There's White Gold in them there hills! Traditional Cache
There's White Gold in them there hills!
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A quick 1.5 km drive up a "Paved FSR" road, you can draw up a very private campsite here - not sure on the summer traffic but it's an amazing location & view.
Now we've shared with you the history of Coal & Gold - what about the other metals?
White Gold
Although little remains of Granite City, treasure hunters continue to come; not in search of gold, but of platinum. Those in the "know" are after a missing cache of the precious white gold which today, with its yellow cousin has soared to an all-time high value.
During the first months of its reign, the more successful of Granite Creek's prospectors had paid a price for the gold they recovered. The gold was within easy reach, but time and again, they found that their pans and sluice boxes were littered with a tiny, silvery-white substance which, but for its colour resembled gold, and, because of its weight refused to separate easily. This meant they had to extract the substance by hand. Yellow was the colour of the day, white was generally thrown away.
Late in November 1885 the colonists mentioned this phenomenon:"...There is associated with the gold on Granite Creek a very hard, heavy and whitish metal, which is probably platinum or iridium, perhaps a mixture of both. There are no means of testing it here, but Dr. G.M. Dawson, assistant director of the Geological Survey of Canada, has kindly offered to take it to Ottawa for examination in the laboratory there, after which it will be forwarded to London for exhibition at the Colonial and Indian Exposition to be held next year...."
Although most prospectors discarded the metal (one contemporary source states that "many hundreds of pounds...were dumped out and covered up by...tailings..") Three business men gambled the laboratory tests by the dominion government. They bought many pounds at $0.50 a pound, that would confirm that it was indeed platinum.
As far as is known a Scandinavian prospector named Johanseen was the first to treat the white mineral with respect: legend inicates that he amassed 25 pounds of platinum while working his claim. However for reason unknown, he is said to have buried the intriguing but worthless ore in a bucket near his cabin. Then he followed his fortune to new diggings, never to return. During the fire of 1907 Johanssen's cabin was among those consumed.
The platinum's identity and value, of course, did become known to the miners of Granite City and in following years sacks of the mineral were shipped to the jewelry markets of California, New York, and London.
Platinum was also known as white iron, and had been found in various quantities in the Similkameen and Tulameen rivers. Between 1887 and 1892 Canada's total production of platinum came from streambeds of the Similkameen and was valued at a third of one million dollars. According to the Geological Survey of Canada, "the platiniferous region of the upper Similkameen and Tulameen is the most important as yet discovered in North America."
The valley of the Tulameen River, from which both this mountain and the nearby town take their name, is one of only two places in the world where gold and platinum occur together in placer deposits; the other is on the Amur River in the Russian Far East.
At the time of the Tulameen gold rush c.1901-2, the boomtown Granite City, about 3km from Coalmont, was (like so many places in BC) touted to be the next big city "north of San Francisco and west of Chicago etc" but it folded very quickly, and there are no remains there at all today; the one set of log foundations evident on the site, now a grassy meadow, date from a later period.
Legends of lost fortunes abound in the hills around Tulameen and Coalmont, including the one very tempting tale of a "Dutchman" (Chinook Jargon for a German or other northern European of any stock) who went from camp to camp around the Tulameen goldfields, collecting then-worthless platinum nuggets from other miners. Story has it he buried them somewhere in the hills in a bunch of coffee cans which (supposedly) have never been found to this day, though many have looked for them since.
So as a true hunter of treasure will you be struck with the fever?
Info taken from: http://www.princetonbc.info/history/ghostown/granite.htm
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
ghpxrq haqre jung n qbt qbrf