Nova Scotia's only full-time gold miner, Edgar Horne pursues a family quest
By Hans Durstling and David J. Mossman
AWAY BACK in the woods in Renfrew, N.S., 67-year-old Edgar Horne makes a living doing something most of us can only dream about. Often single-handedly, Horne mines gold. In fact, he is something of a one-man institution, for he processes the gold using 19th-century equipment which he salvaged as rusted derelicts from abandoned Nova Scotia gold fields, restored, reassembled and put back to work.
The discovery of gold in southeastern Nova Scotia dates back to the 1860s, when one small-scale gold rush followed another. More than 60 gold mines were in production in the province at one time or another until World War II. Many of those mines exasperated professional geologists: the companies, tending to be small and undercapitalized, worked small, rich leads to recover as much gold as quickly as possible, instead of systematically exploring and working larger areas which, the geologists felt, held greater long-term promise. Eugène R. Faribault, the doyen of early Nova Scotia geologists who examined and mapped more than 100 Nova Scotia gold deposits in the early 1900s, frequently lamented the inefficient and unscientific mining methods. Attempts have been made at modern full-scale gold mining in the province in recent years and, almost without fail, the launch of each new enterprise has been accompanied by disparaging comments about the antiquated, wasteful work of the past. If the old-timers could hear such comments, they might be forgiven a jeer or two because every attempt at corporate, scientific mining in the Nova Scotia gold fields has uniformly failed, due to unprofitably low grades of ore, costly technical hurdles and, in some cases, faulty assays. And they might well raise a toast of respect to Edgar Horne, whose one-man operation, using their tools and methods, has been consistently and successfully extracting gold.
In a clearing in the forest, a shed of fieldstone and corrugated sheet metal, built, characteristically, by Horne himself, houses his historic machinery. The shed rises at the back to a height of some eight metres to accommodate the two restored stamp mills that thunder inside. Each stamp mill is a giant, mechanized mortar and pestle, consisting of a series of long iron rods with steel stamps at the bottom, continually raised and dropped by a camshaft to crush the gold-bearing quartz. First used for crushing gunpowder mixtures in the late Middle Ages, then adapted to mining, they were used in California's gold fields in the mid-1800s and wherever else there was ore to be crushed. You can still find stamp mills standing idle as restored, static showpieces in mining museums here and there, but Horne's mills may well be the only ones on the continent still earning a living for their owner.
And for Horne, that's important. With a deep sense of history, he savours the satisfaction of his restoration work, but it's clear this is not a museum. These are working machines whose sole purpose now, as then, is to extract gold, which they've been doing since Horne resurrected them over several decades. In fact, all recent corporate attempts notwithstanding, Horne with his turn-of-the-century technology is the only full-time gold miner in Nova Scotia today.
Stocky and barrel-chested, Horne still climbs with vigour 12 metres down into his mining pit and sledgehammers at the gold-bearing quartz veins with power and enjoyment, his broad hands a registry of manhandled boulders, of machine parts wiped with oily rags, and of many a hammer blow struck. With wrinkles of wry humour at the corners of his eyes, his slightly Churchillian features are reminiscent of a beaming British bulldog. Most of his jokes are at his own expense. A character, he has a character's sense of style, and he knows about the impact of appearances: one day he'll be sporting an Australian bush hat, the next a jaunty straw hat and broad red suspenders framing a half-buttoned faded shirt and his ever-present pendant, a half-ounce ingot of his own gold on a chain around his neck. He won't say how profitable his operation is, but he is not conspicuously affluent nor by any means poor.
He will talk for hours about mining and machinery, veins and nuggets and troy ounces per ton, but hardly ever about himself. Speaking of one of his two salvaged stamp mills, he says with formidable matter-of-factness, "Oh, I hauled that one in on a flatbed from Molega." It takes quite a few visits and some attentive listening for incidental details before you can piece together the fact that the mill itself weighs several tonnes, that Molega (another old Nova Scotia gold rush site) lies 130 kilometres away in the backwoods in another county, and that he had to dismantle a three-storey building to get at the mill and its diesel engine.
