The legend of the True North's "Lost Lemon Mine"

There is a catch, though.

Those seeking its fortune will encounter a great deal of bad luck or even death.

The Legend of the Lost Lemon Mine is one of the great mysteries of the Canadian Rockies. Its tale has many variations, and the details always seem to change.

To keep things consistent and less complicated, we’ll relate the most common version of the tale, with some other variations mixed in.

Frank Lemon and Blackjack

It all began in the autumn of 1870, although some sources say 1879, with a white prospector named Frank Lemon and his Indigenous friend, Blackjack.

The two men had been searching for gold in the Rocky Mountains when they found a gold deposit between the Crowsnest Pass and the Highwood River in southwestern Alberta.

Allegedly, the duo found the gold mine and got into an argument over whether to camp and start mining immediately or take some gold nuggets with them and find someone to pay for an operation and return in the spring.

They went to bed without a resolution.

Lemon was still upset, and in the middle of the night, he crawled out of his blankets, picked up an axe, and killed his friend with a single blow to the head.

He built a large fire to burn the body, picked up a gun, and left the area.

Soon, he began to lose his mind, convinced the ghost of Blackjack was pursuing him as he fled the mountains.

Unknown to him, two Blackfoot men had been watching from the trees. They had seen the pair strike gold and have the argument that resulted in the Blackjack’s murder.

The witnesses told their chief what had happened. He swore them to secrecy and made them promise to never tell a soul about the gold.

The Indigenous people did not see gold the way Europeans did. To them, it was something that could be turned into a trinket.

But once the Europeans arrived, Indigenous communities observed how they valued gold — and what they would do for it. From the Fraser River Gold Rush to the Klondike, gold meant uprooting Indigenous communities, followed by violence and death.

Per local legend, the chief who was informed of the gold put a curse on the land around the mine.

Lemon returned to town filled with guilt and confessed to a priest about his crime. The priest promised to keep his secret.

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Other contenders

The priest who talked to Lemon asked a local trapper named John McDougall to go to the mine area, find Blackjack’s body, and give it a proper burial. But just in case there was actual gold there, McDougall decided to take a group of miners with him.

On their way, the group stopped at Fort Kipp, a whisky fort near present-day Lethbridge.

McDougall drank so much that he died. The miners returned home and Blackjack was never buried.

Two years later, the same Indigenous men who witnessed Lemon slaughtering Blackjack saw another man heading towards the mine. He is not identified in the stories, but they found his body the following year outside the mine.

Over the years, other hopeful miners asked Lemon to take them to the mine, but every time he approached the area, he was overcome with anxiety and fear and refused to journey any further.

For the rest of his life, his mental and physical health declined, and by all accounts, Lemon was never the same again.

However, aside from Lemon and Blackjack, another critical character appears in the tale — Lafayette French, who funded the duo’s initial expedition for gold.

French went on a 30-year quest to find the mine and the riches within.

According to one account of the legend, he managed to find it. Overcome with excitement, he wrote a letter from a cabin he was staying in close to the mine and detailed his success.

But remember that part about bad luck? Yeah, it struck again.

That night, the cabin burned down and the letter was destroyed. French escaped but contracted pneumonia from exposure that night. By the time he found help, he was close to death.

French sent for his long-time friend, Dan Riley, telling him that he had found the Lost Lemon Mine. Riley told him to rest and that they would speak in the morning.

But by the time the sun rose, French was dead.

Riley later became a Canadian senator and launched his own searches for the mine but was unsuccessful.

His son, George Riley, took up the cause but never found it.

There was yet another man who knew the location of the mine — the priest Lemon had confessed to.

Based on Lemon’s information, the unnamed priest organized an expedition to find the mine in 1883.

Before he could venture out, a forest fire destroyed any trace of the route or markers that could have guided him on his way to the mine.

Some story versions note that a rock slide fell over the area, burying the strike forever.

Where is the gold mine?

The legend of the Lemon Mine was kept alive well into the 20^th century.

In the autumn of 1948, two Yellowknife prospectors named Albert Peterson and J. Hunt went in search of the mine.

They believed they had the location because they had a sample of gold ore they’d found in the Rockies west of High River in 1934.

The sample was found along the headwaters of the Highwood River, which is near where the Lost Lemon Mine is reported to have been located.

They didn’t find the mine and faded into history.

But then, in September 1949, it was reported that construction workers had come upon the mine while building a highway through the foothills of the Rockies between Morley and Coleman.

Morley is a small community on the Stoney Nakoda Reserve, about 30 minutes east of Banff on the Trans-Canada Highway. Coleman is 160 kilometres to the south, in the Crowsnest Pass near Frank, Alberta.

This report was untrue, and the Lemon Mine continued to be out of reach, existing only in tales.

One common theme in these stories is that they all claim to have found the Lost Lemon Mine, only for it to be a false alarm.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t look like people looking for endless riches will stop looking.

A century and thirty years later, we’re still talking about the fabled mine and storied lives of Lemon and Blackjack.