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Books, Art, Music and Photography About Mining and Northern Topics

Stompin’ Tom remembered for Northern roots – by Sebastien Perth (Sudbury Star – March 8, 2013)

The Sudbury Star is the City of Greater Sudbury’s daily newspaper.

Stompin Tom Connors’ Mining Songs: http://republicofmining.com/2013/01/21/stompin-tom-connors-wiki-profile-and-mining-songs/

The ties Stompin’ Tom Connors formed with Northern Ontario are legendary.

Connors, who was surrounded by his family when he died Wednesday night at age 77, often credited the Maple Leaf Hotel in Timmins for launching his professional career and the song he penned at the Townehouse Tavern — Sudbury Saturday Night — in 1965 became one of his biggest hits.

Charlie Angus — musician and Member of Parliament for Timmins-James Bay — says Connors showed Canadians who they were through his writing.

“I think what Tom did that was so important is that he put our experience and our places on the cultural map of Canada. I was talking to a woman who said when she was 11, she memorized Sudbury Saturday Night. She had never been there, but her dad worked at Stelco so she thought Stelco was like Inco and it was.

“My grandfather had been at the McIntyre mine (in Timmins) where the fire had been and Tom wrote the song and it gave chills to hear it. We thought we had that special relationship,” Angus said. Townehouse manager Paul Loewenberg said Connors captured the city very well when he wrote Sudbury Saturday Night in 1965.

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NEWS RELEASE: Mayor Matichuk leads Greater Sudbury in mourning Canadian icon Stompin’ Tom Connors

 

For Immediate Release

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Mayor Marianne Matichuk was saddened to learn of the passing of Canadian music legend Stompin’ Tom Connors on Wednesday.

“Stompin’ Tom endeared himself to Canadians because he devoted himself and his music to life in Canada,” Mayor Matichuk said.

“He wrote and sang about the things Canadians hold dear, such as hockey. He cared most about being a Canadian … and he will never be forgotten for that.”

One of his most famous songs, Sudbury Saturday Night, written and first recorded in Canada’s Centennial year of 1967, remains recognizable to all Canadians. Though Greater Sudbury has evolved considerably from the company town immortalized in that song, Connors captured compellingly the spirit of our community 45 years ago.

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Thank you, Stompin’ Tom Connors. We needed you – Globe and Mail Editorial (March 7, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Stompin Tom Connors’ Mining Songs: http://republicofmining.com/2013/01/21/stompin-tom-connors-wiki-profile-and-mining-songs/

He wore a cowboy hat and banged his heavy-heeled cowboy boot on a piece of plywood while singing his twangy songs in small-town bars, but Stompin’ Tom Connors was more than just another lanky country-and-western act. The beloved East Coast singer and songwriter, who died on Wednesday at age 77, was an outspoken Canadian nationalist long before that became a cool thing to be. Stompin’ Tom was a pioneer, and he will be missed.

These days, Canada isn’t scared to be a little loud and proud. Politicians push patriotic buttons and endlessly recite their devotion to “hard-working Canadians.” Advertisers shamelessly (and successfully) plug our country and its natural beauty, and play up Canadians’ adventuresome and ribald sides. But Stompin’ Tom was doing that a long time ago, celebrating the end of a hard week’s work with famous lyrics like, “The girls are out to bingo and the boys are getting’ stinko/ And we’ll think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday night.”

Nationalistic to the point of being a curmudgeon, Connors fought with the Junos for nominating Canadian performers who made their name and sold most of their music outside Canada, and he battled with the CBC over its refusal to broadcast a concert he’d taped for that purpose.

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Stompin’ Tom Connors dies at 77: A look back at a Canadian country icon – by Greg Quill (Toronto Star – March 7, 2013)

 

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Stompin Tom Connors’ Mining Songs: http://republicofmining.com/2013/01/21/stompin-tom-connors-wiki-profile-and-mining-songs/

Stompin’ Tom Connors, the lanky, cranky country music legend who extolled Canada’s pastoral and working-class virtues in song has died. He was 77.

Stompin’ Tom Connors , the lanky, cranky country-folk music legend who extolled Canada’s pastoral and working-class virtues in song for more than 40 years in saloons, festivals and concert halls across the country — all the time railing against a global music industry that he considered had betrayed the nation’s character and song treasury — has died. He was 77.

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Author mines copper’s history, complexities – by Gerald M. Gay (Arizona Daily Star – March 7, 2013)

http://azstarnet.com/

A startling discovery in Bill Carter’s backyard led the Arizona author to write his latest book, “Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World.”

Carter lived in Bisbee for nearly a decade. He met his wife and they had two children in the former mining town, which sits nestled in the Mule Mountains, nine miles north of the Mexico border.

In his book, Carter notes a local saying that Bisbee is “100 miles and 100 years from Tucson” with evidence of its past found all over town.

“The big open pit was not far off from our house,” said Carter, who now lives in Flagstaff and who will sit on three panels at this weekend’s Tucson Festival of Books.

“If you live in Bisbee, you just kind of use it as a landmark. You stop thinking about its history. It’s just that thing down the road.”

