Hiking through scraggly scrub brush, clambering up jagged, rocky hills, and across grassy fields in the mid-1860s, the prospectors scrutinized each area carefully for signs of a soft reddish-orange mineral.
A copper mine would set a lot of people on the road to good fortune; in demand for coins, housewares, bathtubs, shipbuilding, the metal was indispensable in Canada. After months of exploring in the Madoc, Ont., region, about 115 km northwest of Kingston, the miners were at last tracing a potential mineral seam. The prize they found on John Richardson’s farmland wasn’t copper, it was gold.
Digging a shaft 15 feet down, “the seam was six inches wide at the top and was decomposed for six feet,” said prospector Marcus Herbert Powell in the First Report of the Bureau of Mines, 1891. “Then it was solid rock to 15 feet, where it suddenly opened into a cave 12 feet long, six feet wide and six feet high, so that I could stand upright in it.” It was a discovery that he literally fell into in the summer of 1866.
“The hanging wall was quartzite and the foot wall was granite, while the roof was composed of spar, talc and rocks of various kinds, and the floor of iron, talc, quartzite, black mica and other minerals,” Powell described. The gold was interspersed throughout the rocks “in the form of leaves and nuggets, and in the roof it ran through a foot thickness like knife blades.” The nuggets weren’t all tiny flakes that could blow away — “the largest was about the size of a butternut.” (A butternut is approximately the size of a walnut.) The dark hollow in the earth was a cavern of riches.
Powell and his fellow prospector, William Berryman, announced their find of the newly named Richardson Mine, but people didn’t believe the young men “¦ that is, until word spread far enough. Then miners streamed in from as far away as California’s gold rush and the Caribou gold fields in British Columbia. To meet the urgent needs of new miners, a boom town was hastily slapped together, named El Dorado “¦ the golden one.
Barely weeks passed before 80 buildings were erected, shanties and roadhouses, cabins and hotels, crowded along muddy lanes. Eldorado was as rough and gritty as any mining town could be.
Many prospectors stayed in Madoc at newly constructed hotels, and others travelled the 53 km northward from Belleville by stagecoach. “There are at present four four-horse coaches and two covered stages, besides numerous private conveyances, leave Belleville for Madoc daily,” reported Alfred A. Campbell to the Commission of Crown Lands in a paper dated May 6, 1867. “A daily express has also been established.” The need for modern communications was addressed, too, with the hurried installation of a telegraph line.
Dozens of establishments sprouted up between Belleville and the gold mine. “Excitement and population peaked at April (1867) when it is believed that 4,000 prospectors, investors and curiosity seekers arrived in central Hastings.” Land prices rocketed skyward and deeds transferred from hand to gold-fevered hand as speculation ran rampant, not only over weeks or days, but some within hours.
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