The lure of gold, silver, and other metals has led to dramatic movements of people to new frontiers in North America. The California rush of 1849 was followed by a succession of rushes in western Canada which culminated in the Klondike in the 1890's. The promise of wealth led fortune-seekers to open up undeveloped regions to settlement. In much the same way, the discovery of precious metals stimulated the development of "New" Ontario in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This mining boom witnessed the discovery of nickel and copper at Sudbury in 1883, silver at Cobalt in 1903, and gold in the Porcupine district in 1909. These mining camps may have lacked some of the colour and excitement of the Caribou and Klondike, but each was of greater long-term significance than these spectacular but short-lived rushes. The production of Northern Ontario mines provided Canada with a major portion of its staple export of minerals.
The opening of this new territory is largely the story of thousands of bold individuals, most of whom discovered the hardships of a pioneer existence instead of quick fortunes. Both the Sudbury and Cobalt camps were accidental by-products of railway construction, but the individual prospector, nevertheless, played an important part in finding the ore bodies. In Cobalt, the Caribou, and the Klondike, it was possible for a prospector to both discover and mine a property. Prospectors in Sudbury and the Porcupine, on the other hand, staked claims with the intention of selling them to a company with the necessary capital and technical knowledge to develop the complex ores. Buying these mining properties was a gamble with the odds heavily against success. Canadian and British financiers were reluctant to invest in such questionable schemes and, as a result, much of the original capital came from the United States.
The corporate structure of these three Northern Ontario mining camps was largely determined by the relative complexity of the operations required to free the metal from the ore. The simple methods of placer mining which were used in California and the Klondike where the metals were found in a free state and could be recovered through panning the gravel of creek beds or by running gravel through sluice boxes were impossible in Northern Ontario. The metals were imbedded in ore bodies in a variety of complex relationships. The ore usually existed in the form of veins of varying length and depth, originally formed during a period of earth movement when ascending hot liquids carrying mineral constituents flowed into fissures and cracks in the earth's crust. Elaborate, large-scale equipment was required to mine and to extract the metal from the ore. Only in Cobalt were relatively individualistic methods possible in the early years because high-grade ore cropped up in veins near the surface, and the extraction of the silver from the calcite ore was a fairly simple task. As a result, over forty companies were in operation, some on a very small scale. In the Porcupine gold fields, the gold was usually found in quartz formations and required extensive treatment. Several companies were successful, but three dominated the scene. In Sudbury, on the other hand, finding a feasible process for extracting the nickel from the sulfide ores was a difficult and costly business for nickel was still largely unknown in the nineteenth century. The high cost of research and the size of the mining operation in Sudbury forced many companies out of the field; eventually mining in the Sudbury area was dominated by one company.
In some ways the corporate structure of the mining camps was reflected in the nature of labour relations, particularly in union organization. Mining companies reacted vigorously and with varying degrees of success against the organization of their labour force. In Sudbury, union organization was particularly sporadic because one powerful company dominated. Unionism became much more established in Cobalt where a proliferation of companies hired miners. The story of unionism is essentially the story of the relatively radical Western Federation of Miners (later known as the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers), first organized by the militant Bill Haywood in Montana. Most of its early Canadian membership was in British Columbia. The issues in Ontario were the right to organize, the demand for an eight-hour day, and the wage scales. A local of the union was first organized in Cobalt in 1906, and in less than a decade, branches existed in Sudbury, the Porcupine, and other mining camps. In 1916 Cobalt became the Ontario headquarters, by which time, the union had been forced out in Sudbury. It was not successfully re-established there until the 1940's.
One of the major consequences of any mining boom is the sudden appearance of a number of frontier urban communities. In Northern Ontario they may be roughly classified as follows: First were the colourful mining camps which bloomed virtually overnight and were characterized by the traditional main street of shacks and log cabins. These were sometimes transformed in a few years into more substantial communities. The best example is Cobalt, but Elk City, Gowganda, Golden City, South Porcupine, and others also grew in this fashion. Such towns often faded almost as quickly as they had sprung to life. A second type, which later became more common, was the company town, such as Copper Cliff. These were owned and built by the company for the convenience of staff and some wage labourers. These towns usually provided most urban amenities but their size and social composition was much more static than towns not directly owned by the mining companies. A third type was the town which emerged as the main service or distributing centre for the area. These towns usually had some particular advantage in terms of location or transportation. They were not boom towns for they grew very slowly and looked like established towns in other parts of the country. Their growth reflected the general expansion of economic activity in their vicinity, especially the growth of the industrial work force. Sudbury and Timmins are examples.
