The Legend of the Lost Bullets Gold Mine

“Gold! Gold! Gold!”

All these years later, I can see and hear him now. The late Jack Fleetwood, the man with the photographic memory, the man fellow local historians regarded as the Oracle of the Cowichan Valley, was addressing a small gathering of the Shawnigan Lake Historical Society.

An audience so small that it could fit in a lakeside boat house, the SLHS having just been founded by the late Brownie Gibson and several fellow history buffs.

Resting on his good hip, hand on the other, Jack began slowly, pausing between each exclamation for dramatic effect. His subject, gold mining on the Island, held his audience spellbound for there’s nothing more guaranteed to catch a listener’s ear.

Particularly when it’s a tale of gold being lost and found in years gone by...

Gold, to varying degrees, is in virtually every stream on Vancouver Island and many are the tales of its having been found in quantity then ‘lost’ again through the discoverer’s death or by some other misadventure.

A century and three-quarters ago, the first whites to settle in the Cowichan Valley were, for the most part, settlers, here to farm. Sam Harris came to found a township at Cowichan Bay. But he wasn’t all business.

Not when he heard the stories of gold nuggets from a cave near the head of Cowichan Lake, nuggets moulded by the local Natives for use as bullets! Off he went in search, but he didn’t find the cave nor, so far as is known, did others who tried.

But the legend of Cowichan Lake country’s Lost Bullets Mine lives on, as we’ll see in next week’s Chronicle.

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