Placer Mining in Heart of City.
The gold-mining industry, both placer and quartz, in most instances has been for long so closely associated with the wilderness that the average man instantly conjures up pictures of ice-bound mountain passes, or glaring, sun-scorched stretches of desert, when he thinks of it. To such places his imagination turns where men daily and hourly must face hardship and danger in order to win the precious metal.
Yet in the city of Edmonton, Canada, since the outbreak of war, some thirty “grizzlies” have been at work on the banks of the Saskatchewan River. Here, within half a block of the city’s main street, and always with the sound of its traffic in their ears, nearly a hundred men daily shovel and sluice for gold.
The bars of the Saskatchewan River in the early days and as late as 1900 were worked. Many prospectors at that time made from three to ten dollars a day. Of late years, however, mining of this kind has been abandoned, though a large dredge, working the bars of the river, has proven a paying proposition.
The river runs directly through the city. With the outbreak of war and the possibility of large numbers of men being out of employment, the city council suddenly turned their attention to gold mining, which offered returns right in the heart of the city. Within its gates are to-day a large number of old mining men. Men who, after going through the Klondike rush, settled here. Most of them are to-day wealthy and retired. But some half dozen of them offered their services as tutors.
A number of grizzlies, so commonly used in the working of river bars and other placer-mining propositions, were constructed and for a while they gave instructions as how to work them. About a hundred men soon went to work. Though the highest daily clean-up so far has been seven dollars, the majority of the workers are making from one to two dollars a day.
The workmen are from all classes of society. Old-time sourdoughs work next to new-come English immigrants. Two college students, working their way through a nearby university, put in their off hours shoveling and panning. An out-of-work literary man and an out-of-work actor here are working a claim together.
The mining game has always been marked for its tragic side. The stories of men made suddenly rich overnight by some fortunate strike has been told in a hundred stories; but seldom is the other side mentioned, the story of quick-flung-away wealth that went almost as rapidly as it came.
Working slowly, toilfully, with the mark of old age upon him, in this diggings within the heart of the city is at least one man who is a living representative of this sad side of the game. His name is Tim Foley. Ten years ago he sold his third interest in a quartz mine in northern Ontario for $40,000. To-day he toils strenuously on the river bank, his great hope, as he himself expressed it, to clean up three or four dollars a day.