It wasn’t until the corporation Freeport-McMoRan acquired Phelps Dodge, owners of the dormant mining operations in Bisbee, in 2007, that Carter began thinking about the remnants from the past that he couldn’t see.

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Excerpt from “Haywire My Life in the Mines” – by Doug Hall

This autobiographical book describes the Doug Hall’s family through war and depression, and goes on to relate his experiences underground in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s. It is written from the point of view of the average Joe who went underground when he was eighteen and didn’t know what he was getting into. The author considers himself lucky to have survived those years.

Click here to order an e-book of “Haywire My Life in the Mines”: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/269905

Working on the Grizzly

So anyway there I was one day working in a gang of guys with Old Abel when the Shift Boss or Captain or some such dignitary came up to us and said, “I need a man with a safety belt to work on the grizzly”. Now probably at that point I should have been a bit brighter and taken note of how all the other men in the crew were suddenly looking at the ground or the side of the drift or just about anyplace else except at this chap who needed a man for the grizzly. And to compound things I looked directly at this chap and said, “I’ve got a safety belt”. I noticed then how some of the other men in the crew seemed to relax and some of them even looked the visiting dignitary right in the face as if to say, “Gee I was going to volunteer but that other guy beat me to it”. And so that was how I became a grizzly man.

For the uninitiated perhaps I should explain what a grizzly is. It’s basically a steel grating with various sized holes placed over the top of an ore-pass. Usually a scooptram driver but sometimes trammers on the railroad tracks would put rocks of varying sizes (i.e. muck) on top of the grizzly and then the grizzly men would have to put the rocks through the grizzly so that the rocks would be small enough to go through the chutes in the loading pocket down below. The grizzly men would do this using a scaling bar, a sledge hammer or by drilling and blasting the rocks, sometimes after dragging them to the back of the grizzly using a tugger hoist.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

DANIEL GUGGENHEIM (1856-1930) MINING EMPIRE

These days the name Guggenheim is synonymous with the world of modern art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. However in the 19th and the early 20th centuries the Guggenheims were better known as the most powerful force in US mining, having built a mining empire in both North and South America.

A Jewish immigrant from Switzerland, Meyer Guggenheim started his business career in the US in manufacturing and then in importing fine lace from Switzerland. He invested some of the gains from his importing business in silver and lead mines at Leadville, Colorado. In 1884, encouraged by the success of his Leadville investment, and of the rapid industrialisation of the US, he closed the lace business to concentrate on mining interests and founded Philadelphia Smelting and Refining to treat his Leadville mining output.

At that time he was almost 60 and his eldest son, Daniel, one of eleven children, who had worked for the Swiss end of the family’s importing business, took up the reins, and progressively became the driving force behind the family’s mining strategy. Daniel was educated at a Catholic high school in Philadelphia and by-passed university to enter the family business and was supported by five of his six brothers.

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Excerpt from “Haywire My Life in the Mines” – by Doug Hall

This autobiographical book describes the Doug Hall’s family through war and depression, and goes on to relate his experiences underground in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It is written from the point of view of the average Joe who went underground when he was eighteen and didn’t know what he was getting into. The author considers himself lucky to have survived those years. 

Click here to order an e-book of “Haywire My Life in the Mines”: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/269905

Sudbury 1966

Anyway as I said I was eighteen when the grade thirteen school year was over and so father took me out to the mine the next day. I don’t recall being asked if I wanted to go underground. Father was a miner and I guess like it or not I was going underground as well. I remember I made $2.56 an hour that first summer underground as mine helper.

I still remember going down on the cage the first time. I felt good about it. No fear. I think I sort of felt like I had become a man. One time a few years later I had been away from the mines for a while but I had secured a job underground. In the day or so before I went back underground I was seized by fear. I knew then what I was getting myself into. I managed to steel my nerves and get on with it. After a few days back at it I was okay but I always remember the fear I had that time before I went back under.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

OPENING UP THE PILBARA (Australian Iron Ore Region)

The 1960s saw a huge iron ore development programme in Western Australia, the largest mines being in the Pilbara. Apart from Tom Price, major new mines developed there in the 1960s included Mount Newman (Amax, BHP, Colonial Sugar, Selection Trust), Mount Goldsworthy (Consolidated Gold Fields, Cyprus Mines, Utah Development) and Robe River (Cleveland Cliffs).
One of the key issues that had to be addressed in terms of opening up the Pilbara was transport.

The problem that first exercised Hancock and the international miners drawn to the Pilbara was how these fabulous riches were to be transported to market. The potential size of the deposits meant that the majority of the customers for the ore would come from overseas, with Japan being the obvious first port of call. The steel industry in Australia itself, dominated by BHP, was well served by the traditional supplies coming to it from South Australia where expansion was underway in the 1960s.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

Canadian J. AUSTEN BANCROFT (1882-1957) Zambian copperbelt

The name of Joe Austen Bancroft, a Canadian born in North Sydney, Cape Breton, is synonymous with the exploration and development of what is now known as the Zambian copperbelt. The exploration programme that he oversaw in then Northern Rhodesia in the 1930s was probably the most extensive scientifically-based programme seen anywhere up to that time and from it was born one of the largest copper mining provinces in the world. Bancroft pioneered the science of economic geology in the first part of the 20th century; at the time such a term would have been considered an oxymoron but now it is the driving force behind most commercial geology.

