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In 1866, a cave dripping with gold was found in Eldorado, fuelling a boom that became a bust. Now some believe there are more riches to be found
ELDORADO, Ont. — Kim Woodside was ready for a change, a mid-life pivot, and a 100-acre rural property in Eastern Ontario seemed like a good place to start. It had two grey barns she hoped to paint poinsettia red, a woodworking shop full of tools, a woodlot thick with mature cedar trees, a rocky hill out back and a bungalow in need of renovation. It would be a fix, in her calculations, that would take the custom furniture maker about six months to complete.
“All the tools were there, there were no neighbours and the price was right,” she said. The property in Eldorado was perfect, but then Woodside, a history buff, asked the old codger she was buying it from about the blue historical plaque on the highway nearby. He answered with a question: Was she a “gold digger?”
Woodside didn’t appreciate the comment, but it wasn’t entirely uncalled for, not after he explained that the place she hoped would change her life had changed other lives when the Richardson gold mine, Ontario’s first, was discovered beneath it in 1866.
“I didn’t know anything about rocks or mines or the story of Eldorado,” she said. “I grew up in Prince Edward Island on a sandbar. Rocks for me basically meant the Rockies.”
Canadian mining lore is fired by stories of the Klondike rush of the 1890s, of Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie, Bonanza Creek, brave Mounties, starving prospectors, pack mules, scallywags, women of ill repute and savage winters, all stirred into a character-rich stew the poet Robert Service — the so-called Bard of the Yukon — mythologized with lines about the “strange things done under the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold.”
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