The Mine

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Speaker 23 Hi, Park Enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra.
And the story I'm going to tell you about in today's episode has developed a reputation as being a legend or some kind of lure.

Speaker 23 But I assure you, the facts of this case are not fiction. They're very, very real.

Speaker 23 It's the story of three prospectors who set their sights on mining gold in Canada's far north back in the early 1900s, who one day just disappeared.

Speaker 23 The truth of what happened to at least two of them remains one of the most puzzling mysteries in Parks Canada history.

Speaker 23 The first thing you need to know is that this case starts way back in 1904, so a while ago.

Speaker 23 Press coverage was limited 119 years ago, as you can imagine, but what little reporting there was hasn't totally been lost to time.

Speaker 23 Most of the original source material from Canadian newspapers has been preserved in archives.

Speaker 23 The second thing that's important to understand about this story is that it takes place in the remote Northwest Territories of Canada at a time when that landscape was mostly unadulterated wilderness.

Speaker 23 In the 1970s, the specific area I'm going to be talking about was officially designated and established as Nahani National Park Reserve, but back in the early 1900s, it wasn't known by that name.

Speaker 23 Conditions in the Northwest Territories are known to be extremely brutal in the winter, and much of the terrain is difficult to traverse.

Speaker 23 According to the website for Parks Canada, the Nahani River and its tributaries are incredibly dangerous, especially if you don't have experience with some of the roughest whitewater in North America.

Speaker 23 At least five people have died while trying to navigate the Nahani waterways, and some people's bodies have never been found.

Speaker 23 Back in the early 1900s, the large stretches of alpine and boreal forest in this region were extremely difficult to venture across.

Speaker 23 There were very few roads or designated trails, and if you were in the mining business, exploring this region was mercilessly unforgiving.

Speaker 23 According to Parks Canada, Dene people originally settled in this part of the country, and many residents today have indigenous heritage with these regions, which are governed by Daicho First Nations.

Speaker 23 In fact, Parks Canada and Decho First Nations jointly manage the Nahani National Park Reserve.

Speaker 23 This was done to make sure the natural ecosystems and history of the land are not destroyed by continued mining and natural resource extraction.

Speaker 23 There is so much beauty and richness to this region, but there's also a dark history too.

Speaker 23 Early European settlers' insatiable appetite for gold and minerals had a huge impact on this part of Canada.

Speaker 23 And to this day, visitors to the national park still stumble across archaeological discoveries that prove violence and adventuring went hand in hand at the dawn of the 20th century.

Speaker 23 This is Park Predators.

Speaker 23 In the late summer, early fall of 1908, a young man in his 20s named Charles MacLeod trudged through the woods along the southern southern stretch of the Nahani River in the far north region of Canada.

Speaker 23 With him were five men who worked in the mining industry, and it was Charles' job to guide the group through the wild landscape, which in those days was a good distance away from home.

Speaker 23 The closest towns were Fort Simpson, which was east, and Fort Liard, which was south.

Speaker 23 A few months earlier, in May 1908, though some source material says it was 1907, Charles and his group had set out on a months-long journey from Edmonton, Alberta to search for gold mines in the Nahani region.

Speaker 23 But Charles had a different interest in going on this particular expedition. He was looking for his missing brothers, Frank and William Willie McLeod.

Speaker 23 According to the Edmonton Journal, four years earlier in the spring of 1904, Frank and Willie and Charles, who was 18 at the time, had learned from some local indigenous citizens that a lucrative gold mine existed somewhere off a remote tributary of the Nahani River.

Speaker 23 Together, the brothers traveled via dog sled team in the snow and ice in March of 1904 to meet with the tribe's chief who was going to show them the best route to the mine.

Speaker 23 The McLeods chose to take a rough and untraversed route coming from the Yukon region, which was further west, so other miners wouldn't follow them.

Speaker 23 When they linked up with the local tribal leader and eventually arrived at the mine several weeks later, they found it was extremely valuable and yielded a lot of gold.

