The British Columbia mining frontier in the decades around the turn of this century was situated in the difficult, mountainous, and largely uninhabited south-east corner of the province. About 200 miles from the Pacific coast as the crow flies, the area forms a triangle, hemmed in east and west and repeatedly interrupted by mountains. The mountain ridges break the area into a series of smaller regions, the Boundary country on the west, the West Kootenay and the East Kootenay on the east. The base of the triangle, the American border, is approximately 150 miles long; its apex is 130 miles north around Revelstoke. Fifty miles to the east, where the Alberta border cuts across the peaks of the Rockies, lies a crucial natural entrance to the area, the Crow's Nest Pass. The Pass area figures in the following story because it became an important coal producer both for the smelters of the British Columbia interior and for the farm homes of the prairies.
More than two decades after the original Fraser River gold rush began in the late 1850s, independent prospectors uncovered the mineral riches of the Kootenays and the Boundary country. Between 1880 and 1900, men and money poured into the newest frontier. Because of its isolated location, and its openness to the mining region immediately south of the American border (called the "Inland Empire"), there was danger that the mining frontier would be integrated into the American economy. The commercial ambitions of the Canadian Pacific Railway, however, led to the construction of the Crow's Nest Pass line which tied the region into the Canadian economy. Virtually by chance, the C.P.R. entered the mining and smelting business at the same time and joined the trend toward larger business operations that had started in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Workers responded to the concentration of ownership by establishing strong unions, and as a result, contributed to the class conflict which, then and now, has marked the British Columbia labour scene.
By the First World War, the region bore little resemblance to the isolated undeveloped region it had been prior to the coming of the miner. The rough camps had been succeeded by several large mining conglomerates and settled communities as well as the ghosts of former boom towns. This is the story of the transformation of the British Columbia frontier and its integration into the Canadian economy and society.
It has been said of early British Columbia that "gold made it gold unmade it." Certainly, the search for the yellow metal played a vital role in the early history of the province before the gold deposited along the river beds had played out. One of the legacies of the miner's entry into the Kootenay area, where strikes had been made on Wild Horse Creek, was the construction of the Dewdney Trail into the southern interior, but by the 1870s the Kootenay region `slumbered peacefully'. Though other mineral resources were known to be buried in these mountains and valleys, including the deposits of galena (silver-lead) ore which the Hudson's Bay Company had used for bullets, the cost of transportation was too great to encourage development. A few miners, mainly Chinese, eked out an existence reworking the placer gold deposits but the number of electors in the region, a gauge of the permanent white population, reached a peak of only forty-seven in 1877.
Americans provided the drive that opened the Kootenays. Expansion into Montana and Wyoming, fuelled by the desire for precious metals, eventually carried prospectors north of the forty-ninth parallel and led to the discovery of gold, silver, copper, lead, and zinc ores in the 1880s and early 1890s. The first lode (or vein) mining occurred in the Ainsworth area on Kootenay Lake where silver-lead deposits were rediscovered in 1882. Some early attempts at commercial exploitation were made by Captain Ainsworth of San Francisco on the west shore claims, but apparently without much success. On the east shore of the lake, development was hindered by a dispute over the Blue Bell claim which resulted in the murder of one of the disputants and the hanging of the other. Finally, in 1887, an American capitalist, W.A. Hendryx, began operations at the Blue Bell.
A year earlier, major discoveries of silver-copper ore on Toad Mountain, near Nelson, started the real influx of prospectors into British Columbia. The richest funds were the famous Silver King claims (Silver King, Kootenay Bonanza, American Flag, and Kohinoor). From Kootenay Lake, prospectors branched out in three directions. To the west they moved along the old Dewdney Trail where, on Red Mountain (Rossland), fabulous copper-gold ores were discovered in 1887. The most famous were the Lily May, Le Roi, Centre Star, War Eagle, Idaho and Virginia claims. In 1891, the copper-gold deposits in the Boundary country further west were discovered. To the northwest, in the Slocan district, silver-lead-zinc ores were discovered in 1891 and, to the north-east, in the East Kootenays, claims to similar ore bodies were staked in 1892. In addition, the ores of the Boundary region were uncovered and, by 1894, the first shipments had departed the Mother Lode, Old Ironsides, and Knob Hill claims near Phoenix.
