CHAPTER VI

COBALT AND THE SILVER MINES

The famous Cobalt Silver Mines naturally focus the interest of the capitalist and the financier in any tour across the great Dominion. While British Columbia and the Yukon have been called the "Wonderland" of Canada, not alone for their mineral possibilities, but for a great wealth of other natural resources besides, and because many millions of dollars have been extracted by placer miners from rivers and streams, yet Ontario is found to exceed all other provinces, so far as yet developed, in the volume of mineral production. The Klondyke gold discoveries in the Canadian Yukon became a romance which has fairly rivalled the Tale of the Golden Fleece. Yet when in the year 1903 the copious and apparently unmeasurable deposits of silver-cobalt ores containing an extraordinarily high percentage of silver were discovered in the district of Cobalt (not far to the west from Lake Temiskaming), this event sent a thrill of sensation through the world of mining and mineral interests that left little to exceed, in romantic ardour, in the poetic legends of the Yukon:

"Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and woods."

Since the discovery of silver in 1903, Cobalt has {130} produced $130,000,000 worth of the white metal. Dividends totalling over $60,000,000 have been paid to shareholders of twenty-four mines. One company alone has distributed among its shareholders in dividends nearly $15,000,000.

In some of the Cobalt mines the ores that contained such phenomenal quantities of silver have been depleted, and ores of lower grade are now being worked, so that a much larger mass of ore, more machinery, and a larger force of working-men are now required to produce the same amount of silver.

The geological intervention of radioactivity is believed by physicists to have a determining influence upon the development of subterranean resources as well as upon the surface features of the earth and the formation of mountain chains. Vitality is another ever-increasing phenomenon, but the bewildering abundance of life that confronts the student of nature is no more inciting to research than the mystery of metals deposited far in the ground. The natural resources of Canada are so vast that even yet, as Dr. W. J. A. Donald asserts, "the greater part of three million six hundred thousand square miles of the Dominion is still _terra incognita_ as regards its mineral resources, or even its geological features."

During the present war all enterprises are, more or less, and, indeed, largely, in abeyance in the Dominion; but the present is always compact of the {131} future, nor can any strictly dividing line be drawn. "Even in the midst of the greatest tragedies," said Sir Clifford Sifton in his address before the Canadian Club of Montreal on January 25, 1915, "while we are trying to do our duty in the greatest crisis of life, we still must speak, act, think, and do in reference to the ordinary affairs of life; and the better we think and act and do in regard to these affairs, the better we shall act in these crises and the better we shall discharge our duty." Canada will never be numbered with those nations regarding whom the words were said of old, "Where there is no vision the people perish."

There is no lack of vision in the Dominion. The splendid loyalty of Canada, not only to the Empire, but to the cause of righteousness, is beyond all estimate in words; as the Right Honourable Sir Robert L. Borden has so finely expressed, there can be only one conclusion regarding the present tragedy of conflict. "To overthrow the most powerful and highly organised system of militarism that ever existed must necessarily entail terrible war and perhaps a protracted struggle. We have not glorified war or sought to depart from the paths of peace; but our hearts are firm and united in an inflexible determination that the cause for which we have drawn the sword shall be maintained to an honourable and triumphant issue."

This is the spirit of the Dominion. But all conflicts must have an end, and when the end of this struggle {132} comes there is a marvellous future awaiting the Dominion. The future of a nation as well as that of an individual is not merely, nor even mostly, to be mechanically surveyed. It is not a definite geographical region with boundaries that can be located and crossed with a clear knowledge of the line of demarcation. The future is something that is created by men's thoughts. It is made, not found; it is constructed, not discovered. And thus, even while all internal industries are somewhat in the grasp of an enforced pause, yet new plans and projects for the future are in order. The mineral resources of Canada are incalculable. But that they will form one of the most remarkable factors in her future prosperity and importance is a practicable certainty.

It was somewhere as early as 1846 that the veins of silver were discovered in the region adjacent to Port Arthur on Lake Superior; and twenty years later that ore was actively producing silver which it continued to do until 1903. On a small island, near Thunder Cape (known as the Silver Islet), was the most famous and the richest of these mines, and the ore, interlined with veins of quartz and carbonates, was found in a wide area. It traversed a large belt of diabase, and only where the vein transversed the diabase was it richly infused with silver. Otherwise, it bore galena alone. As early as 1884 the mine had carried to a level of nearly two thousand feet, and it was estimated that not less than three million two {133} hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of silver had been extracted from it.

