Canada-Mines

CANADIAN MINES

The Klondike Gold Rush was sparked in 1896 by the discovery of gold at Rabbit Creek (also called Bonanza), a tributary of the Klondike River. Miners had been slowly filtering into the Yukon interior through the Chilkoot pass and began fanning out in the area as early as the 1880s. Some of them even stayed through harsh Yukon winters to hold onto their claims. Others partnered up with First Nations women who were well adapted and experienced in surviving the rigors of frontier life. George Washington Carmack was an example. The Carmacks, along with Kate’s brother Skookum Jim and her nephew, Tagish Charlie, were the first to uncover rich placer deposits at Rabbit Creek. They were advised to check out the creek by a fellow prospector named Robert Henderson who passed through the area and prospected in an adjacent creek. News of the Carmacks’ discovery of gold at Rabbit Creek eventually spread to outlying mining camps nestled within the Yukon Valley. Miners soon showed up at the Bonanza, Eldorado, and Hunter Creeks to stake their claims. This was just the beginning of a mass exodus of prospectors from America up to the Yukon with the dream of striking it rich.

Many of the stampeders who made their way to the Yukon were ill prepared for the long journey. Virtually overnight, a number of outfitting companies helped to furbish stampeders for the trip, selling them a variety of goods including food, warm clothing, mining and camping equipment, and transportation. Even in hard economic times, money was freed up to finance the expeditions of over 100,000 stampeders. The city of Seattle, the closest American outpost to the Yukon, profited greatly from outfitting miners. In order to pass into the Yukon, the Northwest Mounted Police demanded each miner carry up to a year’s supply of goods. This was equal to about one ton of goods per person.

Those with extra money were fortunate enough to travel up to the Yukon aboard steam ships departing from San Francisco and Seattle. The less fortunate were forced to make the journey entirely by foot and with the assistance of pack animals. Different routes were marked out for the journey with the two most clearly established routes based from the closest salt water ports situated 600 miles from the gold fields at Skagway along the White Pass Trail or from Dyea along the Chilkoot Pass Trail. Dyea and Skagway quickly grew into boomtowns that catered to the needs of miners. Both routes, about 30 miles long, were treacherous to cross and posed many dangers. The Chilkoot Pass was steep and hazardous. Many stampeders had to make the journey over the pass in the dead of winter. Rising approximately 1,000 feet in the last half-mile, over 1,500 steps had to be cut out of the mountainside glacier of the Chilkoot Pass. Known as the "Golden Staircase,” the stepped incline was still too steep for packhorses to traverse, so stampeders had to cache their goods up the mountain, meaning it took many subsequent trips to move one ton of equipment and supplies over the pass. This task proved too arduous for some, who ultimately abandoned their equipment. Others simply resigned from completing the journey and turned back. Traveling the Chilkoot Pass during the summer still proved to be very difficult.

Those who took to the White Pass Trail did not fare much better. Conditions on the narrow, steep, and slick mountain trail were even more treacherous. Approximately 3,000 pack animals, mostly horses, died trying to cross the pass, and it was therefore renamed Dead Horse Pass. Alternative routes included the Copper River Trail, the Teslin Trail by the Stikine River and Teslin Lake, the all-Canadian Ashcroft route known as the Cariboo Wagon Route, and Edmonton trails.

A good number of stampeders ended up on the shores of Bennet Lake during the winter and were forced to set up temporary tent cities as they waited for the ice on the river to thaw. From here they had to build boats manually by scavenging for timber and whipsawing the timber into planks for the final 500-mile leg upriver to Dawson City. There were about 7,000 different types of boats and rafts made. On average, the journey upriver to Dawson City took three weeks. About 20,000 of the 30,000 stampeders to complete the journey to the Yukon had arrived in Dawson City by the summer of 1898. However, by this time, prospectors who had arrived the year prior had already staked out the best claims along the Klondike River.

The work required of prospectors to extract the gold from their claims along the Klondike River was intensive. Gold was not always easily found at the surface; it was sometimes located 10 feet or more underground. In the winter months, miners had to dig through layers of permafrost by lighting fires to heat the ground in order to thaw it out. Most digging had to been carried out during the summer months.

