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: