Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

CHAPTER XX

SILVER, GOLD AND COMMERCE

I

Cobalt is a fantasy town. It is a Rackham drawing with all its little grey houses perched up on queer shelves and masses of greeny-grey rock. Its streets are whimsical. They wander up and down levels, and in and out of houses, and sometimes they are roads and sometimes they are stairs. One glance at them and I began to repeat, "There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile." A delightful genius had done the town to illustrate that rhyme.

And the rope railways that sent a procession of emotionless buckets across the train when we pulled in, the greeny-grey lake that presently (inside the town) ceased being a lake and became a big lake basin of smooth, greeny-grey mine slime, the vast greeny-grey mounds of mill refuse, the fantastic spideriness of the lattice mill workings, and humped corrugated iron sheds, all of them slightly greeny-grey in the prevailing fashion—the whole picture was fantastic; indeed, Cobalt appears a city of gnomes.

We had travelled all Tuesday and Wednesday, striking east from Winnipeg, only stopping occasionally for the Prince to return the courtesies of the crowds that had collected at wayside stations, and, on one occasion, to allow the Prince to obtain a walk. At North Bay we had left the C.P.R. main line, and pushed up the road of the Timiskaming Railway towards the silver mining town of Cobalt and the gold mining town of Timmins.

During the night and morning of Thursday, October 16th, we had pushed up through a rocky and inhospitable country, where many lakes lie coldly amid stony hillocks that thrust up through live green spruce, or the white ghosts of spruce murdered by fires.

It seems a country fore-ordained to loneliness, and it is hard to believe that a rich town has arisen in it. As a matter of truth, that town would not have been born to it but for an accident. Cobalt was not dreamed of as a city. The intention of the railway engineers had been to drive a line through this land to open up good farming country to the north of Cobalt Lake. Only this accident brought Cobalt into being at all.

Two bored contractors employed on the construction of the railways are responsible for it. They were filling out an idle hour in throwing pebbles into the lake; one of them noticed that the pebbles had a queer texture. Both men examined them, for many of the kind were scattered about.

"Lead," decided one of the men, but the other gave his opinion for silver. He had the strange pebble analysed, and silver it was. On the wave of excitement that followed, Cobalt was born.

As the Prince saw it on October 16th it was obviously a mining town, careless of how it built itself as long as it could get at the rich stopes, or veins, that burrow amid the calcite rock of the district. It is this indifference to planning that makes the town fantastic, though there is something of the fantastic in the character of its people and the welcome they gave.

Above the heads of the very generous and homely throng that welcomed the Prince, the streets were strung from side to side with banners of welcome, many of them touched with native humour.

"GLAD U COME"

declared one, while another offered the "glad hand" with the injunction:

"THE TOWN IS YOURS: PAINT IT RED OR
ANY OLD COLOUR YOU LIKE"

After a corrugated drive along the switchback streets, the miners had their own individual welcome for him. At the Coniagas Mine these stocky men, in brown overalls, the acetylene lamps that lighted them through the underworld still alight on the front of their hats, were gathered about the pit-head workings, and they gave him a particular cheer.

The Prince was shown through the whole of the above-ground workings in this mine. He went into the breaking and stamping rooms, where he could not hear himself speak for the crashings of the mills that broke up the quartz; he saw the machines that washed the silver free from the living rock by jigging it over metal shelves across which flowed a constant film of water; he saw the pulverized slime being treated with oil and pouring bubbling from big vats through wooden chutes.

He climbed to the top of one of the big mounds of dried slime that pile up round the workings. In the old days these mounds were rubbish for which man had no use. Now science has stepped in, and this rubbish is being treated once more, and from four to six ounces of silver per ton are being reclaimed. A big mechanical shovel, working on an overhead cable, was dropping and digging into this dump; it lifted itself full and moved along the rope until it dropped its load into a chute. No man went near it: a super-fellow at the levers of a donkey-engine maintained a control.

The mine gave him a little memento in silver, and very prettily. Two delightful little girls came out of a mass of miners, and handed him a small brick of solid silver inscribed to commemorate the visit. The brick weighed thirty-five ounces.

In a short while the Prince was in the place where the brick was smelted. This was in a small house containing several furnaces built to the level of a man's breast. They are not large furnaces, but when their doors are opened one can look on to an incandescent pool of liquid silver that the gas or oil flames have melted. The Prince watched the process of casting bricks with interest, questioning the two demobilized soldiers who worked a big ladle with the close curiosity he had shown over every detail of the milling. Dipping the long-handled ladle into the shining pool, the soldiers swung it out, and poured the spitting and sparkling contents into a metal mould, in which the silver brick was formed. In this small room is smelted all the metal of one of the richest mining towns in the world.

