The American West is littered with lost gold mine stories. The Lassen Peak area was of no exception. In the early 1900s, Tom Ravenscroft had a ranch ten miles east of Susanville, and occasionally took in travelers. On one occasion a stranger stopped in and became ill during his stay. The Ravenscrofts nursed him, but to no avail; he died there. The stranger told Ravenscroft of a gold mine he had discovered in Kings Creek Valley, near Lassen Peak. There he made a dugout on the side of the mountain where he found the gold.  He extracted two or three sacks of ore that he sent to Salt Lake City to be assayed. To his amazement, it yielded nearly $300. When he left Kings Creek, he stored his rifle, cooking utensils and so on in the prospecting hole. He covered it with rock to make it look as natural as possible.

The following summer, Ravenscroft attempted to locate the mine. He stopped at Drakesbad to talk with Alex Sifford about various
localities. For some time Ravenscroft was elusive about what he
sought. He finally told Sifford the story, and Sifford was much more
responsive to Ravenscroft’s questions. Ravenscroft was intimidated by aspects of the region where it would be necessary to search to locate the mine, and he gave up.

In the 1930s came a new breed of prospectors with the establishment of Civilian Conservation Corps Camps. In the summer of 1933, Frank Boghich, who worked at the Halls Flat CCC Camp east of the park, believed in the lost cabin mine legend. It was his contention that somewhere inside the park was a cache of a half million dollars worth of gold nuggets to be found, and he spent his free time in search of it.

Tim