It's little wonder that gold figures largely within Horne's sense of history. Even as a boy he was surrounded by adults who kept one eye cocked to the end of the rainbow. His great-uncle, Edmund H. Horne, was the legendary Canadian prospector who, as a young man, became infected with glittering gold while working in the mines at nearby Oldham, N.S., and then launched out on an odyssey that led him to prospect in Colorado, in the California gold fields, and in the British Columbia bush; to lose hope and look for a "real job" in Manchester, England; and finally to make a fortune back home in Canada through his discovery of the fabulous Horne gold-copper mine in northwestern Quebec -- the mine that created the wealth of Noranda, the colossus of Canadian mining.
Edgar Horne's uncle, Ed D. Horne, likewise combined a career in local business with mining and milling gold. Thus, by the age of 12, Edgar had been steeped in stories of seams and veins, stringers and nuggets, of rich ore shots that suddenly disappeared. He had worked at his relatives' stamp mills, panned, and seen how gold was concentrated.
He had also seen its impact on human judgment, as was clear from the story he told as we bumped along the dirt trail leading to the mine and mill in his canvas-top 1967 army jeep, mother object of his mechanical affections.
"Edmund H., now," Horne began, keeping up a dry and matter-of-fact manner despite the background roar of unmuffled exhaust and gnashing gear teeth, "Edmund H., when he came back from Noranda, he came back in 1924, and he bought some big farms and went into the cattle business, cattle and show cattle. Well, he did that for about 10 years, and then he got back to being interested in the mining. So then he came back into Renfrew here and spent half a million dollars looking for where the Jubilee and Thompson had cut off. That was the name for a very rich structure, one of the richest in Renfrew. One of the richest in Nova Scotia. Well, that vein had faulted, and the old miners, they couldn't find where it continued. So he spent half a million dollars looking for it, in the '30s. He found good gold-bearing ore and he set up two stamp mills to process it, but...," Horne paused reflectively, and with just a hint of a smile to suggest that this might be a story with a moral to it, continued, "... no, he never found the particular area he was looking for. No. He never did find that."
In that exchange, the Jubilee and Thompson came out the winners, having swallowed considerably more money than it yielded. Yet there was good reason for the quest, beyond a born prospector's urge to relieve the boredom of gentleman farming: Renfrew was one of the most promising gold districts in the province.
The story of Nova Scotia gold begins more than 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian and Ordovician periods. Over the eons, continental drift brought early forms of Nova Scotia and North Africa together until they collided. Shale from Africa's continental shelf -- where sediments containing gold particles had been deposited in layer after layer -- crumpled and folded while heat and pressure caused metamorphic changes, transforming the shale into slate and quartz and concentrating the gold. The continents drifted apart during the Triassic Period, 200 million years ago, but pieces from Africa were left behind in eastern North America. One such piece is the Meguma Group, as Nova Scotia's gold-bearing rocks are known.
The continental drift further reshaped these layers of rock. It was like pushing at a telephone book lying flat on the table: the pages arrange themselves into wavy folds with gaps in between. In geological terms, the folds that form a trough are called synclines, and those that form a crest are called anticlines. In the Meguma Group, the gold is most often found in quartz veins that filled the gaps between rock layers at the apex of the anticlines.
As settlement advanced into southeastern Nova Scotia, people began turning up bits and pieces of loose quartz containing visible specks of gold. In 1861, gold was discovered at Tangier, on the eastern shore, and also at The Ovens, near Lunenberg, which today is a nature park where people still pan on the beach each summer. The first hints of gold at Renfrew were reported in that same year and, by 1868, Nova Scotia was in the grip of a full-fledged gold fever. Thirteen gold districts had been proclaimed by the provincial government and had already yielded 98,000 troy ounces (3,048 kilograms) of gold. Of these, 10,000 troy ounces came from Renfrew. That put Renfrew in fourth place among the districts, but production was rising rapidly. In 1868 the usually sceptical and occasionally caustic Alexander Heatherington, an American expatriate based in Halifax who wrote frequent reports about the Nova Scotia gold industry, called Renfrew the most valuable gold district in the province.