From here the cars went adventurously along the steep and spiral roads, and amid the tall corrugated iron towers and buildings that form the many mine workings. The Prince passed round the bases of great grey slack and slime heaps of old and discarded workings that have been worth millions of dollars in their day, but, after the fickle way of silver veins, have now given out. Through this harsh and grey country he drove until he came to the O'Brien mine, where he was to try the adventure of a descent.

The descent into a mine needs armour, and the Prince buckled on rubber overshoes, an oilskin coat and a sou'wester hat. Garbed thus, and with an acetylene lamp in his hand, he was the natural prey of photographers, who refused to spare him until he escaped into the cage and baffled them by going underground.

Cobalt, which had been cheering the Prince at every available spot, can boast that she also managed to do it in the bowels of the earth. Descending three hundred feet, His Royal Highness walked some distance through the dark tunnel of the workings, and in each gallery the ghostly figures of miners gave him a subterranean cheer. At the end of this walk he went down another three hundred feet, to where a new stope was being started. This was his own particular vein, for it had already been christened "The Prince of Wales Stope" in his honour—no mean compliment, for it is anticipated that it will yield at least a million dollars.

The Prince showed a natural interest in this seam, and in the methods of working it, and he also took, as it were, a sponsor's fee, for he worked a piece of rock from the vein with his fingers and carried it away as a memento.

Beyond Cobalt the land becomes greener and more hospitable, and it opens up into great ranges of good farms, and this state of things continues until, along a branch line, the sprawling and great gold-mining centres of Timmins threw their bleak melancholy over the land.

In Timmins itself can be seen a Canadian town at birth. Its wooden shack houses and brick buildings are only now being brought to order along its streets. Its roads are still ankle-deep in mud; buckboards and other country rigs are, with motors, the means of transport—it only wanted Douglas Fairbanks in a Western get-up to complete it as a town projected into reality from the "movies." It is a one-man town, and bears the name of the pioneer who brought it into being, and who is still the driving force of the great gold mines that make it one of the richest places on the earth. He is a quiet man, whose force of character is concealed behind gold-rimmed spectacles and a rooted instinct against waste of words.

The Prince spent an interesting hour at his mines, which are among the largest, if they are not the largest, of their kind in the Empire; all the processes were explained to him, though he did not go into the workings as he did at Cobalt. He had, it goes without saying, a royal reception here, which, in the hands of the liveliest of mayors, had more than a tinge of humour in it.

Timmins was the Prince's last adventure in the wilds. Steaming south and west along the Grand Trunk Railway, he passed through the delightful holiday scenery of the Muskoka Lakes, and, in country becoming gradually more and more domestic and British, approached Hamilton and the thickly inhabited areas of Western Ontario.

II

In coming to Hamilton the Prince returned to the regions of big welcomes. It was not that the East was more loyal or warm than the West, but that, grouped in the vast area of Canada lying between the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes, are the old and teeming industrial centres of the Dominion. In this area is about seventy per cent. of Canada's population, and men, women and children can pack themselves into the streets by the tens of thousands, be those streets ever so many or ever so long.

This was Hamilton's way. Hamilton is a "Get on or Get out" proposition. It is dubbed not merely "the Birmingham of Canada," but also "the Ambitious City." It is not the largest town in the Dominion, but it asks you to reserve judgment as to that, and meanwhile it lets you know that it is one of the richest.

From the abrupt heights that rise behind it, one looks down, not upon an historic panorama, as at Quebec, but a Brangwyn panel of "modern progress." Between the abrupt hills and the waters of Lake Ontario the city is packed tight on a rising strip of plain. The stacks of many industries, the rigid uplift of square, practical factories, the fret of derricks and patent loaders by the waterside, all seen under smudges and scarves of factory smoke, would give it an air of resolute drabness if it were not for its multitude of trees.

Trees there are in profusion, rising up between the stiff walls of commercial buildings, lining the long, straight avenues that look like bands of greyish water from the heights, and grouping about the comely houses that form the residential quarters on the slopes rising towards the onlooker on The Mountain. But, even in spite of the trees and the blue shine of the distant lake, there is an atmosphere of industrial greyness that differentiates it from other cities.