This was the era of the independent miner, at once prospector and speculator, who found the ore, staked the claim and, perhaps with the aid of a few partners, undertook to drive a shaft or open a "glory-hole", as the open pit mines were called. But the boom days, when the little man could strike it rich, were short-lived. Within a decade, the most concentrated seams of copper, gold, and silver were played out. In the Kootenays, peak production in terms of value was achieved in 1901. In the Boundary district, the peak of ore smelting was reached in 1912. Long before then the grade of ore was declining and costs were rising. The result was a move to consolidation in bigger, fewer, more highly mechanized companies.
Shipment of the ore to market presented an enormous problem to the first generation of miners. Pack trains, wagons, and horse-drawn rawhide sleds carried ore from the claims to navigable waterways, where steam paddlewheelers transferred it to smelters or to rail connections such as the one at Bonner's Ferry. The expansion of the fleet of paddlewheelers during the 1880s was a direct consequence of the need for transporting bulky loads of ore out of and supplies into the region, usually via the United States but also across the Arrow Lakes to connect with the CPR line at Revelstoke.
Such procedures were far too cumbersome to permit the full-scale development of the great riches in the Kootenays. Two strategies were employed to improve economic communications and, in Canada's railway age, it is not surprising that one involved the iron horse. By 1889, twenty-seven rail companies received charters to enter the Kootenay and, in the next decade, twenty more companies were incorporated. Despite the enthusiasm of promoters, and handsome government subsidies in the form of money and land, only eleven rail lines were actually constructed. Nevertheless, many feeder and connecting roads were completed in the first half of the 1890s, thus providing rail-steamship links with the Canadian Pacific to the north, and the Northern Pacific and Great Northern below the border. Despite some valiant efforts by the Canadians, however, the all-Canadian route was clearly losing to its American rivals during this period.
The second economic strategy was to smelt or concentrate the ore near the mining area, thus reducing the weight and bulk of the minerals to be shipped out. The technique had been extensively used in Montana and Washington in the early years and when the smelters and concentrators were constructed in British Columbia, American capital was deeply involved.
The smelter boom between 1895 and 1902 further increased the importance of the Kootenay-Boundary area because it created many new towns with their supporting service industries. The population grew from around 2,000 in 1890 to over 30,000 in 1901, and sawmills, hotels, boarding houses, stores, banks and innumerable drinking places catered to the needs of the miners and smelter workers. The chief towns of the region were Nelson, Kaslo, Nakusp, Slocan City, Rossland and Trail, all of which depended for their importance upon their transportation or smelter facilities. Nelson was founded on the Toad Mountain finds around 1888-1890; its smelter was built in 1895 and enlarged the following year. In these eight years its population grew from under two hundred to about one thousand. Kaslo was the largest city in the interior with a reported population around 6,000. Is economic basis was in shipping as it lay at the junction of the steamship line to Spokane and the Great Northern rail line into Slocan and the mines around Sandon. On the Arrow Lakes was Kaslo's competitor, Nakusp, from which the CPR line came into Sandon and the mine area around New Denver and Silverton. Slocan City, on the south end of Slocan Lake, was the end of steel for the CPR line built in 1896 to connect with Trail. With water connections to New Denver and points north, Slocan City proud boasted 16 hotels and saloons, and dozens of stores. The rise and fall of the golden city Rossland, began with the last shipment of ore by mule, boat and train to smelters at Helena and Tacoma in 1891. During the next decade, about 1000 men were employed in the Red Mountain mines of the area. The Boundary region, which began production in 1893-94, acquired smelters at Grand Forks (the Grandby Company, 1900), Greenwood (British Columbia Copper Company, 1901), and Boundary Falls (Montreal and Boston Copper Company, 1901).