Speaker 23 So the brothers agreed they needed to establish a more permanent camp there.

Speaker 23 But in order to do that and have all the stuff they needed, they were going to have to leave and come back with more supplies.

Speaker 23 So at the start of the summer of 1904, Frank and Willie parted ways with Charles and headed to an outpost in Fort Simpson, and Charles traveled south to collect supplies and Fort Liard.

Speaker 23 Sometime going into fall, Frank and Willie had learned that a group of rival prospectors from the Yukon had heard about the jackpot mine too and were headed to the spot.

Speaker 23 So eager not to get beaten, Frank and Willie had decided to travel back to the mine with an engineering friend of theirs from Scotland named Robert Weir.

Speaker 23 There was no time for them to notify their brother Charles, who was hundreds of miles away, so they set out on a month-long trip back to the remote mine without him.

Speaker 23 After that, a year passed, and then two.

Speaker 23 and Frank and Willie and Robert never resurfaced.

Speaker 23 No one in Fort Simpson had reported seeing them come back, and no record of them traveling south to Fort Liard existed either, which was the first place Charles expected his brothers and their friend to end up, since Frank and Willie had both been stationed at Fort Liard for several years prior to their expedition.

Speaker 23 According to the Morning Alberton, the McLeod sons and their father, Murdoch, had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company and spent their entire lives exploring remote routes of travel through the Northwest Territories as part of the business's main line of work, fur trading.

Speaker 23 Hudson's Bay Company had an office in Fort Liard.

Speaker 23 Initially, Charles didn't worry too much about the missing men because it was understood that prospecting expeditions like the one they'd set out on could take a year or more to complete.

Speaker 23 But when 1905 turned into 1906 and then 1907, and still no sign of Frank Willie and Robert had turned up, Charles grew more concerned and people in Northern Outposts began to circulate wild theories about what happened to the missing group.

Speaker 23 Most people thought the three men had just decided to travel further north into Canada's Yukon region in search of more gold mines.

Speaker 23 The assumption was that they likely met local Indigenous residents and established a form of camaraderie which kept them content while they continued to prospect.

Speaker 23 The source material doesn't go into a lot of detail about what Robert Weir's relatives were thinking during that time, but the Calgary Alberton and Evening Post reported that that prior to joining the MacLeod brothers in 1904, Robert had been living on his own in Canada for a few months, and he had some family members in Edmonton.

Speaker 23 So I imagine those family members were probably equally concerned about his well-being.

Speaker 23 But like everyone else, they understood the nature of the epic expedition he'd undertaken and just accepted the fact that they wouldn't hear from him for a while.

Speaker 23 But Charles MacLeod knew better.

Speaker 23 He felt confident his brothers had met a dark fate in the wilderness, and it likely had something to do with the gold mine they'd found and then had to abandon in the spring of 1904.

Speaker 23 The Evening Post reported that while on his trip in 1908 along the Nahani River, Charles and his group found a message carved into a pine tree that indicated someone had set up a camp there.

Speaker 23 The partial note said, quote, Left this camp, NOV, end quote. The NOV likely representing November, but just being NOV.

Speaker 23 The Western Star reported a few hundred miles further south from that location, Charles and his men ran across remnants of another camp he believed had belonged to the same prior explorers who'd left the mark in the pine tree.

Speaker 23 According to the Evening Post version, Charles and his friends discovered evidence at the second campsite that someone had cut down trees and fashioned a type of fire pit.

Speaker 23 Curious to find more proof of human activity, Charles dug into the ashes buried in the ground and found a log that had the date May 05 carved into the bark.

Speaker 23 Next to the date were the initials FM and WM,

Speaker 23 which Charles immediately suspected belonged to his missing brothers, Frank and Willie.

Speaker 23 Based on all the evidence he'd found at the two camps, Charles considered it was possible his brothers had attempted to return to the remote gold mine in the late summer of 1904, but had been stopped short due to harsh weather in November of 1904.