There was an air of industrialism about the packed welcome Hamilton gave the Prince. He had slipped into the city on the afternoon of Friday, October 17th, but not officially. He was merely to attend the invisible pleasures of golf and dancing. On Saturday he entered Hamilton ceremoniously, officially. He drove down in a car to a siding, entered the train, was backed into the station, and alighted from it and entered the car he had just left. The church bells rang "Oh, Canada," and he had "arrived."

The industrial atmosphere was created by the workers who thronged the narrow business streets in their overalls, having obviously come out from bench and ironworks and packing factories, as well as from the stores and offices, to see the Prince. I noticed among the crowd a great number of Jews, more than I had seen in other Canadian cities.

Yet, if Hamilton was industrial, it also knew how to meet a Prince. Its streets were delightfully decorated, and in the general scheme of bunting the authorities had hung over the roads in pairs, small square banners of the victory medal ribbon, so that the Prince passed under this sign of triumph always. Swaying high up in the trees, just coming into the autumn gold of foliage, this scheme of decoration made a most effective showing.

Part of the Prince's ride through the town was along James Street, that sweeps in a single straight line from The Mountain to the shore of the lake. All manner of citizens were crowded in this sumptuous boulevard and in the pretty streets that ran through the pleasant home centres. Now the cars passed through packed ranks of children ranged according to schools, and all torn between the purely human desire of shouting their heads off and the duty of singing, "God bless the Prince of Wales," the result being an eerie noise that left no doubt about the quality of the enthusiasm. When there were no children there were grown-ups, gathered everywhere, perched everywhere and anywhere in their determination to get a good view. On one low bungalow was a family group, mother, father, children and baby-in-arms, sitting perilous but serenely content on the very ridge-pole of the roof. From a group of houses in the same suave street had come many men, matrons and maidens, waving the green flag of the harp, all fiercely insistent on the rights of Ireland to cheer and show enthusiasm.

So the Prince came to a great, comely semi-Gothic hall with a million children round it (that was the effect, though Hamilton hasn't half a million inhabitants), and I don't know how many in it. This hall was a chamber of children, a forcing-house of delightful infants. Under the broad, mellow light that beat down from the great windows in the roof all the prettiest kiddies in the world seemed to be set in banks of cultivation. Children were in mass round the walls. Children stretched upward in a square of galleries. Children flowered everywhere—only a fillet of walking-space was clear, where a desperate gardener had clipped a passage-way for the Prince, it seemed.

And they were such vivacious children. They cheered. They sang lilting part-songs, each great bank of infancy taking up the melody until the hall was all tune, and the walls seemed to be pressed back by the fine soaring sweetness of the fugue. And when they had sung they burst into the sudden and amazing sparkle of their school yell, "Hamilton! Hamilton! Hamilton!" and then diffused their fervour in a swinging burst of cheers.

And Canadians, children or adults, can cheer. Hands and flags and hats and body join in, to give an impression both passionate and irresistible. And before this storm the Prince could only laugh and wave back with something of the children's abandon, and so delighted did he seem that one of the Canadians who watched him had every right to cry out:

"Say—say—isn't he just tickled to death?"

Through the streets in his ride to The Mountain this wave of cheering followed him, and, quick to respond, the Prince was once more on his feet in his car and waving gladly back to the crowds on the sidewalk. So ardently did he do this, that a little girl who had watched him coming and who watched his passing, turned to her mother and cried:

"Poor hand."

It was certainly a strenuously used hand, but its endurance had limits, and, as he was forced to transfer the office of hand-shaking to the left, so he frequently had to use the left for waving on these long rides, and give the right a rest.

On The Mountain, the tall buttress that curves behind the town, the Prince drove through avenues of fine homes to the Hamilton Memorial Hospital, a magnificent tribute to those men of the city who gave their lives in the war. It is, of course, thoroughly up-to-date in appointments, but it is more than that: it is a poignant link with the brave dead, for every ward has been dedicated to a brave son of Hamilton who died overseas, and a brass plate in each ward records the heroic name.

At this hospital the Prince was received by a Welsh choir, many of the lasses dressed in the tall hats and native laces and fabrics of Wales, and, so that nobody should make mistakes about them, each (men and women) wore a fresh leek at the breast.

The Prince also visited the Sanatorium on the heights, and drove out to the Club, where he lunched, and, on the whole, filled a day with all the bustle that Hamilton knows well how to put into events. It was only at night that he was free to leave this vigorous town, and start for the restful beauties of Niagara.