Lewis Hubert (Harold Bell) Lasseter

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Lewis Hubert Lasseter, or Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter as he later referred to himself, was born on 27 September 1880 at Bamganie, Victoria, Australia. 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. He married twice and had five children. Lasseter was made famous by his sensational claim, first made in 1929, that as a young man he had discovered a fabulously rich gold reef, a proposition now known as “Lasseter's Reef”, in central Australia. Lasseter perished in the desert near the Western Australia – Northern Territory border in early 1931 after he separated himself from an expedition that was mounted 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, and was later re-interred in the Alice Springs cemetery.