Speaker 23 Then they decided to travel a few hundred more miles south towards Fort Liard to wait it out. They'd made a camp there, roughly 90 to 100 miles short of the fort, and remained there until May of 1905.

Speaker 23 But what happened to them after that was a mystery.

Speaker 23 The Evening Post reported that among the clues Charles found at the second campsite was a watch and a ring that he recognized as Frank's because the watch had Frank's name engraved on it.

Speaker 23 There was also a a knife found nearby that was an item he identified as having belonged to one of his brothers.

Speaker 23 The article says that the remnants of the camp didn't appear to have been tossed around or indicative that a struggle or looting had taken place.

Speaker 23 But to say Charles was feeling confident he was hot on his brother's trail is an understatement.

Speaker 23 The Western Star article I mentioned earlier explains that when Charles and his group found the second camp, that location was several miles from where they were intending to set up their own camp, which meant they had to hike a good distance before they themselves could settle in.

Speaker 23 And at some point, before heading out to leave, a member of the group cut his foot pretty badly.

Speaker 23 Charles and some of the other men hiked ahead of their injured friend and set up camp while the injured guy stayed behind to care for his wound.

Speaker 23 Once the hurt guy got patched up and hiked to rejoin Charles and the rest of the group, he told them that on the way, not far from the remnants of the second camp, he'd seen two skeletons in some brush by a tree.

Speaker 23 Now, Charles, who was already super sure that he might be hiking the very ground his brothers Frank and Willie had, was obviously interested in this guy's claim about two skeletons.

Speaker 23 So he hiked back in the direction of the second camp to check the human remains out for himself.

Speaker 23 And sure enough, when he got to the area where his injured friend told him to go, he found two nearly fully intact skeletons tucked into some vegetation beneath a large tree.

Speaker 23 The bones appeared to be sitting on or wrapped in what was left of some blankets, though several sources say not much of the blanket fabric remained.

Speaker 23 Charles pulled the tangle of vegetation away to get a better look at the bones and immediately noticed that neither skeleton had a skull.

Speaker 23 So whoever these people were, most of their bleached bones had stayed piled beneath the tree, but their heads were nowhere to be found.

Speaker 23 Very little of their clothing was left, and Charles noticed that one of the skeletons had an unusual shattering pattern in the breastbone that he suspected might have been caused by a rifle shot.

Speaker 23 Near the base of the tree, Charles also found a carving that he thought looked like coordinates or instructions to a nearby gold mine.

Speaker 23 The Western Star reported that the etching appeared to have been marred, almost like someone had cut into it to prevent it from being legible.

Speaker 23 At this point, Charles was convinced the bones belonged to his brothers Frank and Willie. So he buried the remains nearby and erected crosses to memorialize the spot.

Speaker 23 News that Charles and his friends had found the skeletons and that there had been a cryptic gold mine message next to them didn't reach the public though until January of 1909.

Speaker 23 You see, it took several months for Charles' group to endure a harsh winter, travel out of the wilderness, hook up with a dog sledding team, and then finally get to a fort in Telegraph Creek, British Columbia.

Speaker 23 This fort had the capability of sending word out that Frank and Willie were found dead and left headless.

Speaker 23 Once news of the grisly find was publicized, everyone in Canada's provinces became fixated on the story.

Speaker 23 Despite no medical doctor ever confirming the bones belonged to Frank and Willie or doing any sort of autopsy, the widely accepted fact, based off of Charles's information and the men who'd been with him in his group, was that the skeletons belonged to Frank and Willie McLeod.

Speaker 23 According to the Evening Post, in the spring of 1909, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched launched an investigation into the men's deaths, and they sent a group of officers to hike up and assess the scene.

Speaker 23 But as you can imagine, not much was left for them to investigate. I mean, years had passed at this point, and Charles had buried his brother's remains.

Speaker 23 So, the RCMP's job of trying to determine if foul play had been involved was next to impossible.

Speaker 23 And just to be clear, no source material I read from 1909 says the police set out with a murder theory in mind. They just wanted to get up to the the spot and check things out for themselves.

