Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

After a corrugated drive along the switchback streets, the miners had their own individual welcome for him. At the Coniagas Mine these stocky men, in brown overalls, the acetylene lamps that lighted them through the underworld still alight on the front of their hats, were gathered about the pit-head workings, and they gave him a particular cheer.

The Prince was shown through the whole of the above-ground workings in this mine. He went into the breaking and stamping rooms, where he could not hear himself speak for the crashings of the mills that broke up the quartz; he saw the machines that washed the silver free from the living rock by jigging it over metal shelves across which flowed a constant film of water; he saw the pulverized slime being treated with oil and pouring bubbling from big vats through wooden chutes.

He climbed to the top of one of the big mounds of dried slime that pile up round the workings. In the old days these mounds were rubbish for which man had no use. Now science has stepped in, and this rubbish is being treated once more, and from four to six ounces of silver per ton are being reclaimed. A big mechanical shovel, working on an overhead cable, was dropping and digging into this dump; it lifted itself full and moved along the rope until it dropped its load into a chute. No man went near it: a super-fellow at the levers of a donkey-engine maintained a control.

The mine gave him a little memento in silver, and very prettily. Two delightful little girls came out of a mass of miners, and handed him a small brick of solid silver inscribed to commemorate the visit. The brick weighed thirty-five ounces.

In a short while the Prince was in the place where the brick was smelted. This was in a small house containing several furnaces built to the level of a man's breast. They are not large furnaces, but when their doors are opened one can look on to an incandescent pool of liquid silver that the gas or oil flames have melted. The Prince watched the process of casting bricks with interest, questioning the two demobilized soldiers who worked a big ladle with the close curiosity he had shown over every detail of the milling. Dipping the long-handled ladle into the shining pool, the soldiers swung it out, and poured the spitting and sparkling contents into a metal mould, in which the silver brick was formed. In this small room is smelted all the metal of one of the richest mining towns in the world.

From here the cars went adventurously along the steep and spiral roads, and amid the tall corrugated iron towers and buildings that form the many mine workings. The Prince passed round the bases of great grey slack and slime heaps of old and discarded workings that have been worth millions of dollars in their day, but, after the fickle way of silver veins, have now given out. Through this harsh and grey country he drove until he came to the O'Brien mine, where he was to try the adventure of a descent.

The descent into a mine needs armour, and the Prince buckled on rubber overshoes, an oilskin coat and a sou'wester hat. Garbed thus, and with an acetylene lamp in his hand, he was the natural prey of photographers, who refused to spare him until he escaped into the cage and baffled them by going underground.

Cobalt, which had been cheering the Prince at every available spot, can boast that she also managed to do it in the bowels of the earth. Descending three hundred feet, His Royal Highness walked some distance through the dark tunnel of the workings, and in each gallery the ghostly figures of miners gave him a subterranean cheer. At the end of this walk he went down another three hundred feet, to where a new stope was being started. This was his own particular vein, for it had already been christened "The Prince of Wales Stope" in his honour—no mean compliment, for it is anticipated that it will yield at least a million dollars.

The Prince showed a natural interest in this seam, and in the methods of working it, and he also took, as it were, a sponsor's fee, for he worked a piece of rock from the vein with his fingers and carried it away as a memento.

Beyond Cobalt the land becomes greener and more hospitable, and it opens up into great ranges of good farms, and this state of things continues until, along a branch line, the sprawling and great gold-mining centres of Timmins threw their bleak melancholy over the land.