Lewis Hubert Lasseter, or Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter as he later referred to himself, was born on 27 September 1880 at Bamganie, Victoria

Victoria (Australia)

Victoria is the second most populous state in Australia. Geographically the smallest mainland state, Victoria is bordered by New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania on Boundary Islet to the north, west and south respectively....

, Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Though self-educated, he was literate and well-spoken, but commonly described as eccentric and opinionated. He traveled in both Australia and the United States and worked at a variety of occupations, marrying twice and fathering five children.

Lasseter was made famous by his sensational claim, first asserted in 1929, that, as a young man, he had discovered a fabulously rich gold reef, an entity now known as “Lasseter's Reef

Lasseter's Reef

Lasseter's Reef refers to the purported discovery, in 1897, of a fabulously rich gold deposit in a remote and desolate corner of central Australia...

”, in central Australia

Central Australia

Central Australia/Alice Springs Region is one of the five regions in the Northern Territory. The term Central Australia is used to describe an area centred on Alice Springs in Australia. It is sometimes referred to as Centralia; likewise the people of the area are sometimes called Centralians...

.

He perished in the desert near the Western Australia

Western Australia

Western Australia is a state of Australia, occupying the entire western third of the Australian continent. It is bounded by the Indian Ocean to the north and west, the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean to the south, the Northern Territory to the north-east and South Australia to the south-east...

 – Northern Territory

Northern Territory

The Northern Territory is a federal territory of Australia, occupying much of the centre of the mainland continent, as well as the central northern regions...

 border in early 1931 after he separated himself from an expedition that was mounted in an effort to rediscover the supposed reef. His body was found and buried in March 1931 by Bob Buck, a central Australian bushman and pastoralist sent to search for Lasseter. It was later re-interred in the Alice Springs cemetery.

However, the book Lasseter Did Not Lie by A. Stapleton (published in Adelaide, 1981) suggests that Lasseter was no more than a con-man, having ripped off his investors in a clever scheme to convince them that such a gold reef existed, only to take their money with him to San Francisco, where he later died in the late 1950s.

Some of the facts pointing in that direction are as follows:

• Lasseter had said that when he was in Alice Springs
  Alice Springs, Northern Territory
  Alice Springs is the second largest town in the Northern Territory of Australia. Popularly known as "the Alice" or simply "Alice", Alice Springs is situated in the geographic centre of Australia near the southern border of the Northern Territory...
  
   the first time, around the time of discovering the gold reef (that is, 1897), he had posted a letter at the post office in the middle of the town. However, at the time, the post office was not in the town, which was actually known as Stuart back then, but located on the other side of the ranges, some six kilometres away, at a water hole which was called Alice Springs.
• At the time when Lasseter stated that he was first in Alice Springs, the town boasted a population of only a few hundred people, with visitors coming many weeks apart, and thus conspicuous. Furthermore, he claimed that he had arrived in the town with horses and camels in tow, and there was only one place where he could have bought such provisions. Yet nobody in Alice Springs remembered him.
• Gold specimens found in the pockets of the body alleged to have been Lasseter's were chemically analyzed and determined to have originated near Kalgoorlie
  Kalgoorlie, Western Australia
  Kalgoorlie, known as Kalgoorlie-Boulder, is a town in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia, and is located east-northeast of state capital Perth at the end of the Great Eastern Highway...
  
  —thousands of kilometres away.
• Jimmy Nosepeg, an Aboriginal tracker who assisted Bob Buck find the body, said the corpse was so decomposed, it "could have been a black fellow".
• Bob Buck, a poor labourer, died with large cash reserves.
• There were three separate investment companies concerned in Lasseter's gold exploration venture, but none of those companies knew of the existence of the others.
• Modern technology—magnetometers, geological mapping, satellite imagery, seismic testing and remote-sensing—show that it is geologically impossible for gold to have ever formed in the areas where Lasseter alleged that it was located.

Other things named after Lasseter

• Lasseter’s cave, Northern Territory
• Lasseter Highway
  Lasseter Highway
  Lasseter Highway is a fully sealed 244 kilometre highway in the Northern Territory of Australia. It connects Yulara, Kata Tjuta and Uluru east to the Stuart Highway...
  
  , Northern Territory
• Lasseter’s Hotel Casino, Alice Springs, Northern Territory