A Slump in Cobalt Lake. Former well known waterway now no more.
From Lorrain’s remote locality comes to Cobalt mines the compressed air and electric current generated with unique machinery from the waters impetuousity at Ragged Chutes on the Montreal River, at Hound Chute also, and at the Matabitchouan River, and not afar off the cottage in which it is said Doctor Drummond’s sympathetic spirit forsook its mortal tabernacle, keeps solitary vigil on a slope overlooking Kerr Lake. His inimitable habitant patois verse survives however, and is kept green in memory when interpreted by the nimble tongues of M. Giles or an Olive Pouze. Occasionally grazing the brink of a declivity when touring the camp, one meets wheeling or gliding past on sled behind good horses, miner’s wife from Montana or a courier in shoe packs and cold weather rig astride a sturdy, sure-footed pony. Jogging along after him the next is a native on a mustang. Similarly mounted a rangy, vigorous individual clad in seamy corduroys, jacket, ear flaps and the inevitable “larrigans” lopes by. This personage proves to be unintentionally traveling incog, as he is a big mine manager, an English expert doting on tetrahedrite crystals, heading to town for a constitutional and the morning mail.
As recently as midnight of August 19th, 1912, an undignified and profane pilgrimage to the shrine of the goddess of fortune occurred in Temiskaming. At the stroke of twelve a ziz-zagging procession of flickering lights born by all manner of men, stretching from Cobalt three miles to the famous, now naked Gillies Timber Limit, broke into motion at the double quick. Ahead of them were twelve square miles—4,000 acres—or twenty acres of undiagnosed area of rock each for the lucky two hundred eager, excited prospectors and adventurers who might stake, find ore and register for $10 at Haileybury first, and thus perchance, stumble on a king’s ransom. Ordinarily, the journey on steam coach costs Ten Cents. This night one bold spirit chartered a special train for $50.00 hoping to outstrip the throng afoot and horseback, in autos and on bicycles, armed as they were with a Five Dollar mining license and panting for place. For an hour or two the nervous strain was intense and the schemes and ruses resorted to for advantage were numerous and crafty. Sweating relay horses clattered at top speed all night between the new diggings and the district seat, positions held in person or proxy in the line-up waiting for dawn reminded one of the nocturnal vigil and struggle for tickets to behold the late Sir Henry Irving, while rumor and conjecture were rife. One energetic but luckless individual, with boundary stakes in earth, had them uprooted and tossed aside by a speculator’s hireling the moment he headed to the registry office; another collapsed from exhaustion and laid prone in the bush as the strong trod over his body and aspirations and still a third poor devil lost a pronounced advantage by falling, horse and rider, into a quagmire at the roadside, and all because there lies side by side beneath the earth’s surface silver sidewalks and blighted hopes.
Jacob Lewis Englehart,
Chairman, Temiskaming & Northern Ontario Railway Commission
Do not conclude that the term “rough diamonds” would fitly describe the mining body of to-day nor opine that they always talk gold at $20 the ounce, assay furnaces, vanners and recording tachometers. Their personnel includes a mighty spry collection of thoroughbreds of advanced education from everywhere. They are men fond of horse-flesh and saddle; men who aim straight at billiard ball or bob cat and a percentage can coax sweet strains from piano or at odd moments resort to the not violent and refining pleasure of gardening. I have seldom seen a gaudier conglomeration of old-fashioned bloom than the flowers before the bungalow of the Temiskaming Mine. In their offices and apartments several enjoy club comforts and trophies and articles of virtu adorn the walls of highly polished logs. They can “diagnose the field” for a close corporation and by theory and experience prophecy what may be found under the crust away east to Des Joachins (des swish aw) Falls, Lake St. John and Chibougamou. The gentleman who cheerfully volunteered, flashlight in hand, to pilot the writer to where drillers pierced rock at mine bottom, wore riding breeches, jacket and English spring leggings of the most approved design and a stunning waistcoat encircled his athletic proportions. He proved to be a raconteur with reminisences of “Ole Lunnon” and the Riviera, but swore fealty to Ireland’s joyous effervescence.
The legacy of this untrodden expanse is unlimited productiveness of soil, waterways and forest. The solitary explorer with pack horse and canoe spyed out a winding trail which the railways’ impedimenta of progress has speedily straightened and made easy for the quasi pioneer. The rolling ground and gentle slopes in the vicinity of Haileybury are pleasant to see. Here the clay belt and husbandman replaces rock and miner and the view from this town and farmer’s mecca—which boasts the unique feature of a floating market place—out and over Lake Temiskaming and across to where the mists conceal a quaint French settlement, Villa Marie, is indeed charming. On learning that the mission bells pealed and a convent dwelt within the borders of Quebec just over that moonlit expanse of inland sea, I confess my conception of interprovincial geography seemed out of alignment. Englehart, a divisional point, bears the name of the Railway Commission’s astute, public spirited Chairman, Jacob L. Englehart, formerly of Cleveland, Ohio, who made his Canadian debut in the Petrolia oil belt, and some forty years ago supported Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt when he was married in the Tecumseh Hotel, London, Canada, to the beautiful Mrs. Crawford of Baton Rouge, La. Jacob Englehart inaugurated the system of greenhouses which flourish in those leagues of loam and clay but the plants which predominate in that “neck of the woods”, however, are those that grow into thousands of cords of coveted pulpwood, cut in certain districts by private owners and on reserves with Government sanction. As this commodity underlies in a vital way the immense paper and publishing interests of America and Europe the supply, method of treatment, market and duty tax has become a burning topic in factory and forum both sides of the international boundary.
Over the Trail where the Railways are not