The rugged rainforest environs of Coquitlam’s Burke Mountain where it tumbles down to the west shore of Pitt Lake could hold the key to unlocking a mystery that involves a lost treasure of gold, prospectors mysteriously dying after trying to sleuth it out and an elderly First Nations’ man hanged for murder.
A contemporary attempt to solve the mystery — and maybe get impossibly rich along the way — is about to launch its second season as the reality series, Deadman’s Curse, on the History channel.
Former Port Moody MMA fighter Kru Williams along with mountaineer and wilderness expert Adam Palmer first embarked on their quest to unearth the legendary cache of gold squirrelled away somewhere in the mountains around Pitt Lake in 2022.
Palmer, a history buff who teaches outdoor education at a First Nations high school, said he had long been intrigued by the tales of treasure somewhere near Pitt Lake and the Katzie prospector known as Slumach, who was allegedly the only person with knowledge of its whereabouts until he was accused of murdering a rival and hanged in New Westminster in 1891.
“It started with curiosity,” Palmer said in a recent phone interview. “Then you find yourself on top of a mountain and you want to know what happened that brought you there.”
The first reports of a lost treasure came to light in 1858 when a series of maps promoting the gold fields of British Columbia were published in San Francisco.
The notations of “gold” and “Indian diggings,” as well as “much gold bearing quartz rock” in the maps’ margins lured prospectors to head north, joining the already swelling ranks of gold diggers funnelling through New Westminster to the backcountry beyond the Fraser River.
Several died, stricken by mysterious illnesses from which they never recovered.
The mystery deepened early in the 20th century when a story in a Wisconsin newspaper linked the lost gold to Slumach, who allegedly uttered a curse on anyone seeking the treasure before he went to the gallows.
Williams said it was a more pragmatic consideration that lured him into the treasure hunt.
“To think you can put your hand into the dirt and pull out generational wealth, that’s what brought me in,” he said.
Neither foresaw the gruelling nature of heir quest, though.
Along with Indigenous explorer Taylor Starr — a distant relative of Slumach — and her father, Don Froese, Williams and Palmer embarked on a physical journey through dense rainforest, up slippery creek beds and over jagged boulder fields looking for clues that might lead them to the treasure while unravelling its mysteries.
More importantly, said Williams, their quest gave them an insight into the lives and challenges of British Columbia’s earliest residents.
“When you’re out here with a sacred Elder walking his land, it changed my entire viewpoint of the history of the First Nations,” he said.
Palmer said the series takes viewers along as they peel away layers of the lost treasure’s secrets and even leads them down some unexpected paths, not all of them necessarily fruitful to their search.
“It’s a lot of information and disinformation and we have to sort through that to get to the heart of the legend,” he said.
And unlike reconstructing history through artifacts, documents, clippings and maps preserved in libraries and archives, Palmer and Williams’ quest came with life-threatening dangers like torrential rainstorms that lasted for days on end, fragile snow bridges and fast-moving rivers. Not to mention encounters with bears and mountain lions as well as a series of eerie ancient pictographs etched into the rocks above Pitt Lake.
“You don’t know what it’s like in the bush until you do it yourself,” Williams said.
How to watch 'Deadman's Curse'
Season two of Deadman’s Curse airs on the History channel at 10 p.m. Thursdays beginning Sept. 12. It will also stream on STACKTV.
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