All of these mining towns had one economic factor in common - they were all single enterprise communities whose destinies were determined by the success or failure of the local mining operations. Diversification was difficult for a number of reasons: mining regions are usually unsuitable for the support of agriculture, the camps were isolated from the major markets, and the relatively high wages in the mining industry discouraged the introduction of secondary industry. These communities have remained colonial towns, part of the economic, cultural, and political empire of Toronto. As on other mining frontiers, the major beneficiary of the mining booms in Northern Ontario has been the metropolitan centre. The mining camps have served merely as agents for the extraction of an exportable staple.
The Nickel Industry in the Sudbury Area
The presence of mineral deposits had been reported in various parts of Northern Ontario from the middle of the nineteenth century, but no major development took place before the discovery of what appeared to be copper ore at Sudbury in 1883. The ore was apparent in a rock cut along the line of construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway about three miles west of Sudbury. Sudbury was then a temporary railway construction centre. Even though this particular spot along the railway was bought by speculators for the standard one dollar per acre, there was no rush, no new mining boom since the local residents had been given expert advice that the copper traces were not significant enough to warrant development. A few prospectors, however, such as Thomas Frood and James Stobie combed the area in 1884, and by the following year most of the major ore bodies were located and staked.
No individual prospector could actually begin mining a copper claim. This required immense capital for heavy equipment in addition to technical knowledge beyond that of the amateur prospector. Thus Frood and others were happy to sell their claims to Samuel J. Ritchie, an American entrepreneur, who organized the Canadian Copper Company early in 1886. Later that same year, the newly organized company began shipping ore taken from open pits at the Copper Cliff mine and others to the Orford Copper Company in New Jersey for refining. At the refinery it was discovered that the ore contained less copper than expected but that it also included a little-known metal, nickel, then only mined in commercial quantities in the French South Sea colony of New Caledonia.
The discovery of nickel set off a long research program to find the best way to extract the metal from the ore. On Ritchie fell the task of selling the nickel. It was the sort of challenge he relished. He prided himself on his high-level contacts with the U.S. and Canadian governments and soon had a representative of the U.S. Navy and Charles Tupper, the Canadian High Commissioner to London, accompanying him on a tour of some of the leading European manufacturers using nickel. The small contingent found much interest in the use of nickel for naval armour plating (the naval race leading to World War I had just begun) and hence great enthusiasm for the production of the Sudbury fields. A market was assured. The U.S. navy even sent a team to Sudbury to make sure that enough ore existed for their long-term use. Ritchie's position in his company was becoming tenuous. His associates, appalled at evidence of questionable speculation and contradictory promises to the Canadian and U.S. governments, removed him from office and soon after from the company entirely. A major administrative reorganization took place in 1902 when the Canadian Copper Company, the Orford Company, and several smaller firms were consolidated into the giant holding company, International Nickel. The result was that the Canadian nickel industry was virtually made an adjunct of the American economy and particularly of the American steel industry which supervised the consolidation move.
Throughout this international bargaining, the work of mining and smelting in the Sudbury region was prospering, with Canadian Copper dominating the scene. Between 1887 and 1902, Canadian Copper mined 71% of the almost two million tons of ore mined in the district. Local smelters were in operation by 1888. Two processes were involved, heap roasting and blast furnace reduction. The first stage, heap roasting, was designed to reduce the amount of sulphur in the ore. The ore was piled on beds of wood, and when the sulphur in the ore was ignited, it burned for months, sending off dense sulphurous fumes. The remaining ore was then put through blast furnaces for further reduction of impurities before being shipped to a refinery. The use of heap roasting as part of the smelting process was in effect until the late 1920's and was the main reason for the devastation of the vegetation in the Sudbury district. The fumes destroyed the undergrowth, and erosion did the rest of the damage. With the successive improvement and enlargement of the smelter furnaces, heap roasting was discontinued.