Panning was a common way to sample the potential of a possible claim. Panning only yielded a small amount of gold at any one time. To extract large amounts of gold involved processing larger amounts of gravel. This was accomplished with the use of sluices. Sluices were built directly in or near streambeds so the gravel could be easily separated from the gold. The gravel was removed from the bottom and banks of the streambeds and placed in the sluices for processing. The drawback was that the streams remained frozen for up to nine months of the year, denying prospectors both flowing water and access to the gravel in the streambed.

Many of the stampeders who made the difficult journey up to the Yukon, some taking up to two years to get there, never did strike it rich. Altogether, miners spent about $50 million dollars trying to reach the Klondike. This amount ended up equalling the actual value of gold extracted in the five years following Carmack’s first discovery of the gold placer deposits at Rabbit Creek.

Sudbury

Originally named Sainte-Anne-des-Pins ("St. Anne of the Pines"), the community started as a small lumber camp in McKim township. During construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883, blasting and excavation revealed high concentrations of nickel-copper ore at Murray Mine on the edge of the Sudbury Basin. Earlier, in 1856, provincial land surveyor Albert Salter had located magnetic anomalies in the area that were strongly suggestive of mineral deposits, although his discovery aroused little attention because the area was remote. However, the railway construction made large-scale mining development in the area economically feasible for the first time.

The community was renamed for Sudbury, Suffolk in England, the hometown of CPR commissioner James Worthington's wife. The original settlement at Sudbury was not strongly associated with the mines, but served primarily as a transportation hub and a commercial centre for the separate mining camps and farming communities that surrounded it—miners only began residing in Sudbury itself later on, as improvements to the area's transportation network made it possible for workers to live in one community and work in another. Sudbury was incorporated as a town in 1893, and its first mayor was Stephen Fournier. Thomas Edison visited the Sudbury area as a prospector in 1901, and is credited with the original discovery of the ore body at Falconbridge.

Through the decades that followed, Sudbury's economy went through boom and bust cycles as world demand for nickel rose and fell. Demand was high during the First World War, when Sudbury-mined nickel was used extensively in the manufacture of artillery in Sheffield, England. It bottomed out when the war ended, and then rose again in the mid-1920s as peacetime uses for nickel began to develop. The town was reincorporated as a city in 1930.

Demand for nickel in the 1930s was such that after an early slowdown, the city recovered from the Great Depression much more quickly than almost any other city in North America, and was for much of that decade the fastest-growing city in all of Canada and one of the wealthiest - to the point that most of the city's social problems in the Depression era were caused not by unemployment, but by the fact that the city was growing so rapidly that it had difficulty keeping up with all of its new infrastructure demands, such as housing, roads, sewers and public transit. Between 1936 and 1941, the city was in fact ordered into receivership by the Ontario Municipal Board. Notably, the city's former mayor William Marr Brodie had himself been appointed to the Ontario Municipal Board in 1934; in their book Sudbury: Rail Town to Regional Capital, historians C. M. Wallace and Ashley Thomson theorize that Brodie lobbied for the receivership order to protect the city from excessive debts and expenditures, even though several other cities in Ontario which were not placed into receivership were technically in much worse financial shape.

Another brief economic slowdown hit the city in 1937, although the city's fortunes rose again during the Second World War. The Frood Mine alone accounted for 40 per cent of all the nickel used in Allied artillery production during the war. After the end of that war, however, Sudbury was in a good position to supply nickel to the United States government when it decided to stockpile non-Soviet supplies during the Cold War. In 1940, Sudbury became the first city in Canada to install parking meters.

Robert Carlin, a prominent Mine Mill organizer, was elected to the Legislative Assembly of Ontario in 1943 as the city's first-ever Co-operative Commonwealth Federation representative, although he was later expelled by the party for not sufficiently denouncing the purported—and vastly overstated—prominence of Communists in the union.

When the contract ran out, LaRose started on his way back to his home in Hull, Quebec. On the way he stopped at the Matabanick Hotel in Haileybury, where he showed his samples to the owner, Arthur Ferland. He then started on his trip, and on the way stopped in Mattawa where he visited a store owned by locals Noah Timmins and his brother Henry. Larose showed the samples to Noah before moving on to Hull. Henry was in Montreal at the time, so Noah cabled him, telling him about LaRose's find. Henry immediately set out for Hull, meeting LaRose and offering him $3,500 for half of the claim. Some time later a story developed that he found a vein when he threw a hammer at a fox walking by his tent.