Speaker 23 However, Charles felt like his brothers had definitely been murdered.

Speaker 23 He told the press the fact that Frank and Willie's remains were located less than 100 miles away from Fort Liard, just a few days' journey, was extremely odd.

Speaker 23 The Morning Alberton reported that both Frank and Willie were super familiar with the area their skeletons were found in.

Speaker 23 So, the fact that they died so close to a fort they should have easily been able to get back to seemed highly suspicious to Charles.

Speaker 23 Even the other miners who'd been with him told newspapers that they felt like Frank and Willie had been murdered by someone, likely over the location of the lucrative gold mine they'd discovered in the spring of 1904.

Speaker 23 The obvious question in everyone's mind was, where was Frank and Willie's third companion, Robert Weir?

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Speaker 23 According to multiple news reports, none of Robert's belongings were found at either campsite Charles and his group had stumbled across.

Speaker 23 And no sign of any additional bones turned up in the woods near Frank and Willie's skeletal remains.

Speaker 23 The Evening Post and the White Horse Daily Star, formerly the Weekly Star, reported that when mounted police units had conducted their search of the area, they'd been accompanied by Charles, but nothing proving Robert had perished turned up.

Speaker 23 The absence of another set of human remains near where Frank and Willie had died felt off to everyone who'd been in Charles' group in 1908 and the search party a year later.

Speaker 23 Charles's friends told the press that Robert wasn't very experienced when it came to traveling in the rugged Canadian woods.

Speaker 23 He didn't have nearly as much experience as Frank and Willie because he'd only been living in northern Canada for a few months before he set out with the McLeod brothers.

Speaker 23 But even if, in a hypothetical scenario, Robert had killed the brothers in a dispute over gold, the prospectors who found Frank and Willie's remains said it would have been impossible for Robert to survive on his own.

Speaker 23 They told the newspapers there was no doubt he was dead, and his remains were somewhere in the woods along along the Nahani River. It was just going to be a matter of time before his bones turned up.

Speaker 23 One theory other than murder that took root in many people's minds though, especially investigators with the RCMP, was the notion that maybe Frank and Willie, and probably Robert too, had all died of starvation and hypothermia.

Speaker 23 The Evening Post reported that it was possible the men had run out of food and supplies while trying to return to Fort Liard, and as a result, slowly died during the harsh winter of 1904.

Speaker 23 Similarly, the notion that they could have all become injured or incapacitated and frozen to death was also a theory people considered.

Speaker 23 And I think there's some credence to this line of thinking, because if you remember, one of the men who'd been in Charles' group in 1908 did cut and injure his foot pretty badly while hiking through the same area that the McLeod brothers and Robert had been in.

Speaker 23 So it's possible the same kind of peril could have befallen them.

Speaker 23 Still, what I can't stop spiraling on is the fact that Frank and Willie's bodies were both located close together near the same tree.

Speaker 23 My burning question is, did they just give up and die propped against this tree? Did they not attempt to signal for help in any way?

Speaker 23 Why didn't they leave more clues behind indicating that was what happened? And where the heck was Robert?

Speaker 23 The fact that Willie and Frank's remains were found together could indicate they simply just died in those positions side by side.

Speaker 23 Or it could mean someone else propped them together after murdering them.

Speaker 23 A detail that supports a murder theory is Charles's testimony that one of the skeletons had what appeared to be a rifle shot through the chest bone.

Speaker 23 Clearly, that screams murder, but again, that was just Charles' word for it.

Speaker 23 Something else strange was that, according to the Western Star article I previously referenced, Charles spoke the native language of indigenous people living along the Nahani River, where he believed his brothers had been traveling.

Speaker 23 traveling.

Speaker 23 He'd hoped these folks would know more about what happened to Frank and Willie, but when he spoke with them, he said they gave contradictory stories about where Frank, Willie, and Robert had been mining.