But gold, alas is rather like love -- the hopes it engenders are often exaggerated and not infrequently brief. In most of the gold districts, complex geology and irregular folding of the strata caused small, rich pockets to occur unpredictably within large tracts of barren quartz. Nor did it help that many of the 19th-century companies, as their bombastic names almost suggest, were formed more to make money from market manipulations than from mining. Built on such flimsy frameworks of hope and speculation, the moment they ran into difficulties, they also ran out of money to deal with them. Thus, even before the turn of the century, many companies had stopped milling on their own and had leased their properties to "tributers" a sort of mining equivalent of moral bankruptcy. The tributers were the grave robbers of the mining world, individual operators out to make maximum money for minimum work. They were notorious for cleaning out only the richest pockets, known as "picking the eyes out of the mine," for doing no development work, for keeping no records, for letting mine shafts flood, and for rarely troubling to fill in trenches. They were the despair of the provincial department of mines, and their trenches the undoing of numerous cattle.
By the Depression, commercial mining had virtually ceased, leaving the Nova Scotia back country dotted with derelict installations and heaps of waste rock that today are explored by mineral collectors, gold aficionados and industrial history buffs.
One of the longest surviving districts was Renfrew, where, thanks to co-operative geology and the persistence of Horne's relatives, sporadic production continued as late as 1958. Overall, in its 96-year production history, the Renfrew district yielded a total of 51,595 troy ounces (1,605 kilograms), placing it 11th among Nova Scotia gold producers. At the old fixed price of $35 U.S. a troy ounce, that added up to $1.8 million; at todays price of about $360 per troy ounce, it comes to $18.6 million. It's a substantial rate of return at either price, considering that no costly deep mining was ever done at Renfrew, where the deepest shaft only went down 140 metres.
Renfrew's geology continues to benefit Horne today. Here the strata are in the form of a large dome, between whose layers the gold-bearing quartz veins lie more or less regularly and predictably, easy to trace conveniently near the surface, and with few of the distortions that bedevil gold mining elsewhere.
Horne's lack of formal training in geology or mine engineering may be another helpful factor in his success. Undoubtedly a handicap for a less judicious person, for Horne it has worked the other way around, by forcing him to size up each situation on its own merits (will it work or won't it?) rather that relying on theoretical preconceptions of how things ought to be done.
Consider for example, Horne's use of the salvaged stamp mills. Having more or less grown up with them, he knew that they were obsolete and that modern ball mills could crush vastly greater amounts of rock. But ball mills also cost vastly more, and in view of the small amounts of quartz his near-surface work could supply, their large capacity was not of much use. Stamp mills, though, are robust, reliable and virtually indestructible. Moreover, there were derelict stamp mills waiting to be salvaged at next to no cost. So, obsolete or not, the stamp mills ideally matched Horne's needs.
After a 20-minute jeep ride from Horne's home in Enfield, we came to a stop at a clearing closed off by a wire gate. A sign on the gate said, "Danger, Blasting Area." A bright blue backhoe, a bulldozer, an air compressor and an aging yellow boom crane stood beside mounds of slate. Here, Horne trenches out the quartz veins. "No, the oldtimers, they didn't have them," he said, gesturing toward the backhoe. "That'll go as deep as 22 feet (6.7 metres), and it'll take a lot of quartz out. I've got about $150,000 of equipment here," he continued, "all paid for by gold."
Once loosened by minor blasting, the barren shale is scraped out by backhoe to expose the quartz vein still stuck to the rock wall like a layer of ham on a sloping sandwich, rarely more than two or three inches thick, and easy to pry off with a crowbar, chisel and, if need be, air hammer. The quartz goes into a bucket to be taken to the stamp mills. Sometimes you can see nuggets of gold inside, particularly in the vein Horne was just then working, and which he calls the "Double Nugget Vein" for its abundance of visible gold.
As he talks about the Double Nugget, Horne grows visibly more intense. Relaxed and contemplative before, he now leans forward into the conversation while his features mirror a mix of enjoyment of the challenge and contemplation of its possible outcome. This, he eagerly explains, is definitely his most ambitious and possibly his most promising excavation. With the help of a grandson and one of his two sons, he had dug the Double Nugget to the limit of the backhoe's reach, and it still looked good. So he hired a professional miner to help him stabilize the pit walls and, once they'd been safety inspected, went on down to 12 metres. Plastic buckets full of gold-flecked quartz chunks in his basement testify that the vein is still producing. Now that he is down to 12 metres, he is driving horizontal shafts along the vein in true underground mining.
