Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

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.