Speaker 23 And he also couldn't get a straight answer from them as to when anyone had last reported seeing the men alive.

Speaker 23 For example, Charles told the newspaper that after discovering his brother's skeletons, he found a mining shaft not far away from their remains.

Speaker 23 And when he asked the locals what that was all about, they said the mine was one they'd constructed themselves. But Charles had his doubts about that story.

Speaker 23 The idea that Willie, Frank, and Robert could have been killed over that mine, or perhaps the other more remote mine they'd found in the spring of 1904 was a recipe for murder that no one could deny, especially Charles.

Speaker 23 And it was definitely a theory that he just couldn't let go of.

Speaker 23 In 1904 and 1905, other explorers and indigenous people searching for gold could have bumped into Frank and Willie while they were traveling and been jealous of what the brothers had found.

Speaker 23 According to the Evening Post, one of the men who'd been in Charles' group in 1908 said that in the years Frank, Willie, and Robert had been missing, hunting and fur trading was booming in that part of Canada.

Speaker 23 This meant there were likely a lot of other people, mostly men, traversing the same routes Frank and Willie would have been using.

Speaker 23 The resounding question that lingered for everyone was, did the McLeod brothers and Robert come across the wrong person and die because of a turf dispute?

Speaker 23 The answer, if you were a white European settler, was yes.

Speaker 23 You see, according to an article by the Star Phoenix, suspicions had grown in white communities that Native people were to blame for killing prospectors in the early 1900s.

Speaker 23 The article explains that from roughly 1905 to 1910, a handful of miners and expeditioners had disappeared or been killed along British Columbia's coast and in remote regions in the far far north.

Speaker 23 The group of men suspected to be behind these incidents was led by a man named Johnny Gunn, a notorious outlaw.

Speaker 23 Johnny had reportedly had numerous hostile encounters with several European explorers and prospectors along tributaries surrounding the Nahani River.

Speaker 23 The issue had apparently gotten so bad that officials in British Columbia issued a $200 bounty for Johnny.

Speaker 23 The Star Phoenix reported that by 1910, he was the prime suspect in the McLeod brothers' murders.

Speaker 23 But any further reporting on him seems to stop after 1910. I couldn't find any articles that reported whether Johnny was questioned about the McLeod case.

Speaker 23 The next time the brothers' deaths are mentioned in the press is six years later, in 1916.

Speaker 23 According to reporting by the White Horse Daily Star, outdoorsmen exploring the region the year prior in 1915 had stumbled across the skeletal remains of a man.

Speaker 23 The article mentions that initially these folks who'd found the bones thought it was a prospector whose last name was Jorgensen, first name either Peter or Martin.

Speaker 23 And this guy had been mining along the Nahani River and gone missing in 1912.

Speaker 23 But authorities confirmed the remains were not Jorgensen, but instead belonged to Robert Weir, the McLeod brothers' long-lost travel companion.

Speaker 23 The White Horse Daily Star article specifically says officials with the RCMP believed Robert had died from exposure, and murder was not an avenue of investigation they were pursuing in relation to his death or the deaths of Frank and Willie.

Speaker 23 However, there's some back and forth on this in the source material, and I think I know why.

Speaker 23 We're talking about an era where there was no DNA testing to know for sure if a set of bones belonged to a certain person.

Speaker 23 Coverage by the White Horse Daily Star says the bones found in 1915 were determined to be Robert, but a piece from the Vancouver Sun published years later says Robert's remains were actually found in 1909.

Speaker 23 But yet another article published by the Edmonton Journal says the bones from 1915 were the missing minor Jorgensen all along.

Speaker 23 So I'm not sure what account is totally accurate, but the consensus I gathered from reading all of the source material is that Robert's remains were never found.

Speaker 23 despite what the RCMP officially concluded.

Speaker 23 But whether any bones were Roberts or not didn't really make a big difference because things went quiet with the case for more than a decade after that.

Speaker 23 It wasn't until 1928 when Charles set out on another prospecting expedition along the Nahani River that the public took interest in Frank and Willie's story again.

