Peeps at Many Lands: Canada

by J. T. Bealby

All the three mines thus far spoken of are mines cut into the solid rock, and the hard stone has to be crushed in powerful stamping-mills and roasted in smelters before the precious metal can be extracted. There are mines of this description in both the east and the west of Canada. But gold is also obtained from a different source—namely, from the sands of rivers, out of which it is got by a process of washing the sand, or "dirt" as the miners call it. In the course of the washing, the gold, which is heavier than the sand, sinks to the bottom of the wooden trough, or rocker, or other receptacle, in which the gold-bearing sands are sluiced.

Two rivers of Western Canada have been especially famous for yielding gold in this way. One is the Fraser and the other is the Yukon. The discovery of gold in the sands of the former led to a wild miners' rush in 1858, and that was followed, three years later, by an equally mad rush into the neighbouring district of Caribou, in British Columbia; but in both cases the fever abated in the course of a year or two, after the gold-bearing sands had all been worked over. The rush to the Yukon was, perhaps, even greater than either of these, notwithstanding that the hardships which had to be encountered were immeasurably greater. The gold-fields of the Yukon, known as Klondyke, are situated near the Arctic Circle, many hundreds of miles from the settled abodes of civilization, and in a part of the world where the winter cold is of appalling severity. Except for a limited amount of garden produce, food, and indeed every kind of supplies, have to be transported many hundreds of miles.

Gold is not, however, the only mineral of value that is obtained from the bowels of the earth in Canada. Very many of the other metals which are prized by man are also extracted, such as silver, lead, zinc, copper, coal, and iron. The Cobalt silver-mines in Northern Ontario and those of the Slocan district of British Columbia are equally famous. Coal is yielded at Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, at Fernie, Michel, and other places in the Crow's Nest Pass of the Rocky Mountains, and in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

At the fairs and annual festivals, which are a prominent institution of both American and Canadian towns and cities of the West, a good deal of interest centres round the competition known as rock-drilling. This is carried on by sets of two men, both expert miners. The task the two men set themselves is to drive their rock-drills as far as ever they can into a solid piece of rock in the course of fifteen minutes. One man holds the rock-drill, whilst the other smites it with a big miner's hammer. At the end of each minute the two men change places, so that the man who held the drill the first minute wields the hammer in the second, and his mate, who wielded the hammer during the first minute, gets a rest during the second, whilst he is in his turn holding the drill. And terribly hard work it is, for the hammerman smites with all his might, and his blows fall like lightning. At the end of the contest both men are generally dripping with perspiration. And no wonder! when in the space of fifteen minutes two men such as these will drive their drills, as they really do, no less than 1 yard deep into a solid block of granite, or at the rate of over 2 inches in each minute. A marvellous exhibition, not merely of muscular strength, but also of skill and quickness! And truly it is a wonderful sight to see with what rapidity the men change places again and again, without appearing to miss a single stroke of the ponderous hammer.

CHAPTER XI

SPOILS OF SEA AND WOOD

"You often hear tall stories of the way the salmon swarm in the Fraser River," remarked an old frontiersman one day to a "new chum" recently arrived in Canada from England. "Those stories are often dished up to suit a palate that is just waiting to be tickled with cayenne, but they are not altogether fiction."

The new chum, having still "tender feet," hesitated about putting his foot in, and merely looked the inquiry which he was unable to conceal.

"Well, you may believe me or not, sir, but it is God's truth that I once saw a man standing on the bank of the river at ——," and he named a village near New Westminster in the delta of the Fraser, "and he was flinging the salmon out on the bank with an ordinary hay-fork, and he was working so that the sweat rolled off him."