Ever since the years of the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush prospectors and adventurers have been looking for the mine and gold-rush rumors have evolved into legends repeated and enriched over time.

[3] In 1903, a newspaper in New Westminster BC reported that a man called George Moody,[4] 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.

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.

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.

It was “a rough trip as the weather was rainy, and sleeping out did not remind one of dreams between Dutch feather beds.” [7] 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.

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.

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.

[11] 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.

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.

He presented the legendary “Slummock” as a middle-aged man, still capable of looking for gold in the mountains, who struck it rich in the late nineties and frequently came to New Westminster with “a well-filled ‘poke’ of nuggets,” spending his money freely, but keeping its source a secret.

Mahoney stated that “…it was believed but never proven, that he had drowned three of his Indian ‘wives’ near Shiwash Rock at the mouth of Pitt Lake to prevent them from divulging the location [of his gold mine].” That last theme grew out into gothic tales such as “The Bluebeard of Lost Creek Mine” [23] and “The gold mine murders of nine British Columbian women.” [24] Hugh Murray told Mahoney that a local physician, a Dr. Hall visited “Slummock” in his death cell trying to find out, but he went to his death “with the burning question of the community unanswered.” [25] At the time of the trial none of the local newspapers of that community even hinted on the possibility that Slumach knew of gold.

Prospector Stanford Corey said in 1926 that in the thirty years he prospected there he had “not seen the marks of any other person ever having entered the land.”[25] The newspapers, however, had a different view: a stream of adventures risking life and limb hunting for the lost treasure.