Speaker 23 At that point, it had been 24 years since Willie, Frank, and Robert left to find gold and 20 years since the first two sets of skeletal remains had been found.

Speaker 23 And during all that time, Charles had had never been able to accept that his brothers had died in an accident or from some weather event.

Speaker 23 He firmly believed they'd been targeted because they'd found a trove of gold and someone else wanted it or took it from them.

Speaker 23 And there were discoveries that supported this being the case.

Speaker 23 According to the Edmonton Journal, several years after the McLeod brothers died, a prospector venturing through the region where their bones had been discovered found a rested 4440 carbine long gun in a riverbed.

Speaker 23 The gun reportedly had a bent barrel and was out of ammunition.

Speaker 23 Everyone who heard about this gun believed its deformity came as a result of it being used as a club when whoever owned it had run out of bullets and gunpowder.

Speaker 23 To Charles, the gun was interesting because its make and model were just like the one Frank and Willie would have carried with them.

Speaker 23 The newspaper reported that by the time the 1920s rolled around, the gun's serial number was sent off to Winchester Firearms Company, and staff there was asked to track down who it had belonged to.

Speaker 23 But I couldn't find any source material that confirmed if an owner was ever found.

Speaker 23 But Charles, ever determined to prove his brothers had been killed for gold, forged on in pursuit of the truth about what or who killed them.

Speaker 23 And in the summer of 1928, he along with seven other prospectors boarded a seaplane at Fort McMurray in northeast Alberta.

Speaker 23 and they set out on a mission to find the gold mine he believed his brothers had discovered, but never lived to reap the benefits from.

Speaker 23 The Edmonton Journal reported that the plane the men boarded was owned by the Northern Aerial Mineral Exploration Company, also known by the acronym NAME, or NAME, and it was flown by a captain who had extensive experience as a mining engineer.

Speaker 23 According to the article, at some point after Frank and Willie's skeletons were found, Charles had slowly won over the trust of local indigenous tribes living near the Nahani River, and those folks decided to come clean about what they knew.

Speaker 23 They said they'd remembered working with Charles and Willie and Frank's father, Murdoch McLeod, who, like his sons, had been employed for years by the Hudson's Bay Company prior to the start of the 1900s.

Speaker 23 In fact, Murdoch had been a manager for the company at the business's Fort Liard office for years.

Speaker 23 According to Charles, the locals' positive history with his family proved helpful, and eventually the locals told him that Frank and Willie and Robert had mined a bunch of gold from the secret spot, but at some point they'd been overtaken by a rival mining outfit and killed before making it back to Fort Liard.

Speaker 23 Charles told the Edmonton Journal before taking off in the seaplane in 1928 that he planned to prove the mine's worth to his traveling companions and the name organization.

Speaker 23 so that they would understand what kind of a motive for murder this mine really could have been.

Speaker 23 He said, quote, while they're cooking dinner, I can walk up to the old prospect and bring back enough gold to show them that this mine is the real thing, end quote.

Speaker 23 The trip to get to the hidden mine wasn't a cakewalk, though. The seaplane with Charles and the other seven prospectors on board left Alberta in the summer of 1928.

Speaker 23 But by October, the number of men with Charles who were still in pursuit of the mine had dwindled to just four.

Speaker 23 Months of tough terrain and merciless conditions proved challenging.

Speaker 23 The only way for the remaining men in the group to navigate to the secret mine was by canoe through the rough and tumble waters of the Nahani River.

Speaker 23 Never mind the fact that at every other turn, they were having to live off the land and dodge all kinds of wildlife like bears that could have killed them.

Speaker 23 Another challenge they faced was human competition.

Speaker 23 You see, by the late 1920s, the mining industry had ushered in the dawn of airplanes and motorized boats being used to transport prospectors out to previously unreachable areas.

Speaker 23 So, in addition to nature making Charles and his friends' journey difficult, they were also up against the clock to beat their competitors from coming across Frank and Willie's hidden mine before they could get to it.

