John Foley found the gold. Peter Leech got the river. That is the shortest summary of how Vancouver Island's one genuine gold rush town came by its name, and it is how these things tend to go: the man with the pan makes the discovery, the man with the official report gets the geography. In July 1864 the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, working the country northwest of Victoria, found colour in a tributary of the Sooke River. Robert Brown, who led the expedition, is credited with the line that carried the news: the gold will speak for itself. Within four months, twelve hundred men were working the creek.
Leechtown sits where the Leech River joins the Sooke, and the river itself runs along the Leech River Fault - a regional break marking the seam between two different pieces of the earth's crust. On one side is the Pacific Rim Terrane; on the other, the Crescent Terrane, part of the ancient volcanic province geologists call Siletzia. These are rocks formed elsewhere and rafted here by plate motion, welded onto the edge of the continent along this line.
That collision is why there was anything to find. The Leech River Complex - badly deformed schists over gneiss, exposed along the fault - is laced with quartz stringers emplaced by hot fluids driven through the rock. The gold came with the fluids. The river spent a few million years doing the sorting, and in 1864 men with pans arrived to collect the results.
The news moved fast because the audience was already assembled. Victoria in 1864 was full of men who had gone up the Fraser Canyon six years earlier and come back with less than they hoped for, and they knew what to do with a rumour. They came overland by trail, or by steamer to Sooke and on foot from there.
By the middle of August, 227 mining licences had been issued. Within a month more than five hundred miners were on the ground and surveyed townsite lots were being offered for sale - the speculators arriving, as always, half a step behind the prospectors. By November the count stood at twelve hundred. For a brief season Leechtown was a real place with streets on a plan, and then, as the accessible gravel gave out, it began the long process of not being one.
The river was never quite finished with. In the decades after the rush, the people working it were mainly Chinese prospectors - men who took ground the first wave had written off and made it pay through patience and sheer repetition, in a province whose laws were arranged to make their lives difficult in almost every other respect.
Mechanization came late and went badly. A small hydraulic plant installed in the early 1930s blasted the gravel banks with high-pressure hoses and never turned a profit; Vanisle Mines tried between 1937 and 1941 with no better result. Small placer claims are still active on the Leech, producing fine gold and flakes rather than a fortune. The ground is now a mineral reserve: no new claims can be staked.
The railway reached Leechtown long after the gold fever broke. The Canadian National line up from Victoria served a station that opened around 1926, described by someone unkindly and accurately as no larger than a chicken coop.
Logging is what the twentieth century actually meant here. A two-and-a-half-mile railway ran from Leechtown to the Kapoor Lumber Company sawmill in the late 1920s, and the Cameron Lumber Company put up a steam sawmill on the CN line in the mid-1930s. At Kapoor, a talc mine operated before 1930 and then switched to green shale. Through the 1940s and 1950s Leechtown was a working logging community, not a ruin. The line had its disasters too: in 1943 and again in 1962, a locomotive went through a damaged bridge nearby, each time killing a crew member. The track was abandoned in 1978 and the rails lifted; in 1987 the right-of-way became the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, the route most people take in today.
Every gold district generates its lost mine, and Leechtown has two. In 1864 a prospector named Hans Christen went looking for a stray mule after a storm and found it sheltering in the mouth of a small cave; just inside, he said, a vein of gold two feet wide ran back into the rock. He spent the rest of his life failing to find the cave again.
The second story belongs to Ed Mullard, who while hunting near Jordan Meadows came upon a cave with chiselled steps, multiple galleries, and treasure inside. He told it to a reporter in April 1959 and died at fifty-six before he could lead anyone to the spot. A search the following year, using his directions and aerial photographs, turned up nothing. Rumours of Spanish gold ingots and a bronze cannon in the Jordan Meadows swamps still circulate; the provincial mines ministry has disavowed the ingot claim. The question is academic now. Between 1915 and 1970 the Sooke Flowline drew Victoria's water from near Leechtown, and in 2007 the area was bought outright for the Greater Victoria supply. Gates, fences, and bylaws seal the watershed. The relics are still in there - rusting logging and mining equipment scattered through the second growth, a 1928 cairn that vandals got to - but the searching is over.
Leechtown lies at 48.483N, 123.717W in the hills of southern Vancouver Island, about 59 km by road northwest of Victoria at the confluence of the Leech and Sooke Rivers. From 3,000 to 5,000 feet the key line is the Leech River valley itself, running arrow-straight along the fault - one of the clearest surface expressions of a major fault anywhere on the island - with the Sooke River joining from the south and Sooke Lake Reservoir to the east. Look for the old rail grade, now the Galloping Goose Regional Trail, threading the valley toward Sooke and Victoria. Nearest airfields are Victoria International (CYYJ) roughly 20 nm southeast and Victoria Inner Harbour water aerodrome (CYWH); Port Renfrew and the west coast lie beyond the ridges to the northwest. The ground below is restricted watershed with no landing options. Expect low cloud filling the valleys on wet-season mornings, and summer haze from regional fire smoke that can flatten the terrain contrast.