Shortly thereafer, Ferland had another guest stay at the Matabanick, Thomas W. Gibson, the Director of the Ontario Bureau of Mines. Gibson identified the mineral in the samples as niccolite, a nickel-bearing mineral, which was intensly interesting to the Bureau after finding the deposits in Sudbury in 1883. Gibson sent the samples to Willet Green Miller, a professor at Queen's University and Ontario's first Provincial Geologist. With the samples Gibson included a note which stated that "If the deposit is of any considerable size it will be a valuable one on account of the high percentage of nickel which this mineral contains. I think it will be almost worth your while to pay a visit to the locality before navigation closes."

In October another railway contractor, Tom Herbert, came across an open vein of silver on the east side of Long Lake. He told Ferland about it that night, and the two set out for the site the next day. Due to a loophole in the Mining Act, surface veins allowed prospectors to stake up to 320 acres (1.3 km2), rather than the typical 40. Ferland formed a syndicate with four railway engineers, purchased Herbert's claim for $5,000, and jointly staked a total of 846 acres (3.42 km2).

Meanwhile, Miller had examined the samples Gibson sent him, and was disappointed to find that only the surface had any niccolite, the interior being mostly cobalt of little commercial value. He nevertheless sent the samples for further analysis, which returned a report stating they had 19% silver within. Miller soon set out for Long Lake, arriving in November 1903.

Miller visited a number of the veins that had been discovered, reporting that at the base of the LaRose vein he observed "lumps of weathered ore weighing from 10 to 50 pounds carrying a high percentage of silver", while the Little Silver Vein had "pieces of native silver as big as stove lids and cannon balls" and that "loose silver is common in immediate proximity to the vein; every depression in the rock on the top of the hill contains much free silver. The earth occupying these depressions is deemed by the owners of sufficient value to sack and ship for treatment".

William Trethewey arrived in the spring of 1904 and set out prospecting the area. On his second day he found a vein, and staked it with another prospector, Alex Longwell. Immediately thereafter he found a second vein, staking it for himself, while Longwell went off to stake another of his own. All three would later develop into major mines, the Trethewey, Coniagas and Buffalo. Millar had returned to the area to continue work, and posted a sign alongside the railway tracks which read "Cobalt Station T. & N.O. Railway". Still, there was relatively little work being done commercially, and nothing like a "rush" started.

When travel re-opened in the spring of 1905 word was out that there was silver at Cobalt Station. Prospectors and developers started pouring into the campsight, and by the end of the year there were 16 operating mines that had shipped $1,366,000 worth of ore. The next year another $2,000,000 worth of ore was shipped, but the obvious surface viens were mined out. To continue production, trenches were dug in criss-cross patterns hoping to cut through a vein. The Nipissing Mine introduced the use of high-pressure water to simply wash off all of the topsoil, and by 1913 Long Lake, now known as Cobalt Lake was "tainted or yellow green, and is opaque". The lake was later drained, both to clear out the brakish water as well as to expose further veins.

Although one of the richest veins was known as early as 1904, development was slowed by disagreements among the shareholders. These were finally worked out and mining the "Lawson Vein" started in 1908. Once mining was underway it became clear that the vein was incredibly large, as much as 10,000 tons of processed silver, making it the largest single find in the world to this day. It is better known today as the "Silver Sidewalk".

The rush reached its peak in 1911, shipping 31,507,791 ounces of silver. The town had grown considerably, and had a population of between 10,000 and 15,000.

World War I made labour hard to come by, and by 1917 most of the mines had closed due to a lack of men to work them. Instead, the small number of workers available were put to work using new extraction methods to work the tailings, which required far fewer people to keep in operation. At the end of the war Cobalt had a population of about 7,000. In 1918, in spite of the problems, 10,000 tons of silver were shipped.