The growth of Trail was probably the most significant event in the development of the Interior. In order to compete with a smelter planned for Northport, just across the boarder in American territory, a young entrepreneur from Butte, Montana, F.A. Heinze, constructed a smelter at (Dewdney) Trail Landing. Armed with a contract to smelt the ores from the rich Le Roi mine, Heinze also built a narrow gauge railway to transport the ore from Rossland. His foresight was to lay the basis for the creation of a Canadian mining empire at Trail, which had become a town of 2,000 by 1897.
Control over transportation was to determine the control of trade in Canada's new "inland empire." The battle lay between Canadian commercial capital, in the form of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and American commercial capital led by the Great Northern Railway. In 1891 the CPR had purchased Heinze's Trail smelter. Its railway subsidiary, the Columbia and Western, in an attempt to bring the commerce of the region onto its east-west line, had acquired the Columbia and Kootenay Steam Navigation Company in 1896 and had built or purchased a number of other railway lines. In 1898, the Columbia and Western bought the charter of the British Columbia Southern Railway Company for a line to the Crow's Nest Pass from Kootenay Lake. The charter included a Provincial land grant of 3 3/4 million acres of land and almost 4,000 acres of coal land in the Pass area. Against the CPR, the Great Northern had spread its competing network of branch lines north from its mainline centred on Spokane, including lines to Nelson (1895), to Grand Forks (1903-4), Midway (1906), and the Pass coal region (1903-5). It also controlled a steamship line centred on Kootenay Lake. Thus, the battle for commercial dominance was intense in the mid-1890s.
The master stroke of strategy which brought ultimate victory was conceived in the offices of the Canadian Pacific. Strathcona, Van Horne and company built the "connecting link", the Crow's Nest Pass Railway, from the CP mainline in southern Alberta through the coal fields of the Crow's Nest region to Kootenay Landing in the Interior. Construction of the rail line was heavily subsidized by the Canadian government, to the extent of $11,000 per mile. Why the government was so generous is still debated by historians. Was it merely a continuation of John A. Macdonald's national policy which would encourage the integration of another resource frontier into the main-stream of the Canadian economy? It certainly had that effect. On the other hand, it is clear from CPR records that the railway would have built the Crow's Nest Pass line with or without the government hand out. More likely, then, the subsidy was given as the CPR's price for acceptance of government regulation of railway freight rates, a regulation now embodied in the famous Crow's Nest Pass rates on grain.
But whatever the reason, completion of the line in 1898 established the CPR's pre-eminence in the mining frontier of the B.C. interior and, as Fowke and Britnell have demonstrated (see p. 33 reference in reading list) permitted the integration of the region into the Canadian commercial economy. Mining machinery and other manufactured goods, protected by the National Policy tariffs, now moved west on Canadian rather than American rails. This westward movement of manufactures was supplemented by agricultural products, livestock, dairy and grain products from Alberta and Manitoba and poultry products from Ontario. Minerals smelted in the CPR-controlled Trail smelter comprised the major return flow and gave new impetus to the East Kootenay mining region.
Large coal deposits in the Pass region provided a fortunate complementary resource that the new rail route made economically feasible for exploitation. In addition to the coal needs of the rail road's steam engines, the smelters had an omnivorous demand for coke which had previously been supplied from Vancouver Island and, indeed, from much farther afield. Once connected by rail to the Kootenays, the Pass district took over as major supplier since it could deliver coal and coke to the smelters at about 60 percent of the cost of coast fuel. The Crow's Nest Pass Coal Company was incorporated in 1897 and, with its competitors, was shipping nearly a half million tons of coal and coke by 1903. Approximately a thousand coking ovens dotted the Pass landscape and almost 1,500 men were employed by the company. The fortunes of the Crow's Nest Pass fields were thus inextricably linked with the Kootenay and Boundary metal mines and smelters.
The events of the late 1890s marked not only the victory of Canadian capital but also the rise of large wealthy corporations in the mining industry. Between 1885 and 1900, no fewer than 1,316 mine companies had been established, but only 200 remained in existence by 1901 and, by 1914, just 35 companies survived. In the Boundary area, the Grandby Company was a dominant enterprise, as was the B.C. Copper Company. The greatest corporation of all, however, was a remote descendant of Heinze's little smelter at Trail, the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (COMlNCO) which was established in 1906 under the control of the CPR. These corporate giants succeeded by vertical integration (the turning of mines, smelters, power utilities and even transportation systems into one company), horizontal integration (the consolidation of more and more mines into one company), and consolidation. By buying control -of a number of mines, and integrating mining, smelting, power production and transportation, they promoted economies of scale.