When the Cobalt silver mines began to be worked, Canada took her place as the third silver-producing country in the world; and this distinction must be largely attributed to the richness and copious output of these particular veins.

Cobalt is about 330 miles north of Toronto, on the Ontario Government Railway, and four hours south of Cochrane. At Cobalt the mines are clustered all around and beneath the town, a lake in the centre having been drained to facilitate the search for ore. To the south-east these mines are distributed over a distance of four miles. While the Cobalt silver district proper is comprised within this area, other mines, and productive ones too, have been found in the farther outlying country. London is the chief silver market of the world. Much of the bullion shipped from Cobalt is sent directly there, and London is also the basing point of prices.

The vast mills of Cobalt, transforming the crude ore into bullion, and the hydraulic plant on the top of a hill, where one man manipulates power sufficient to wash down huge rocks and to uproot and send down large trees and stumps, open out to the uninitiate a new idea of the way in which man contrives to control Nature and force her to do his bidding.

At Cobalt the "silver sidewalk" is not only an {134} actual and visible spectacle, a solid surface on the level ground of shining silver from one to three feet in extent, but it is an indication of untold possibilities. Still, up to this time, the richness of the veins has been found to be rather in their number than their depth. These deposits are found in association with the pre-Cambrian rocks which, according to the geologists, belong to the Huronian and the Keewatin formations, through which a later diabase has been intruded in the form of a sill. This is not held to be necessarily the source of the ore deposits, but rather the means of opening the way for their introduction from other sources. A large majority of the productive veins, some eighty per cent., in fact, occur solely in the Huronian formation. The remaining twenty per cent. is divided between the Keewatin and the later diabase. As has been said above, these deposits are not especially deep, most of them being found below the sill within a depth of two hundred feet. The ores from all the Cobalt region include white arsenic, cobalt oxide, and nickel oxide, as well as the fine silver, and not infrequently a semi-refined mixture of the cobalt and nickel oxides.

If silver were the magnet that first drew the attention of the miner, the prospector, or the capitalist to Cobalt, it is not the only encouragement to the settlement of all this beautiful region. A few miles out from Cobalt is the pretty suburb of New Liskeard on a sheet of the bluest water, sparkling in the sunshine and the transparent air; {135} where numbers of artistically designed cottages have sprung up; where the business street reveals a thriving trade; where one or two newspapers are published; and where the seeker after the occult may find his palmist and his mental healer as well as his dentist and his physician. Electric cars connect this idyllic little village with Cobalt, and motor cars dart about in a way which suggests that this region is by no means outside of the cosmopolitan luxuries of life. The country is one of great scientific interest. The geologist may find new data; the botanist and ornithologist new fields for observation.

Cobalt is recognised as a permanent silver camp, and as one of the richest on the entire American continent. At first the stories told of silver paths, brilliant and shining in the sunshine, were regarded as part and parcel of the usual myths that spring up in mining camps. But the "silver sidewalks" were there. They were the most palpable of facts. A hundred miles to the north of the town of Cobalt, on Porcupine Creek, the prospectors found gold. Specimens of the alluring yellow ore may be seen in glass cases in the corridor of the King Edward Hotel, Toronto. In that city many of the miners may be met, for mining is now a scientific pursuit rather than merely an industry, and whether the miner takes his ease in cosmopolitan centres and gives his mines "absent treatment," after the convenient fashion of Christian Scientists, or whether he is less remote {136} from his interests, does not seem to affect the results in a vital manner.

During the year 1915 thirteen mines in Northern Ontario produced gold, and many of these are now making alterations and additions to their plants which will enable them to largely increase their output.

The following table shows the steady advance of the Porcupine gold camp since its discovery in 1910:--

Value of Year Production $ 1910 35,539 1911 17,187 1912 1,730,628 1913 4,284,928 1914 5,203,229 1915 7,580,766 ---------- Total 18,852,277

To find this possibly incalculable wealth in the densely wooded wilderness is a continually increasing surprise. The Porcupine district, as well as the Cobalt region, is reached by the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, a line of two hundred miles in length, built by the Province of Ontario, and furnishing connection between the Transcontinental line from Quebec to Winnipeg, north of the lakes, and the cities in the southern portion of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The construction {137} of this connecting line led to the discovery of Lake Timagami (one of the popular summer resorts), and about thirty miles north of the lake the first indication of silver was accidently found by a workman who hurled his hammer at a scampering rabbit and hit a rock instead, chipping off a layer that disclosed a vein of almost pure silver. This initiated the famous La Rose mine, taking its name from the man who made this fortunate throw of his hammer, and within the succeeding four years this immediate region was capitalised at some five hundred millions. While the Cobalt silver mines, then, owe their discovery to this employee on the line, the engineers prospecting for the grade of the Grand Trunk Pacific accidentally uncovered vast coal-fields in Alberta.

This Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway connects the Grand Trunk System at North Bay with the Canadian Government lines at Cochrane. The opening up of all this country has not only resulted in the exploiting of these famous mines, but has brought to knowledge the existence of the largest tract of pulpwood in the world. The belt of these forests extends from Ontario to Quebec and westward to the prairies of Manitoba, a thousand miles of almost unbroken woodland.

The hydraulic mechanism used in prospecting for ore is one of the marvels of inventive genius. One man can operate the powerful lever that turns on a torrent of water against trees, huge stumps, vast rocks, and sends them rolling down the hillside. {138} All obstruction, indeed, the very hill itself, is washed down. The twentieth century will always stand out as a remarkable era for the invention of mechanism to harness and utilise power hitherto undreamt of for practical application. These inventions are securing the increasing spiritual liberation of man. When he is enabled to harness the powers of the ether; to send the lightning on his errands; to bridle a force that no man ever saw or touched; when he can cause the waves of the ether to serve his chariot wheels, he has indeed transformed the world in which he finds himself.

There are rumours of a recent invention made by Mr. Asa Thurston Heydon in the Yukon that may largely revolutionise the mining industry. It was in the middle 'eighties that Mr. Heydon began studying the primitive divining-rod, the use of which he was inclined to believe was based upon some germs of scientific truth. He thought it possible that some natural law lay hidden in the garments of superstition. For thirty years he experimented and observed. This research has led him to what he believes is a series of discoveries, one of which is his invention called the clairoscope, which is the diviner for substances that are in the earth. Fitted with one or another substance attached, it turns to that which corresponds with the given thing attached. He calls the instrument the clairoscope and the result obtained the clairum. The clairum, Mr. Heydon explains, is the counterpart {139} of the spectrum. The latter is limited to the luminous, the former to the non-luminous, rays. The spectrum exemplifies one pole of the spherical organisation of energy, and the clairum exemplifies the opposite pole. Mr. Heydon's researches are based on his conviction that everything, organic and inorganic, from electrons to the mighty universe itself, is surrounded by a sphere; that these spheres blend and combine "in accordance with the laws of force-centres," but that in all combinations "they retain their identity as do rays of light." This interesting speculator holds that the non-luminous rays are constant, changing only from attraction to repulsion, and that they are the radii of the spheres. He believes that the distinctive energy that operates the clairoscope is a higher dynamic energy; nothing less, indeed, than that vital force which is characteristic of all life. "A name must be found," he says, "for this vital force which is rhythmically circulating throughout the universe, forming the pulse of existence. The dream of the alchemist is founded in the nature of things," continues Mr. Heydon, "and will be realised when mankind shall have discovered the simple process of polarising and depolarising electrons at will. This will induce the polarisation of the correlated material sphere, and an electron of the desired element will awaken from its slumbers."

To what degree Mr. Heydon's theories will bear the test of his future investigations it is impossible {140} to conjecture; but it is already true that the clairoscope is being used to some extent to locate minerals and has proved useful.

To descend into a mine, down to a three hundred and fifty feet level, and see the strange panorama of life that is before one's eyes, is a novel experience. Into the cage steps the little party, and the downward journey begins. All is dark save for the lamps of the miners, affixed to their caps, and the lights that are swung give a fitful and weird illumination. Through the narrow aisles on every level push-carts are passing, and the visitor must pack himself into as little space as possible as he stands against the wall to let the traffic pass by. Everything is dripping; one walks in mud and water, and sees the glisten of the wet walls. The air is cold and damp. It seems inconceivable that men can work under such conditions, yet the visitor is assured by some of the workmen themselves that they prefer this labour to any of the employments open to them on the surface of the earth. This subterranean world incites curiosity, interest, and still the onlooker is not sorry when he finds himself again in the air and sunlight above.

On the hills about Cobalt are perched attractive cottages and bungalows, and the quiet, pleasantly social little town bears no trace of the traditional atmosphere of the mining-camp of that peculiar order that has been most vividly derived from the pictures in the novels of Bret Harte.

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