A fragile story

An article in the Sunday Province 20 March 1932, tells about the unsuccessful three-week search in November 1931 for the missing prospector “Volcanic” Brown. Then Game Warden George Stevenson and Guide LeRoy McMartin made the search in the winter’s worse weather and found no trace of Volcanic Brown.

A dozen years later Stevenson told Cecil Clark (Vancouver Sun 31 December 1954) that on that search they had discovered Volcanic Brown’s collapsed pup tent and that, among his few personal possessions, they found “… a screw-top glass jar full of coarse gold." Why would Stevenson and McMartin not have mentioned in 1932 at least the finding of Volcanic’s camp?

Stevenson in 1954 time was the only witness to that alleged find—McMartin had died—and he (and Cecil Clark) may have had some fun telling this story. Cecil Clark mentioned the finding of the pup tent—but not the gold—briefly in his article trying to debunk the Slumach saga, “Over the Rainbow...to Slumach’s Lost Mine.” It was written in 1968, just after the passing of Stevenson.

The article in 1932 quotes Stevenson as follows: “It was slow going—three or four miles a day. Our 12 by 48 shoes would sink to one’s knees, even without our packs. I’ve never seen it snow so thick and fast anywhere; we couldn’t see a yard sometimes." And yet, they found a collapsed tent and other artifacts, including that glass jar with coarse gold??

One wonders why an experienced prospector would have taken a glass jar with him into the mountains and why Volcanic Brown would have chosen such a fragile container to store his treasures. It seems a signal from Stevenson and Clark to take this story with a grain of salt.