Harold Lasseter
Lewis Hubert Lasseter or Harold Lasseter or Lewis Hubert (Harold Bell) Lasseter (born September 27, 1880 in Bamganie near Ballarat in Australia; † 1931 ) was an Australian gold prospector and charlatan who stated that he had found a gold deposit through an error in a cartographic measuring system was lost.
Life
Little is known about Lasseter's youth. He was the second son of William John Lasseter and his wife Agnes. His mother died early and his father married a second time. He served four years in the Royal Navy and left it in 1901. He then traveled to the United States, married in 1903 and later returned to Australia. There he worked as a farmer in New South Wales . He moved to Melbourne in 1914 and was looking for a job as a bridge engineer. He married for the second time in Melbourne in 1924 and worked on the Sydney Harbor Bridge .
Lasseter stated that he had spent some time in the outback and discovered a large gold deposit on the border of the Northern Territory and Western Australia . He found this gold deposit together with the gold prospector Harding, who measured it with two clocks and a sextant . However, the clocks were defective and the determination of the location failed by more than 160 kilometers. Road marks, as they were common for prospectors, were not left; at least this was what the two gold prospectors said.
During the time of the Great Depression he found donors who financed a search for the lost gold location in the desert, and received motorized vehicles and an airplane for the expedition. The expedition left Alice Springs on July 21, 1930 . Together with him, Fred Blakeley and others such as an engineer and a pilot searched for the gold deposit. As the expedition progressed, Blakeley declared Lasseter a charlatan and decided to end the search. Lasseter then continued to search for the lost deposit, but died in the desert. He was found with his belongings and his diary and was buried on March 31, 1931.
myth
The most modern investigations of the area in which Lasseter was looking for the gold deposit showed that, due to geological features, gold cannot occur under any circumstances and not even in the smallest quantities. In a manuscript by F. Blakeley Dream Millions (Sydney, 1972) the thesis is put forward that Lasseter did not die in the desert, but took the money of the financiers and fled to the United States and died there in the 1950s.
Lasseter's story was described by Ion Idriess in a 1931 novel Lasseter's Last Ride , which was published 17 times by 1935, spreading the legend widely.
Naming
The Lasseter Highway , which leads to Uluru , and the Lasseter Cave (quarry) in the Northern Territory are named after him. There is a hotel with his name in Alice Springs and a breed of dogs.
literature
- Fred Blakeley, Mary Mansfield: Dream Millions. New Light on Lasseter's Lost Reef. Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1972, ISBN 0207124418 .
- Desmond R. Clacherty: On Lasseter's trail. Malvern Press, Malvern 1989, ISBN 0-7316-6724-7 .
- Ion Llewellyn Idriess: Lasseter's last ride. An epic of Central Australian gold discovery. 21st edition. Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1937. German-language edition: Lasseter's last ride. A gold prospector's fate in the Australian bush. From the English by Bruno Schwietzke. Bertelsmann, Gütersloh 1937.
Web links
- Harold Lasseter on Australian Dictionary Biography
- Harold Lasseter on mininghall.com , accessed July 2, 2009
- Information about the expedition
Individual evidence
- ↑ Information on lasseteria.com (English), accessed on July 2, 2009.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lasseter, Harold |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Lasseter, Harold Bell; Lewis Hubert |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Gold prospectors in Australia |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 27, 1880 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bamganie at Ballarat |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1931 |
| Place of death | Australia |