As the best viens were mined out the cost of extracting silver from the Cobalt area made it increasingly unprofitable. By the 1922 many of the smaller mines were closed, when the Great Fire of 1922 swept through the area. Most of the viens ended less than 300 feet (91 m) below the surface, limiting the total amount of silver in the area. The stock market crash of 1929 led to a major devaluation in metal prices, rendering even the deeper mines unprofitable. The LaRose closed in 1930, and by 1932 only the Nipissing Mine and a few smaller operations were still working. All of these were closed by 1937.

In the World War II era and immediately thereafter, cobalt became a valuable mineral in its own right, and a number of operations opened to process the tailings again, this time for the cobalt. Increasing silver values and better mining processes started to make the area profitable, and the 1950s saw a brief resugence of mining. Most of these closed by the 1970s, and the few remaining ones by the early 1980s.

Prospectors Climbing Chilkoot Pass

Gold Hill, Dawson, Yukon Territory

No.9 Anvil White Star Mining Co. - Dawson, Yukon Territory - 1902

No. 6 Anvil Pioneer Mining Co.- Dawson, Yukon Territory - 1902

No.19 Below Discovery - Miller Creek, Yukon Territory

Unidenfied Klondike Gold Mining Operation

Mining gold-bearing gravel - Klondike

Unidenfied Klondike Gold Mining Operation

Digging in the perma-frost - Dawson, Yukon Territory

Claim No. 44, Bonanza Creek, Yukon Territory 1901

Dominion Nickel Mine, Sudbury, Ontario

Miners in Sudbury District, Ontario, 1890s

Silver Leaf Mine - Cobalt, Ontario

Nova Scotia Silver Cobalt Mining Co. - Cobalt, Ontario

Dome Extension Mine - Porcupine, Ontario

The Cobalt Silver Rush started in 1903 when huge veins of silver were discovered by workers on the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T&NO) near the Mile 103 post. By 1905 a full-scale silver rush was underway, and the town of Cobalt, Ontario sprang up to serve as its hub. By 1908 Cobalt produced 9% of the world's silver, and in 1911 produced 31,507,791 ounces of silver. However, the good ore ran out fairly rapidly, and most of the mines were closed by the 1930s. There were several small revivals over the years, notably in World War II and again in the 1950s, but both petered out and today there is no active mining in the area. In total, the Cobalt area mines produced 460 million ounces of silver.

The Cobalt Rush was instrumental in opening northern Ontario for mineral exploration. Prospectors fanned out from Cobalt, and soon caused the nearby Porcupine Gold Rush in 1909, and the Kirkland Lake Gold Rush of 1912. Much of the settlement in northern Ontario outside the Clay Belt owes its existence indirectly to the Cobalt Rush.

In the late 19th century the Ontario government started a program to establish settlements in the Clay Belt, a band of rich soil running north of Lake Temiskaming. The government wanted to open what was then known as "New Ontario", after it had been merged into the province from formerly Northwest Territories land. At the time, direct settlement to farms was still fairly widespread, and the towns of New Liskeard and Haileybury formed in the 1890s as the hubs of this activity.

The settlements generated some commercial interest in building a railway from North Bay to New Liskeard, but these plans ended when the rate of settlement dwindled at the turn of the 20th century. In 1902 the government decided to take over the project and started development of the T&NO, contracting out construction to a wide array of companies. By the summer of 1903 the line was about 100 miles (160 km) long and was approaching Haileybury.

James McKinley and Ernest Darragh were contractors supplying ties to the T&NO, working north of the Montreal River, about 5 miles (8.0 km) south of Haileybury. On the banks of Long Lake (one of many lakes in northern Ontario with this name) they found a number of pebbles bearing small metal flakes, and on 15 August 1903 they staked a claim and sent several samples to an assayer in Montreal. These proved to be disappointing, but a number of further samples they sent in in the fall returned 12% silver.

Fred LaRose, a blacksmith also working on the railway, had set up small cabin at the north end of Long Lake, near the Mile 103 post of the line. About two weeks after McKinley and Darragh, LaRose found similar rocks. LaRose noted "One evening I found a float, a piece as big as my hand, with little sharp points all over it. I say nothing but come back and the next night I take pick and look for the vein. The second evening I found it." LaRose had no idea what the metal was, he thought it might be copper, but staked a claim anyway.