Granite Creek’s ‘White Gold’ Still Draws Treasure Hunters

Little did the miners realize that Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ was platinum!

Noted the Victoria Colonist noted in November 1885, “…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 thoroughly 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 examination at the Colonial and Canadian Exposition to be held next year….”

The miners thought the ‘white gold’ was almost worthless and a nuisance

According to Frank Bailey, “…In the early days the placer mines were greatly hampered with what they called ‘white gold’ in their sluice boxes, which was then worth practically nothing; many hundreds of pounds of valuable platinum were dumped out and covered up by their tailing [piles], and Messrs. Cook, Blair & Rabbit bought a lot of it for 50 cents per pound, while today it is worth over $45.00 per ounce.

“When it became a little more valuable many sacks of platinum were shipped to the California markets, New York and Hatton Garden, London….”

But all of that was long ago

Today, little remains of Granite City, the British Columbia mining boomtown which, ever so briefly, rivalled Victoria and Vancouver in size and stature.

But its story of Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ has reached almost legendary proportions.

For 10 breathtaking years, the junction of Granite Creek and the Tulameen River, 13 miles west of Princeton, was the site of a brawling, thriving mining town. But, during the decade of its reign, Granite City’s prospectors had paid a price for the fact that the gold they so eagerly sought was within comparatively easy reach. (This certainly was not the case in many other camps where miners had to dig their way down to bedrock through ground that was often frozen solid).

To their frustration, whenever they recovered gold from Granite Creek, they found that their pans and sluice boxes were littered with a shiny, silvery substance which, because of its weight, refused to separate easily from the gold.

This meant extra work for the miner and many a curse was uttered. Because, initially, Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ had no appreciable value, it was simply discarded.

Only one man thought he knew better

It was a Scandinavian named Johanssen, so far as is known, who was the first to think Granite Creek’s white gold worth saving.

According to legend he amassed 25 pounds of platinum while working his claim. But when it became apparent that Granite Creek’s gold producing days were drawing to a close, he, like so many others, moved on to fresh diggings. Rather than throw away the pretty but ‘worthless’ white gold, he is said to have buried it in a large bucket near his cabin.

Then Johanssen, too, followed the will-o-wisp of fortune to new diggings and never returned.

In April 1907 a fire consumed many of the old town’s remaining structures, among them Johanssen’s cabin. Since then, vandals have contributed to the destruction of more of the town’s historic buildings.

And there, so far as is known, the story ends. Chinese miners worked the abandoned claims in later years and modern-day prospectors have successfully recovered much of the discarded platinum. But Johanssen’s rich hoard of Granite Creek’s white gold is thought to remain where he buried it.

The missing platinum has made Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ legendary

The story of Granite Creek’s ‘white gold’ has, in fact, become known as the ‘Lost Platinum Cache.’

According to government sources, an estimated seven and one-half tons of platinum had been recovered from the gravels of Granite Creek and the neighbouring Tulameen. By the early 1970s, the total value of the gold mined over the same period was placed at $1 million.

Originally used almost exclusively in expensive jewelry, platinum became ‘irreplaceable’ to the automotive industry in the 1980s for use in catalytic converters. Most of it is produced as a by-product of mining nickel and copper; as of this writing it is priced at just over $991 U.S. per ounce.

The world’s two leading producers of platinum are Russia and South Africa.

–See Also: More Tales of Lost Treasure

—From Treasure lost & Found in British Columbia; Firgrove Publishing, 2018