Speaker 23 Fortunately for Charles, that didn't happen.

Speaker 23 According to the Edmonton Journal, Charles and his friends managed to make it to the hidden mine before anyone else.

Speaker 23 And he found some valuable clues there as to what might have happened to his brothers.

Speaker 23 According to the Edmonton Journal, when he and his fellow prospectors first got to the hidden mine, they found, quote, evidence, unquote, that Frank and Willie had been there.

Speaker 23 And they'd also found signs that other men from the Yukon had arrived shortly after Willie, Frank, and Robert left.

Speaker 23 Things like sluice boxes, dislodged gravel, washing tools, and rusted shovels were all located at the mine.

Speaker 23 After taking a closer look, Charles and his friends felt confident the items were brought by men who'd come from the Yukon, because etched into a tree was a message that that they were the last group who'd been there, and they'd come from the West.

Speaker 23 Also at the site was a bag of ammunition, which was a sign to Charles that the men had been armed.

Speaker 23 Proving these mystery men from the Yukon were who had killed his brothers was impossible more than two decades after Frank and Willie's demise.

Speaker 23 So Charles and the men who traveled with him stayed focused, and they mined at the site until they couldn't anymore. And they struck gold, lots of it.

Speaker 23 The Edmonton Journal article I mentioned earlier, which was published in 1929, a little under a year after Charles and his men made it to the secret spot, reported their gold haul had been so significant, there was no doubt other mining operations and engineers would flock to the remote location.

Speaker 23 Another article by the Edmonton Journal said that for a while, right after Charles and his friends found the mine, they were prohibited from telling anyone where it was, per a deal they made with the name organization.

Speaker 23 But eventually that confidentiality restriction was lifted.

Speaker 23 One of Charles's companions eventually told the newspaper, quote, if we had spent the winter in that country, we could have come out with $50,000 worth of gold this spring.

Speaker 23 We could have thawed the ground and sunk shafts and sluiced the gravel out when the water started to run in the spring. We got 48 colors in one pan.

Speaker 23 The dust was such big stuff that you could hear it tinkle when we dropped it into the pan, end quote.

Speaker 23 Because of stories like this, a free-for-all gold rush unfolded at the start of the summer of 1929, and thousands of gold-hungry prospectors traveled to the Nahani region with hopes of striking it rich.

Speaker 23 Some miners got wealthy, others failed, some disappeared, and many even died.

Speaker 23 But by August, things had calmed down and many men returned home disappointed.

Speaker 23 Creeks and mines were no longer producing a lot of gold, and the rumored location of where the McLeod brothers' hidden mine was proved too difficult for most prospectors to try and get to.

Speaker 23 Around this time, information about what Charles McLeod truly thought happened to his brothers also came to light.

Speaker 23 Gone was the long-believed theory that a group of miners from the Yukon had killed Frank and Willie.

Speaker 23 Instead, the Edmonton Journal reported that Charles believed one man and one man alone had murdered his brothers all those years ago. And that man's name was Robert Weir.

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Speaker 23 Charles told J.M. Gilroy for the Edmonton Journal that in his quest to figure out what had happened to his brothers, he'd pursued tracking Robert Weir.

Speaker 23 Even after 1916, when most people, including the RCMP, believed Robert had died and his remains had been found, Charles said he never accepted that the young man from Scotland had perished.

Speaker 23 According to his interview with J.M. Gilroy, Charles said that in 1908, after he'd discovered Frank and Willie's skeletons, he'd tracked Robert to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia.

Speaker 23 There, he'd heard stories that a man matching Robert's description had sold $8,000 worth of gold dust before disappearing.

Speaker 23 Now, even though I have no idea what Robert looked like, I do know he probably had a Scottish accent, so maybe that's what gave him away. I don't know.

Speaker 23 But either way, Charles felt confident Robert had made it out of the Nahani region alive, and that he'd robbed and killed his brothers before taking off.

