THE SILVER MINES OF NORTHERN ONTARIO
Take up your map of North America and draw a line from Buffalo to the
lowest part of Hudson Bay. Divide it in half, and the middle point will
just about strike Cobalt, the centre of the world’s richest silver
deposits. I have come here via North Bay from Toronto, more than three
hundred miles to the south, and am now clicking my typewriter over
ground that has produced upward of one million dollars an acre in
silver-bearing ore. For a long time it has turned out a ton of silver
bullion every twenty-four hours.
There are said to be only two real silver-mining districts in the
world. One is at Guanajuato, Mexico, where the veins are of enormous
extent but yield a low grade of ore. The other is here at Cobalt, where
the deposits, though comparatively small, are almost pure silver.
In practically all the other great silver districts the metal is a
by-product. The Anaconda mine in Montana and the Coeur d’Alene in Idaho
are both famous silver producers, but in the former it is a by-product
of copper, and in the latter, of lead.
Twenty years ago, when I visited Cobalt shortly after the discovery
of its underground wealth, I rode all day on the Ontario government
railway through woods as wild as any on the North American continent.
The road wound its way in and out among lakes, sloughs, and swamps.
The country was covered with pine and hardwood, and so cut up by water
that one could have gone almost all over it in a canoe. Even along the
railroad it was so swampy and boggy that the telegraph poles had to be
propped up. Outside the swamps it was so rocky that deep holes could
not be made, and in such places great piles of rock were built up about
the poles to support them.
Some of the country was covered with bogs known as muskeg. This is a
bottomless swamp under a thin coating of vegetation, through which one
sinks down as though in a quicksand, and, if not speedily rescued, is
liable to drown. Hunters in travelling over it have to jump from root
to root, making their way by means of the trees that grow here and
there. There is said to be still much of this muskeg in the region of
Hudson Bay and almost everywhere throughout this northland. Much of it
has been drained, leaving a land somewhat like that of northwestern
Ohio, which was once known as the Black Swamp.
Reaching Cobalt, I had to rely on the miners for living accommodations.
Log cabins and frame buildings were going up in every direction and a
three-story hotel was being started, but many of the people were still
living in tents or in shacks covered with tar felt. Even the banks
hastily established to take care of the rapidly growing wealth of the
settlement were in tents, and the bankers slept at night beside their
safes with a gun always within reach. Streets were yet to be built,
and the wooden and canvas structures of the town straggled along roads
winding this way and that through the stumps. In the centre of the
settlement was a beautiful little lake that one could cross in a canoe
in a few minutes, and the mining properties extended back into the
woods in every direction.
To-day, although still possessing many of the characteristics of the
typical mining camp, Cobalt is a busy little city of six or seven
thousand inhabitants. The tar shacks and tents have been replaced by
modern buildings--banks, churches, stores, and homes--many of them
erected since the big fire in 1912. There are good schools, including
a school of mines, and the muddy roads have long since given way to
sidewalks and streets. Even the lake has gone, its waters having been
pumped away to allow mining operations, and where it once rippled
peacefully some of the richest veins in the district are now being
worked. Kerr Lake, a short distance from the town, has also been
drained to allow safer underground workings. The place reminds one of
the mines of the Bay of Nagasaki, Japan, where coal has been taken out
of fifty miles of tunnels under the Pacific Ocean. I have visited those
tunnels, and have also ridden by electric car through the coal mines
under the ocean off the coast of south Chile.
The discovery of silver at Cobalt marked the first finding in the
Dominion of any precious metal in important quantities between the
Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Two railway contractors,
employed in the building of the line northward from the town of North
Bay, were idly tossing pebbles into the lake when they found some
that they believed to be lead. An analysis showed almost pure silver.
Shortly afterward a French blacksmith named La Rose stubbed his toe
upon a piece of rock where the railway route had been blasted out,
and upon picking it up saw the white metal shining out of the blue
stone. He conferred with his friends and sent it down to Toronto to
be assayed. The report was that it was very rich in silver. La Rose
thereupon filed a mining claim, selling the first half of his property
to the Timmins corporation for five hundred dollars. Later he disposed
of the balance to the same parties, receiving for it twenty-seven
thousand dollars, which seemed a fortune to him. It was also a fortune
to the purchasers, who took out more than a million dollars’ worth of
pure silver.
Owing to the general tendency of the people to doubt the existence
of precious metals in large quantities in Ontario, and the efforts
of those who had made the “strike” to keep their discoveries secret,
it was more than two years before excitement over the find reached a
climax, and work on a large scale was begun. Since then these mines
have produced nearly fourteen thousand tons of silver bullion, worth
more than two hundred million dollars. Think what this means! Loaded
into cars of thirty-five tons, the total output would fill sixteen
trains of twenty-five cars to the train! Made into ten-cent pieces and
laid side by side, it would make a band of solid silver twice around
the world at the Equator! Manufactured into teaspoons, it would furnish
one for every person in the United States, England, and France, with
many to spare!
The height of the silver production at Cobalt was reached in 1911,
when thirty-one million ounces of the metal was refined. Since then
the yield has declined, but mining engineers say that the district
will produce silver in commercial quantities for another half century.
Eight mines are still each shipping a quarter million ounces or more of
silver a year, and one of them, the Nipissing, is producing annually
an average of four million ounces. Its huge mills, where the ore is
crushed and the silver taken out, can be seen across the lake bed from
the railway station, with gigantic overhead conveyors carrying the
rock from the mine to the mill. Silver is now being extracted in paying
quantities from what was once considered waste ore, and the tailings
previously dumped into the lakes have been treated in the mills,
yielding a net profit of three dollars’ worth of silver a ton. In the
meantime, the original three-mile radius of the silver-producing area
has been extended twenty miles to the southeast and sixty miles to the
northwest.
The entire Cobalt region seems to be one vast rock covered with a thin
skin of earth. I have visited the chief silver regions of the world,
but nowhere have I seen the metal cropping out on top of the ground as
it does here at Cobalt. The veins run for hundreds of feet across the
country, and often show up on the surface. I saw one mine where the
earth had been stripped off to the width of a narrow pavement for a
distance of a thousand feet. The rock underneath, which had been ground
smooth by glaciers, looked when cleaned much like a flagged sidewalk.
Winding through it was a vein of almost pure silver, so rich that I
could see the metal shine as though the rock were plated. I walked
over this silver street for hundreds of feet, scouring the precious
metal with my shoes as I did so. These veins are not regular in width
nor do they run evenly throughout. Here and there branches jut out
from the main one like the veins of a leaf, and the ore has everywhere
penetrated into the adjoining rocks.
For a long time the work here was more like stone quarrying than
mining. The country about is cut up by long trenches from ten to twenty
feet deep and five or more feet in width, which have been blasted out
of the rock to get the ore. The sides of the hills are now quarried
where the silver breaks out, and the veins are followed down into
the ground for long distances. One mining company has sunk a shaft
to a depth of four hundred and fifty feet, and has excavated about
thirty-seven miles of tunnels. So far, no one knows how deep the veins
go. The geologists say that the silver will lessen in extent as it
descends, and it is claimed that this has been the case with many of
the mines.
The discovery in 1923 of the largest silver nugget ever found renewed
interest in the Cobalt deposits, and has led to the reopening of
several old mines with profitable results. This gigantic find, which
tipped the scales at more than two thousand pounds, was about ninety
per cent. pure silver, and was valued at twenty thousand dollars.
The discovery was made by Anson Clement, a carpenter, in the Gillies
Timber Limit about five miles from Cobalt, and a team of horses with
a block and tackle was needed to haul the giant nugget out of the
ground. Nuggets of silver eighty and ninety per cent. pure and weighing
three and four hundred pounds each are not uncommon, and I have seen
chunks of silver ore the size of a paving brick that I could not lift.
Indeed, much of the ore reminds one of the rich copper nuggets that
are found in the Lake Superior region. Recently a vein of almost pure
silver, which in one place was between four and five feet in width, was
uncovered in the Keeley Mine, eighteen miles from Cobalt.
Before the discovery of the Cobalt deposits, British Columbia led in
the production of silver in Canada, and still has an output about
one third that of Ontario. Silver is mined also in Quebec and Yukon
Territory, a new silver district of promise having been discovered at
Keno Hill in the Yukon. Three thousand tons of ore has been taken from
one of the Keno Hill mines in one season. This has to be carried on dog
sleds and wagons forty-five miles to the Stewart River and then sent
down the Stewart and the Yukon to the Pacific, where it goes by ocean
steamer to the nearest smelter. Only an unusually high grade of ore can
be handled profitably with so long a freight haul before smelting.
The Cobalt mines produce not only silver, but also four fifths of
the world’s supply of cobalt. Cobalt and silver are frequently found
together, but nowhere in such quantities as here. Cobalt is a mineral
somewhat like nickel in its properties, and is also used instead of
nickel for plating steel. It is used to make paints and pigments,
and is often known commercially as cobalt blue. Silicate of cobalt
furnishes the colour for all the finest blue china. Practically the
entire Canadian output, most of which is smelted at plants in southern
Ontario, is exported to England and the United States.
The cobalt can be plainly seen in the ore when the rock is exposed to
the weather. It is of a steel-gray colour tinged with rose-pink, and
where it occurs in the form of a powder it looks exactly like rouge.
When heated it turns a beautiful blue. Arsenic and other elements
are often found mixed with the cobalt-silver ore, and the region has
deposits of nickel, copper, and lead.
A hundred miles to the north of Cobalt is the Porcupine gold district.
The gold output ranks first in value among the metals produced in
Canada, and four fifths of all that is mined in the Dominion comes
from the Porcupine and Kirkland Lake districts of Northern Ontario.
The Hollinger mine in the Porcupine area is the largest gold mine in
North America and one of the richest in the world. It began operations
in 1910, and within ten years after it was opened had produced almost
a hundred million dollars’ worth of gold, and had paid dividends of
thirteen millions. The Hollinger shaft goes down into the earth fifteen
hundred feet or more and there are about thirty miles of underground
tunnels.
There is no telling what minerals may not be discovered in this section
of Ontario, which seems to be a part of the great mineral belt that
extends from Lake Superior northward toward Hudson Bay. There is iron
on the Canadian side of Lake Superior, and some of our richest mines of
iron and copper are found on the western and southern shores of that
lake. Petroleum, natural gas, and salt are produced in the peninsular
region of the province between lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario to the
amount of more than three million dollars’ worth a year. About a
hundred miles from Cobalt lies Sudbury, which has the richest nickel
deposits of the whole world, and prospectors say that there are
minerals all the way north to James Bay, which juts down into Canada at
the lower end of Hudson Bay.
[Illustration: The silver deposits around Cobalt crop out on top of the
ground in veins of almost pure metal hundreds of feet long. Millions of
dollars’ worth have been mined without any underground workings.]
[Illustration: The prospector in northern Ontario, the richest mineral
region in Canada, safeguards his claim by erecting “discovery posts”
bearing his name, number of his mining license, and date of his find.]