative as the 1970s begin.

Eager to explore the tale during the centenary of B.C.’s joining Confederation, their objectives were to “separate fact from fiction in Pitt Lake’s lost-creek gold-mine story.” The authors write: “What we discovered instead was a fabulous collection of fabrication, mistruths, and wilful embellishments, all construed into an astonishing tale.” Today they acknowledge their own unconscious role in perpetuating “mistaken identity” around Slumach in their book’s first edition: “The portrayal we offered was erroneous and based on sensationalized accounts rather than more reliable history, as we were to learn and later correct.”

They are also meticulous in acknowledging key contributors to their own research. These include photographer Don Waite, who came out with his own book, The Lost Mine of Pitt Lake, at the same time as their own in 1972 and remained a lifetime friendship with the trio. There’s also Fred Braches, a Slumach skeptic who came into the authors’ orbit as they were working on the second edition. Braches, who passed away earlier this year at ninety-three, founded slumach.ca, “a website for all who prefer facts over fiction.” In 2009, the BC Historical Society gave him an award of excellence for the website, which the authors declare “the reference site” on all things Slumach. And there is Adam Palmer, star of the History Channel’s Dead Man’s Curse, whose stunning photos adorn much of the book.

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Just when you think the man himself has disappeared under the weight of his legend, Slumach returns in the later chapters with the search for his grave in New Westminster. There’s also a serious examination of the issues surrounding his story, including interviews with his descendants in the Katzie community. As with the TV series and podcasts, the central moral issue this final edition of Slumach’s Gold explores is the impact of colonial/settler exploration on surrounding Indigenous communities.

The second edition of this book was published eight years before the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many readers encountering this story for the first time may feel conflicted between their instinctive curiosity and eagerness to explore some of the locations described—thus contributing to gold fever tourism—and mindfulness about First Nations communities that have suffered at the hands of overzealous white explorers. (These range from the original gold seekers to the German documentarian Sylvio Heufelder, who during the 1990s sent his team to film in the area despite Katzie Elders saying they weren’t welcome.) As a result, beyond general locations marked on the Slumach Country map, the authors are careful not to provide too much detail about known prospecting routes.

Toward Slumach’s Gold’s conclusion (after the Antonson brothers stake their own claim in Slumach’s gold, which they allow to lapse), the three co-authors share their own opinions on the truth about the legend and on the implications for further research, given today’s realities of climate change, artificial intelligence, and Reconciliation.

For its conscientious research and fact checking, its humility in revision, and its highly engaging storytelling punctuated by excellent visuals, Slumach’s Gold should be an early long list candidate for next year’s B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes.

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Daniel Gawthrop is the author of the novel Double Karma (Cormorant) and five non-fiction titles including The Rice Queen Diaries (Arsenal Pulp Press). Visit his Substack here and his website here. [Editor’s note: Daniel Gawthrop has reviewed Harman Burns, Ed Willes, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Yeji Y. Ham, Chad Soon and George Chiang, Hirsch and Cheryl A. MacDonald and Jonathon R.J. Edwards for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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