Speaker 23 The puzzling thing about this theory, though, meant that Robert would have killed Frank and Willie over a small amount of gold in comparison to what the mine they discovered was worth.

Speaker 23 Basically, Robert committing the crime and then taking off proved he had no interest in claiming the secret mine for himself. He just wanted an easy grab.

Speaker 23 That surprised most people, especially prospectors who later attempted to find the mine.

Speaker 23 Most folks had a hard time believing Robert would be greedy enough to kill, but not greedy enough to go back to the mine and get more gold before vanishing.

Speaker 23 According to an article by the Edmonton Journal, Charles claimed that 15 years into his search for Robert, he found where his trail ended, a farm on the outskirts of Edmonton, and the Scotsman had reportedly died from suicide.

Speaker 23 So I guess that's where the story ends with Robert. It's clear from the source material that the RCMP never publicly agreed with Charles' theory that Robert was Frank and Willie's murderer.

Speaker 23 The RCMP's official position was that the matter regarding the death of Frank and Willie McLeod was closed in 1921, because that's when investigators determined the brothers had died from exposure and animals had scavenged their remains, toting off their heads in the process.

Speaker 23 Basically, the RCMP was fully embracing the phrase, case closed.

Speaker 23 During the 1930s and 40s, dozens of mining outfits and prospectors used modernized air and water vehicles to try and locate the McLeod Brothers' secret jackpot mine. But everyone failed to find it.

Speaker 23 In 1947, the Edmonton Journal reported that about a dozen gold seekers had died attempting to do so.

Speaker 23 The spot was ominously dubbed Dead Man's Valley or Headless Valley, and Charles, who by that point was an older man, had moved on from his experiences in the region.

Speaker 23 He'd started a roofing business in Edmonton and had left behind everything he endured while mining in the Nahani region, including the painful discovery of his brother's remains.

Speaker 23 He warned future prospectors to avoid the region because it was so dangerous and pleaded with them to stop trying to find his brother's mine.

Speaker 23 Interestingly though, in 1950, Charles, who was in his mid-60s, went against his own advice and returned to the perilous region with his three sons to wait for it, mine for gold.

Speaker 23 So yeah, apparently Charles and his family were totally safe to prospect that rugged part of Canada, but he just wanted other people to stay away.

Speaker 23 In the 1970s, one of his sons, Ike, gave an interview to Vancouver Sun reporter Maura Farrow and laid out once and for all what his father believed had happened to Frank and Willie.

Speaker 23 He said Charles went to his grave believing Robert Weir murdered Frank and Willie and that he'd done it while the brothers had been sleeping next to their fire pit on their return trip to Fort Liard.

Speaker 23 Charles told his sons that more than likely Robert had cut off their uncle's heads because the shots he'd fired had entered their heads and he wanted to remove evidence.

Speaker 23 Then, Robert stole what gold he could and took off.

Speaker 23 Whether that's the truth about what happened to Frank and Willie McLeod is impossible to know. All trace of them and a potential crime scene was lost to the Canadian wilderness a long, long time ago.

Speaker 23 According to Ike's interview with the Vancouver Sun, several years after Charles buried his brother's remains, he returned to their grave markers and discovered a landslide had wiped them away.

Speaker 23 So even Frank and Willie's bones are gone forever.

Speaker 23 But the lure of the Nahani River and whatever potential treasures it may hold is still ever-present.

Speaker 23 And I'm not sure the magic of what drew the McLeod brothers and their killer or killers there in the first place will ever go away.

Speaker 23 Park Predators is an Audio Chuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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Speaker 15 Here's a quick podcast for all you true crime fans.

Speaker 16 The case of the missing Reese's.

Speaker 16 It was me at the store with my mouth.

Speaker 10 Motive?

Speaker 15 Um, they're Reese's.

Speaker 16 What was I gonna do? Stop myself? Tune in next time to see if I do it again. Spoiler, I will.

Speaker 21 Wow, that had everything.

Speaker 16 Reese's, suspense, Reese's.