The Lost Lemon Mine: The Great Mystery of the Canadian Rockies

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This work is a loose collection of reprinted articles assembled
Reader’s Digest style. The central subject is a local legend from the
Alberta foothills. The standard elements are all here—a bonanza gold
strike, a fake priest, a deadly Native curse, plus bushwhackers, murder,
guilt, and decades of fruitless searching by credulous gold fools trying
to rediscover the mother lode.

If anyone cares to join this club, there is even a chapter, reprinted
from an Alberta Ministry of Energy pamphlet, on how to prospect. A
subchapter entitled “What Does Gold Look Like?” is perhaps a better
illustration of whom they expect to come looking for gold than it is of
the object of the search.

This work is a prime specimen of “drugstore literature,” a genre
one finds next to the snow shakers and souvenir gold pans during a
holiday in “gold country.” As a local legend, it might make
interesting reading when one is sitting alone in an Alberta motel room
or putting down tent stakes at the “Lost Lemon Mine Campground” in
Coleman, Alberta. Otherwise, it is an unremarkable book.