On this day:
HEADLESS VALLEY
On September 28, 1915, the burned-down cabin and the headless remains of Swedish prospector Martin Jorgensen were discovered near the Nahanni River, in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Nahanni country, home of a legendary hidden tropical valley, where dazzling gold deposits are guarded by superstition and elusive, savage mountain men. Jorgensen was searching for the placer gold that had been reported earlier by the McLeod brothers. He sent a message to his partner, via a trapper, that he had found the gold. Now he was headless.
Seven years before Jorgensen's remains were found, the headless bodies of the McLeod brothers were discovered in the South Nahanni. They left behind a sled runner with the words "We have found a fine prospect" written across it and large chunks of quartz riddled with gold. Their story started in 1903, when a Cassiar Indian visited the Hudson Bay Company trading post possessing fist-size gold nuggets. Plied with alcohol, he revealed the placer location. Murdoch McLeod, Hudson Bay agent at Fort Liard, relayed the story to his three sons, Willie, Frank, and Charlie McLeod.
Burning with gold fever, the brothers made a grueling wilderness journey to a tributary of the Flat River. After little luck and much misadventure, including having their barge and supplies lost at the Cascade of the Thirteen Drops, the boys returned home. Willie and Frank set out with a Scottish engineer the next year. After they had been absent for four years, Charlie went to look for them. In mid-summer, he found their bodies, picked clean by animals and headless. Since the early 1900s, over twenty men have either vanished or been found as a headless skeleton.
Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009