The rapid growth in population naturally created a bustling society of miners and merchants. A significant proportion (one might estimate roughly one-third) were Americans, most of whom migrated from the mining region just across the border. With them came their union, the militant and radical Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The WFM was formed in Butte, Montana in 1893 following a bloody clash with Idaho mine owners. Mining has traditionally been an industry marked by sharp conflict between labour and capital, a result of dismal and dangerous working conditions, the often primitive living conditions, and the common exploitation of workers by the company store. The situation was made worse by the restiveness of transient, womanless men. But the American strikes were particularly violent because of the anti-labour attitudes and the greed of the mine owners, the notorious robber barons of western America. The result was open class war which led the WFM to adopt a strong socialist program and eventually to participate in the founding of the anarcho-syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in 1905.
Union-management relations in the B.C. interior, while never cordial, did not degenerate to the open violence of the American strikes. The first local of the WFM was founded in Rossland in 1895, but the union made little headway until the process of company consolidation had begun and the number of small independent miners declined. Conflicts between unions and mine owners over eight-hour day legislation, which had been passed by the provincial legislature in 1898, first triggered large-scale union organizations. A widespread strike to support the legislation was called in early 1899, and affected almost four thousand workers in the West Kootenay. Later in the year, thirteen locals of the Western Federation of Miners formed District 6, their own region of the international union. The union and the strike were apparently effective since the act was maintained.
Labour-management strife continued to disrupt the new mining communities. The most famous dispute was the Rossland strike of 1901 over several issues, the most important being anti-union discrimination by the companies which led eventually to the new, 1902 provincial Labour Act. The new legislation resulted in part, from agitation by Smith Curtis, the district's labour-supported member of the provincial government, to give unions greater legal protection against damage suits resulting from strikes such as the Rossland dispute. By 1903, there were fifteen locals covering almost all the important metal mining centres and three locals in the major coal mining towns. Total district membership approached 2,000. Then, a widespread strike took place across western Canada involving the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees and supported by the coal miners in the WFM. The strike was broken with the help of the federal government. Shortly afterwards, the coal mining locals split off to become part of District 18, United Mine Workers of America, while the "hard rock" miners remained in the WFM, which was renamed the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1917. The two unions continued to represent the workers through the period.
The major period of expansion had come to a close before the First World War because of a combination of low metal prices, generally depressed economic conditions, and falling ore yields. Many mines and smelters had closed, but the advent of European hostilities brought high prices and renewed expansion, this time along established corporate lines. The value of output rose quite dramatically, at least until 1916. However, the mines of Rossland were exhausted and the Boundary mines were soon to follow suit. The war marked the end of the gold, silver and copper era and the rise to prominence of lead and zinc. Exploitation of these base metals, however, was hampered by the complexity and low grade of the east Kootenay ores, in particular, those of the Sullivan Mine near Kimberly. The wartime rise by over 150 percent in zinc prices spurred experimentation with flotation and electrolysis. Flotation was first used in Canada unsuccessfully at the Le Roi mine in 1902. It is a process of concentrating the metallic ore by "floating" the metal bearing particles off the ground host rock on oily bubbles specially frothed for the purpose; electrolysis is a method of refining impure metal by passing an electric current through a solution resulting in the depositing of the pure metal on a charged grid which is suspended in the solution. These new processes finally unlocked the problems with the Sullivan ores after 1918. The profitable exploitation of the base metals of the region could continue on a systematic basis. Mining was so profitable, in fact, that Cominco, the CPR subsidiary, threatened to dwarf the parent railway.
The south eastern part of B.C. had largely lost its frontier nature by the first few years of the 20th Century. The completion of the Crow's Nest Pass Railway and the creation of Cominco in 1906 had secured the area, under stable corporate control, for the Canadian economy.
