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Tim Falconer spent three summers on mineral exploration crews, worked in two mines and studied mining engineering at McGill University for two years before switching into English Literature. He is the author of five previous non-fiction books and a veteran magazine writer. His last two books—Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music and Klondikers: Dawson City’s Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey—made the Globe and Mail’s Top 100. He lives with his wife in Toronto.
Viola MacMillan, who was one of the most facinating women in Canadian business history, was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals. MacMillan was a prospector who’d gone on to put together big deals, develop lucrative mines and head a major industry association – all at a time when career women were a rarity. Early in July 1964, shares in her company, Windfall Oil and Mines, took off. In the absence of information about what Windfall had found on its claims near Timmins, rumours and greed pushed share prices to a high of $5.70. MacMillan stayed quiet. Finally after three weeks of market frenzy, Windfall admitted it had nothing. When the stock crashed, so many small investors lost money that the Ontario government appointed a Royal Commission to examine what had happened. Meaningful changes at the Toronto Stock Exchange and the Ontario Securities Commission followed. Windfall is biographical history at its finest: the unlikely story of the trailblazer who, although convicted and imprisoned, would later receive the Order of Canada.
EXCERPT: THE QUEEN BEE
Viola MacMillan had been so successful selling houses on the side that she decided to leave her job as a stenographer at Rodd, Wigle & McHugh to start her own real estate agency. The move turned out to be ill-timed. By the end of the 1920s, Windsor was no longer booming, and then the Great Depression followed the stock market crash of October 1929. George hadn’t had a job in a while, so they moved to London, Ontario, where she sold Christmas cards wholesale. They kept the place in Windsor and filled it with boarders while taking in more roomers in the home they rented in London. She also tried to sell houses on the side, but that proved a tough go.
Her new idea was to prospect from spring to fall and then return to London to sell cards and real estate. But she needed financing. Syndicates had become a popular way to get a grubstake. Investors bought units that could be converted into company shares if a prospector found something worth developing. Sweat equity was typically worth a third of the shares. Units might sell for ten dollars, so for investors it was a bit like buying a lottery ticket, if lotteries had been legal at the time. The MacMillans liked some gold claims they’d staked in Bowman Township, near Matheson, so Viola created the Bowman-Matheson Gold Syndicate.
Once she’d sold enough units in her syndicate to pay for a season of prospecting, she decided to go. The problem was George had finally found work at a brokerage house. He was a customer’s man, another name for a stock market salesman. But she was determined to be a full-time prospector. “I’m leaving for the north. If you want to come along with me, that’s OK,” she told him. “If not, I’ll be OK alone.”
George left his new job, and then he and Viola loaded up their Model T jalopy and headed for the bush. Although her friends thought she was crazy and told her so, she would not be dissuaded. “I’d far sooner sit and listen to a prospector all night than go dancing or go to a movie,” said MacMillan, who loved dancing, a few years later. “Mining is my life. It’s on the books for me.” That expression—“on the books for me”—was one she used a lot.
Going prospecting for gold wasn’t a crazy move during the Depression. Just about every industry suffered during the Dirty Thirties. That included mining, as most mineral prices collapsed. In Sudbury, for example, several mines shut down, the population fell and the city defaulted on its bonds in 1934. The rare exception to all the bad news was gold. With the price of the precious metal set at $20.67 an ounce, there were jobs available in the Timmins and Kirkland Lake areas. But only for people with mining experience, and most of the people who joined the employment rush to northern Ontario had none. The province produced $33.6 million worth of gold in 1929. That climbed to $70.9 million in 1934. After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt raised the guaranteed price to US$35 per ounce that year, annual gold production in Ontario reached $122.6 million by 1940. Forty new mines opened in the province during the decade and at least a dozen reopened. Prospecting also increased. While there were still no guarantees, the high price of gold meant the chances that someone would want to develop a new discovery were higher and the threshold for economic ore was lower. In addition, many people turned to prospecting because they had nothing else to do. That meant Viola and George weren’t the only ones headed to the bush.
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Few, if any, of the others were women. Viola was a rarity in the first half of the twentieth century. Among the others, perhaps the most famous, at least in her day, was Caroline Mayben Flower. A pianist and composer who’d studied in Europe, she was a music teacher and high society manqué in Manhattan until she faced much-publicized petty larceny charges. When her doctor advised her to spend more time outdoors, he was thinking of a quiet spell in the Adirondacks. Instead, she began to divide her time between New York and northern Ontario, where she reinvented herself as “the Lady Prospector.” When she first arrived in Cobalt in 1906, the thirty-seven-year-old mostly stayed at the Matabanick Hotel in nearby Haileybury, which was a far more refined town. After the claims she owned north of there didn’t amount to anything, she staked claims in the Gowganda area before joining the rush to the Porcupine in early 1910.
Flower, who regularly fed less-than-reliable stories about herself to the newspapers, claimed to be a graduate of the Columbia School of Mines (in fact, she had taken a mineralogy course at Barnard College, the women’s liberal arts school associated with Columbia University). Still, while many mining men initially scoffed at the idea that this slight, big-city woman dressed in a cowboy hat and boots could hack it in the bush, she was tough. She staked numerous claims, selling some while keeping others and doing the necessary assessment work on them. Along with helping to build her own log cabin, she proved to be a good shot, taking down deer and bear for her food. One night, when a black bear came by her cabin, she calmly shooed it away instead of killing it because she already had enough meat. One newspaper called her “the golden-haired heroine of the Porcupine.”
Early in 1913, after time in New York, where she’d taken more geology classes, she came back with a vintage lute, something to play during the evenings in her cabin on the Mattagami River. But the days were for mining, not music. After a stop in Cobalt, she continued north with steel, other provisions and hired men to work her group of six claims next to a gold discovery in the Cripple Creek mining district, west of Porcupine Lake. She didn’t have the same luck on her ground and soon a decline in her health led to a permanent return to New York, where she died in 1917.
Another woman who took to prospecting was Mabel Fetterly. Like MacMillan, she’d grown up in the Muskoka area. She moved to Swastika in October 1911, a few months after Harry Oakes arrived. Her late sister’s four children, now her responsibility, and her mother joined her. The next year, she paid five dollars for a prospector’s licence and learned the trade from Hiriam Tobico, an Indigenous man from the southern part of the province who’d come north before she did. Within a year, Fetterly had sold a claim she’d staked in Playfair Township for $6,000.
When she wasn’t looking for gold, she drove a horse-drawn sleigh between Swastika and the Argonaut Mine, chopped wood to sell, worked as a camp cook, trapped with Tobico and hunted. After he gave her a rifle for Christmas one year, she became a superb shot, once taking down a moose so large that the antler spread was more than 160 centimetres. Harry Oakes bought the head for $200, had it mounted and hung it on a wall of the magnificent chateau he’d had built in Kirkland Lake. Known for smoking a clay pipe and always wearing men’s clothing, she was brash, plain-spoken and proudly independent, but was well-liked in the community.
Fetterly and Tobico were best friends and long-time prospecting partners. Although they never made a discovery to rival Oakes’s success, they did make money staking and selling claims, notably three properties that went into development but not into production: the Queen LeBel, the Tobico and the Cambro-Kirkland, though the Tobico later became part of the Upper Canada Mine. And Fetterly continued prospecting well into her sixties.
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