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Mining is the industry that drives the economy in the Snow Lake area … it has for over 100 years. All of the mines the industry is based on have been in the ground since the Earth was formed; however, it was only when technology allowed mine finders the ability to locate orebodies that they were able to exploit them. As technology continually advances, many of those occurrences mined or explored in decades past are now getting a second look.
This was the case with the Lalor Mine (Chisel Lake Basin) and the Snow Lake Mine (New Britannia and Nor-Acme), but it is also playing a part in the resurrection of exploration on several lithium properties on the east side of Wekusko Lake (Thompson Brother Cluster and the Sherritt Gordon Cluster), as well as the mine that originally brought pioneers to the area early in the 20th century – Herb Lake’s Rex/Laguna.
Back in the 1930s and ’40s, Herb Lake, Manitoba was a prosperous mining town. It hummed with activity and even though it couldn’t be accessed by anything other than boat and a winter road, it was home to between 600 and 700 people.
Its tree-lined streets boasted three or four stores, a dairy, a butcher shop, a restaurant, a barber shop, post office, hotel and beer parlour, a blacksmith shop, a school and churches.
However, with the end of the Second World War and despite the prosperity and technological change that it fostered, the town’s Rex/Laguna mine wavered and waned before crashing completely. The town came to its own demise in the late 1950s. Her streets are mostly rabbit runs now and her carefully tended gardens are a tangle of caragana and poplar trees.
For the rest of this column: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/my-take-on-snow-lake-jan-18-2019-1.23601824