The growth of communities in the region was directly related to the expansion of the nickel industry. By 1900 the major producer, Canadian Copper, employed about 1,200 men in the area. Sudbury slowly grew as the service centre of the region, and had a population of almost 2,000 in 1900, seventeen years after its founding. By 1921 the population had reached 8,000 reflecting the demand for nickel which rose sharply with the coming of World War I. Sudbury had by then lost its frontier appearance and did not look much different from other small communities in Ontario.
Silver at Cobalt
The discovery of copper and nickel at Sudbury led to the settlement of a portion of Northern Ontario, but developments at Sudbury had little direct effect on the extension of the mining frontier to other parts of the region. The discovery of silver at Cobalt was the result of an Ontario government attempt to stimulate the agricultural settlement of the clay belts of Northern Ontario, In 1903, during the construction of a colonization railway, the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario, railway employees found traces of mineral deposits near Haileybury, a little agricultural service centre. Samples sent to the provincial government's geological branch resulted in a visit to the scene by provincial geologist Willet Miller. Astounded by the amount of high grade silver ore which appeared in outcroppings on the two main claims staked, Miller immediately set out to survey and map the area. Perhaps, because of the well-known results of what had happened to most of those going to the Klondike five years earlier, Canadians were wary of this "new Eldorado." No rush developed until the spring of 1905 after the first shipments of silver in 1904 had proven the worth of the camp. The trip which fortune hunters made to Cobalt was hardly reminiscent of the incredible trek to the Klondike. Prospectors or speculators could take the overnight Pullman from Toronto and arrive in the middle of the camp the next morning with all of their baggage and equipment and armed with an accurate geological map based on Miller's surveys.
Cobalt did resemble the Klondike in the sense that it was something of a poor man's camp. With luck, an individual prospector could both locate and develop a mine since some veins of almost pure silver were very near the surface. One of those who originally discovered silver in 1903, the railway blacksmith Fred LaRose, sold his claims for about $30,000 to a group which included the two Timmins brothers. Other prospectors developed their own finds and became wealthy mine owners. An example was W.G, Tretheway, a Cornishman with prospecting experience in British Columbia. In 1904 he staked two claims and began mining with extremely primitive equipment. Because the ore veins near the surface were very rich, his sales from his first year of mining allowed him to purchase more elaborate equipment for what became two of the biggest producing mines in the early camp. Tretheway's experience, which was duplicated many times, resulted in a profusion of small companies usually operating only one mine. In 1905, sixteen mines were being worked, but by 1910, at the height of the boom, forty-one mines were producing over $15 million worth of silver a year. By 1922, when many of the mines were exhausted, almost $300 million worth of silver had been taken from the Cobalt camp.
Unlike Sudbury which grew very slowly but eventually developed into a substantial urban community, Cobalt sprang into maturity in less than five years. The tent and shack town of 1905 had become, by 1910, a community with an air of permanence and a population of 10,000. The town never entirely lost its early haphazard character, however, for it had been laid out without much concern for symmetry. In fact, critics usually pointed out that Cobalt was really just one long street which casually followed the rocky shoreline of Cobalt Lake.
Any description of Cobalt must take into account the fact that it was a mining camp which suddenly emerged near two established towns, Haileybury and New Liskeard. A kind of spatial class distinction emerged with most of the miners and technical staff living in Cobalt while many of the mine owners lived five miles away in Haileybury along "millionaires' row" overlooking Lake Timiskaming. In a sense this "tri-town" area really constituted a single community, and after 1912, they were connected by an electric streetcar system on a half-hour schedule.
In spite of being a lively mining camp, Cobalt had the reputation of being a law-abiding community. One of the reasons for this may have been an Ontario law which prohibited the sale of alcohol within five miles of an operating mine (there were several mines within the townsite). Residents wishing to drink legally could go to one of Haileybury's many hotels. Others, however, tended to frequent one of the thirty-five to forty "blind-pigs", the illegal bars which apparently operated quite openly with little suppression by the authorities. Nevertheless, many of the negative characteristics of mining camps on other frontiers did not seem to be as evident in Cobalt where schools, churches, theatres, and sports were well supported.
