
Four murders and a lost gold mine! Dead Man’s Valley still holds the secret of the murders. The gold mine has been found. Late in 1933 word flashed that the missing mine had been found. Only a few months remained of the year. But the secret was out. By December 31 the Canadian government had registered approximately 100 claims.
The tributaries of the South Nahanni River in the Northwest territories, near the boundary of British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, are alive with prospectors who have answered the call of another placer gold field not so many hundred miles from where the great Yukon gold rush took place.
In February, 1909. word came to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, then the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, that two prospectors had been missing since the Summer of 1906. Relatives had hunted for them, had found their dead bodies, but had failed to find papers and gold which they were known to be carrying. The circumstances looked liked murder.
Will and Frank McLeod, born at Ford Liard in Northern British Columbia, had started out in 1905 to look for placer gold in the mountains north of their home, in what is still a remote part of Canada. They crossed through a wild country, unknown, unmapped, probably never before traveled by white man. They struck fast-flowing rivers with canyon walls. They traveled in waters where 15 miles a day was considered fast going by those who came after them. They made portages over mountains.
They pitched camp here and there and hunted with prospectors’ ax and spade. They went on till one day they found something. They built sluice boxes and hauled their gold pans out of their pack sacks. They built a shelter and worked day after day. They stored up nuggets, dust and gold flakes. Their treasure chest became bulkier and bulkier. Then, before the first snows were on them, they hid their find, hid their tools and started for home.

They kept a secret. Yes, they had picked up a little bit here and there, but nothing much inquiring friends were told. But next Spring Will and Frank McLeod started out, taking with them this time, a Scotch engineer named Weir.
In 1908 Charles McLeod, a brother of the two prospectors, found their bodies, wrapped up in blankets. No gold, maps, nothing was found near them, except a watch which hung on a tree. Charley burled his two brothers, and marked their grave. The Mounties started on the trail the following Spring. Corporal A. H. L. Mellor left Smith’s Landing on the Slave River, and set out across a region he had never traveled before to Fort Liard.
He had a hard trip, through swift rivers, white foaming mountain streams, but he made the South Nahanni River, and headed for the spot where the McLeod brothers had been reported buried. There on the opposite bank of the river he found a couple of prospectors, the vanguard of many to come in the following years. They were waiting for the river to go down a bit. It was July and the melting snows made travel on the river impossible. They knew nothing about the McLeod’s, except the grave which they had seen.
They found tools, sluice boxes and gold pans. But the spot was 75 miles distant from where the bodies of the brothers had been found. J. J. Byrne, mining man of Northern Ontario. Interested in mines in the Great Bear Lake area, became claim holder of the long lost mine. But many men were to hunt for that lost mine before Mr. Byrne’s men located it. And two more were to die in that remote country.
Mr. Byrne is an authority for the facts about these two additional deaths. He has delved deep into the secrets of Dead Man’s Valley. In an Interview in the Northern Miner, leading Canadian mining paper, he tells that some years after the McLeod’s disappeared, and after other prospectors had unsuccessfully looked for the mine, an old Klondike gold miner named Jorgenson crossed the mountains which divide the Yukon Territory from the Northwest Territories and prospected along the Nahanni River.