Leaving the Double Nugget diggings, we headed for the stamp mills. En route, Horne stopped briefly at a small clearing to point out a tumbled pyramid of bleached shingles and mouldering woodwork lying in a bramble patch. "There's a piece of mining history," he said, "the old Renfrew Post Office. That's the roof. All that's left of it."
The mill building nestles in its clearing with almost fairy-tale cosiness, its fieldstone walls blending with the surrounding rock from which they were gathered. Inside, rays of sunshine beam down from openings in the corrugated roof through which the tops of the stamp mills extend. Foot-wide canvas drive belts snake from a 1950-vintage diesel motor near the door to loop around wooden wheels as big as millstones which turn the stamp mill camshaft. Horne makes a few adjustments and the motor springs to life amid a cloud of white smoke; he gently engages the clutch and the camshaft begins to turn, lifting and dropping, lifting and dropping the stamps, all five of them at increasing speed until the building begins to shake with the impact of five 540-kilogram steel stamps crashing down one after another with a din like a herd of monster horses cantering on the spot.
The stamps do their work inside a large cast-iron "mortar box" which is continually loaded with quartz chunks through an ore chute in back. In front, at about waist height, an opening covered by a wire screen extends the width of the box. A battery of hoses supplies water to the crushing surfaces, and with each thump of a stamp a milky mush of water and crushed quartz slops out through the screen, while the much heavier gold remains behind in the bottom of the mortar box. Small amounts of mercury are also added to the mortar box to amalgamate, or alloy with, the gold. The mush slopping through the screen flows down a gently inclined, mercury-coated copper plate as big as a banquet table, the mercury again serving to capture any tiny gold flakes in the mush.
Roughly every two weeks, the mortar box and the amalgamating plate are "cleaned up," or scraped, to recover the mercury/gold amalgam which is carefully distilled in a closed retort, or distilling vessel. This is one of the few processes Horne does not do himself. The mercury distils off, and is recovered by condensation to he used over and over again, and in the distilling vessel nothing remains but a spongy mass of gold, much of which Horne sells directly to a jeweller near Halifax. The purity of the gold from his Renfrew mine, says Horne, runs about 22 karat -- 91.6 percent pure gold. During peak production in the previous century, Renfrew yielded gold at a rate of about three-quarters of a troy ounce per ton of rock processed. When asked how that compares with his current rate of return, Horne's reply was hesitant and long in coming. "Well...that's always a...a kind of guess. For one thing we only take the quartz out and no wall rock, so it's a very selected ore and there's minimal waste. And the other thing is that you get areas that are quite different. Like right now, we're taking out ore that in some cases is running 10 ounces to the ton. But maybe in the next ton it might be running half an ounce to that ton. Gold isn't consistent, it runs in veins, it runs in pockets... it runs like a shadow across a piece of paper, that's about how I'd explain it."
Even in easy-to-mine Renfrew, it seems that Nova Scotia gold still maintains a basic unpredictability. Have Horne's years of experience helped him understand or predict its behaviour? "No! I'd dare any geologist to define in any consistent pattern where the gold is distributed and the amount, and where it is at any particular point in a vein. No, it's highly unpredictable."
These days, Horne is considering the future of his operation. He recently advertised in a Canadian mining magazine in search of a partner. Characteristically, he justifies the move on purely technical grounds, as one more way to get more gold out. "The old mills I've got are great for the high-grade ore, because I don't have to put much tonnage through, and I can get a lot of gold out of small amounts of quartz. But there's a lot of ore that I'm bypassing, in the wall rock on the sides of the quartz veins. If I could get someone to come in with a bigger tonnage mill, they could get a good recovery out of that because of the larger amount they could put through."
It must be a big step, almost like putting a child up for adoption. But whatever his private hopes and worries may be for the future of, essentially, his life's work, Horne, with his usual reticence, keeps any sentimental thoughts to himself.
He pauses reflectively, considering the possible outcome of his ad. "I'd say there are interested people around, but whether I'll latch onto one, I don't know. There's not exactly a line-up of people looking for gold properties in Nova Scotia." He pauses again while his features express a cheerful self-irony, and then concludes, "But there's not apt to be a line-up."