Gold in the Porcupine District
After most of the likely properties in the Cobalt area were staked, prospectors fanned out over the north looking for a new strike. A short-lived rush to the Gowganda region resulted in the instant mining camps of Elk City and Gowganda. Excitement grew again during 1909 with the news of major gold discoveries in the Porcupine district further to the north. The sites of the future three great mines of the area - the Dome, the Hollinger, and the Mclntyre - were all staked that year. Ironically, in the case of the Hollinger discovery, the spot had been prospected and a test pit dug several years earlier by a Klondike man who was looking for gold and did not recognize the value of the ore body. Those who did recognize its value - Benny Hollinger and his partners - sold their claims for $350,000 to investors willing to speculate on the unproven ore body. This was the same group, headed by Noah Timmins, which had made a fortune on the LaRose mine in Cobalt. Their instinct proved correct for the claims they purchased were to form the basis for the greatest producer of gold in Canadian mining history.
Unlike Sudbury and Cobalt, the Porcupine region was not immediately accessible by rail since the line of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway passed about thirty-five miles to the east of the area. Transportation by other means was almost impossible during the summer because so much of the area was wet and swampy. Much of the early mining equipment had to be brought in by teams of horses during the winter of 1910-1911 after the freeze-up. By the summer of 1911, a branch line of the railway reached the eastern portion of the district, and connections with the outside world were greatly improved.
Mining activity in the region was intense by 1911. Visitors commented on the quality of the stripping and trenching operations which reflected the experience of Cobalt. In fact, many of those in charge of the mines had gained their experience in Cobalt although the size of the operation in the Porcupine was larger and the chemical processes for the separation of the metal more complex. The major mine was the Hollinger which in its fifty-eight years produced over $1/2 billion worth of gold, while the Mclntyre and the Dome have each produced over $1/4 billion worth and are still in operation.
The sudden influx of thousands of treasure-seekers to the new gold fields resulted in several instant communities. The first was Golden City, laid out on the shores of Porcupine Lake by the provincial government in order to provide for an orderly settlement. A livelier town was South Porcupine at the other end of the lake closer to the scene of exploration and to the Dome mine. Both were remarkably similar in appearance with the familiar collection of shacks, saloons, stores, banks, and homes along one main street. South Porcupine was to fall victim to the disastrous fire which swept the region in the summer of 1911. However, the town of about five hundred people reappeared virtually overnight as a tent town and was quickly rebuilt. Both Golden City and South Porcupine had been hastily located on swampy ground near the lake and, consequently, had poor drainage and sanitation facilities. A more suitable site, called Timmins, which was laid out near the Hollinger mine had caught the imagination of town lot investors by the fall of 1911. The original impetus to this town was the construction of company-owned housing for Hollinger employees. Timmins grew very slowly with a population of less than 4,000 in 1921, but it eclipsed the other towns of the area and became the main service centre of the Porcupine.
The mining frontier continued to expand into new territory after the Porcupine finds. The next major strike in the region was at Kirkland Lake in 1911 where the legendary Harry Oakes laid the foundation of his incredible fortune with mines such as the Lakeshore. Within a decade, the insatiable search for new sources of precious metals led prospectors from the area of northeastern Ontario into northwestern Quebec, where another new mining region opened with the Noranda boom.
The Mining Frontier in Retrospect
There can be no doubt that mining has played a major role in the development of several regions of Canada, including Northern Ontario. Mining accelerated the growth of other kinds of activity through its demands for transportation, hydro-electric power, the products of farm and forest, and urban amenities for its instant communities. In a more general sense, mining provided the nation with a major staple product, at least as important to the economy as fish, fur, lumber, and grain had been in earlier years.
To have mining as the raison d`être of an entire region has several major drawbacks which have become clearly evident in the experience of Northern Ontario. Mining was, especially in the early years, extremely careless and wasteful in its methods and lacked concern for the surrounding environment. Then, too, mining tended to accentuate a region's colonial status in relation to established metropolitan centres by its emphasis on primary extractive functions to the neglect of secondary industry. Ultimately, the most damaging feature of a mining-based economy is its impermanence, for sooner or Iater the mines are exhausted. In the case of California and the Caribou, mining opened up regions capable of diversification into other types of economic endeavour. In the Yukon when mining died, there was nothing to replace it. For Northern Ontario, the verdict is not yet in.
