Author Biography: Don Lee was born in Westlock, Alberta, in 1926, the oldest of five children in a farming family. His mother, of German descent, and his father, of Norwegian/Icelandic descent, were from pioneering stock. They put many backbreaking years into developing two sections of farmland in northern Alberta, cultivating the land at first with teams of horses. Almost every type of animal was raised on this farm - pigs, chickens, turkeys, cows and horses - and the family also bred silver foxes for their pelts. Don's parents grew a large vegetable garden every summer and visitors never went away empty-handed. Don worked hard on the farm from a young age and learned to love and respect the outdoor life. He also ran a trapline as a youth.
Gwen Roberts was born in 1930 in Edmonton, Alberta, second daughter of a family that settled in Langley, BC in 1932. She was named Tegwen by her Welsh father and her English mother. When the family arrived in the Fraser Valley, Langley was a rural agricultural comminity. Gwen, the second of four children, grew up in a happy household where both parents doted on the children but also provided very definite role models when it came to outdoor and indoor chores. Anything outside was Dad's job, and the indoor housework, cooking and sewing was Mom's job. How different a life Gwen would have after she married Don!
When Don's family sold the farm and moved to BC in 1945, Don, as a nineteen-year-old, got a job in heavy construction, a field that would involve him for the next twenty years.
In 1948 Don and Gwen met; they married the same year. A son, Brian, was born the year after they were married, and shortly after that the treks to remote construction sites that would extend over the next seventeen years began. Whenever possible, the family moved to the job location. In 1957 a daughter, Linda, was born.
Work on large earth-moving schemes such as dams and power projects, as well as the St. Lawrence Seaway, took the family across Canada and into the Yukon. At a Mayo, Yukon dam project in the early 1950s Don started to think about the famed Yukon gold strikes. In his spare time he built a small sluice-box. He ran the gravel at the job site through it and began to brag about having seen his first colors - flecks of gold. This earned him the nickname Sluice-box Kid.
The construction jobs Don was involved in required excavation of tremendous volumes of earth and the use of a wide variety of heave equipment. He gained skills he would find invaluable in gold mining. Don learned how to operate each machine and rose first to foreman, then general foreman and then superintendent over various phases of earth and rock digging, moving, replacing and building.
His construction work gradually increased his knowledge of soil, rocks and minerals. It was on a job in the Bridge River area of BC that Don stumbled upon his first boulder of jade, which at this time was thought to be alluvial and found only in creeks. Jade became Don's fascination and it was later to become his green gold. Finding the jade boulder turned him into a rockbound. He traded part of it to Ross Tanner, who knew how to cut opals, having learned it from an old European artisan. Ross would show Don and Gwen how to cut and polish stones. The Lees were enthralled to see the colors wining and blinking as the opal was rotated.
Years of intensive study of jade led to the Lees staking claims in the Bridge River area. The joined Bob Smith of Greenbay Mining in establishing a world market for jade. Don's experience with jade over the yars has made him one of the most knowledgeable people on the subject in BC. Jade mining also rekindled Don's dream of a gold mine.
Except for the time spent at construction jobs from Vancouver Island to Quebec, Langley has continued to be home for the Lees. It is the place Gwen and Don chose in 1965 as the location of their own rock shop, specializing in jade and opals, and it has been the base for all their other ventures in BC and the Yukon. Whether they are finding and marketing precious stones, retailing jewellery and giftware, doing gardening or mining for gold, they always work as a team. |
