Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

This whole region is a treasure house of minerals. Mining operations were carried on for years near Phoenix in one of the biggest copper beds of the world. The metal lay in a great mass two hundred feet wide and more than a half mile in length.

The millions of tons of ore taken from the Phoenix mines were fed into the smelter at Grand Forks, which stands on the banks of the Kettle River, shadowed by mighty mountains. For years it annually produced millions of pounds of copper, and in addition silver and gold worth a million dollars or more. The smelter was closed in 1919 with a record of having smelted fourteen million tons of ore, and the mines ceased operations that same year.

In the meantime, the Granby Company, which owned the mines and the smelter, had begun to take copper out of the Le Roi mine at Rossland, a few miles to the east. Shafts there have been sunk more than two thousand feet into the earth, and there are about ninety miles of underground workings. This same company, which is owned largely by American stockholders, operates the Hidden Creek copper mines at Anyox, the biggest in British Columbia. They are located on the coast near the Portland Canal, hundreds of miles to the northward and only a short distance from Alaska. In one year they produced thirty million pounds of copper. Other mines are worked on Vancouver Island and on Howe Sound north of the city of Vancouver.

The Canadian Rockies, with three hundred peaks more than ten thousand feet high, offer thrills aplenty for even the most seasoned mountain climber. Alpine guides have been brought here from Switzerland and have established a colony in British Columbia.

The line of the Canadian National Railways through Yellowhead Pass, the lowest gap in the Canadian Rockies, lies near Mt. Robson, 13,068 feet high, and the tallest peak in all the Dominion.

Although the deposits of the Boundary District have been practically worked out after yielding twenty million tons of copper ore, British Columbia still has more than half the copper output of the Dominion. Its total annual mineral production is worth more than six hundred million dollars. Of this, coal and coke make up about one third. Silver, lead, zinc, and platinum are also mined.

Gold was first discovered in British Columbia on the Fraser River. That was around 1857, just as the California placers had begun to play out, and thousands of prospectors rushed here from our Pacific coast. Many fortunes were made in a single season, and by 1863 the placer mines had an annual yield of more than three million dollars’ worth of gold. The total production to the present time has been valued at more than seventy-five million dollars.

All of this gold was recovered by the pick and shovel and without the aid of machinery. Hydraulic mining was not introduced until the easily accessible gold had been washed out by primitive methods. The lode mines were not worked to any extent until 1893, but these are now producing more than the placers.