He was born in 1882 one of eight children and his father was a Methodist minister. The early part of Bancroft’s adult life, after graduating first in his class from Acadia University, Nova Scotia in 1903 and being awarded a Yale fellowship, was spent studying and then teaching geology. He joined the faculty of McGill University in Montreal in 1905 and took post-graduate courses at Leipzig University, Georgius Agricola’s alma mater, and Bonn University between 1908 and 1910.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

SIR ERNEST OPPENHEIMER (1880-1957)

It is impossible when considering mining in the 20th century not to place the Oppenheimer family at the centre of the development of the South African industry, one that is pre-eminent in the production of precious metals. Sir Ernest Oppenheimer played a crucial role in establishing the Anglo American group and, as Chairman of De Beers, in organising the modern diamond-trading cartel, the Central Selling Organisation, now much reformed.

Sir Ernest was born in 1880 in Freidberg, Germany, where his father Edward was a cigar merchant. The Oppenheimers were a large German Jewish family with excellent connections, particularly in the diamond business in England. When he was 16 he went to England and started work as a clerk in the London office of diamond merchant A. Dunkelsbuhler, who was his cousin, and became a naturalised Briton.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

THE AUSTRALIAN NICKEL BOOM

The Australian mining boom of the late 1960s was given the generic title of the nickel boom, although it can be argued that nickel was, in economic terms, a relatively minor part of a period of exploration and new discoveries that saw the genesis of the giant iron ore industry in the northern part of Western Australia and the discovery of uranium in the Northern Territories.

In terms of nickel there were three major events – the discovery of nickel by Western Mining at Kambalda in Western Australia in 1966, the sensational but ultimately disappointing Poseidon discovery at Windarra to the north of Kambalda in 1969, and in 1971 the Selection Trust group’s Agnew nickel discovery, which was further north still.

A FINANCIAL EVENT

Although Australia had spawned a number of mining booms in its past, the 1960s boom at times was as much a financial event as a mining event. As far as stock market activity was concerned, the surge of interest in Australian mining shares followed an extended worldwide boom in industrial, technology and financial shares, and was symptomatic of an era when confidence was high and investors, buoyed by profits elsewhere, were in the mood for speculation.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

HANS MERENSKY (1871-1952)

Hans Merensky was born in 1871 in Botshabelo in the Transvaal. His father Alexander, a German, was an ethnographer interested in the scientific study of local African culture; he was also resident missionary in the area.

In 1882 the family returned to Germany where Merensky finished his schooling and then went to the State Academy of Mining in Berlin to study mining geology and engineering, and then took a doctorate in geology at the Royal Technical College of Charlottenburg. His course professor in Berlin remarked on Merensky’s sixth sense for ferreting out mineral deposits.

Following that he worked in the coal mines of Silesia before joining the Department of Mines in East Prussia. In 1904 Merensky returned to South Africa on sabbatical from the Department to do some geological field studies and it was here that he made the first of a suite of major mineral discoveries in southern Africa. Working in the Transvaal he discovered tin near Pretoria and then became associated with Premier Diamonds.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

COAL IN THE UK and THOMAS POWELL (1779-1863)

The first nation to fully embrace the Industrial Revolution was Great Britain, the leading military power in the world at the start of the 19th century, and also a leader in industrial innovation. However, coal had been mined in Britain since, and possibly even before, the coming of the Romans in the 1st century. Originally it had been used in fires and forges for working metal, a role that it had held for many centuries in other parts of the world.

Mining in these earlier times was quite crude, favouring surface accumulations of coal, and when these were exhausted shallow drifts would be driven into the coal to allow mineworkers to mine it at shallow depth. As long as the British economy remained primarily agrarian, the use of coal was not widespread. Gradually, a number of significant engineering advances stimulated interest in coal mining and provided the Industrial Revolution with the means to materially quicken the pace of development.

Coal and the invention of machines, to both improve coal mining and to utilise the power that coal could generate, drove the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen were credited with inventing the steam engine in the 18th century, which allowed pumping to take place in the mines to remove water as coal mining moved to new depths.

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Excerpt from “The History of Mining: The events, technology and people involved in the industry that forged the modern world” – by Michael Coulson

To order a copy of The History of Mining please click here: http://www.harriman-house.com/products/books/23161/business/Michael-Coulson/The-History-of-Mining/

CANADIAN GOLD RUSHES/ NOAH TIMMINS (1867-1936)

The 19th century ended with Canada firmly in the world’s consciousness thanks to the fabulous Klondike gold rush. By the middle of the 20th century Canada would be established as one of the most powerful economies in the world and an important diplomatic player following its key roll on the Allied side in both world wars. The economic underpinning, which enabled Canada to advance to the edge of major power status, was mining. In 1900 the country produced minerals to the value of US$64 million – by the beginning of the Second World War that figure had risen to $567 million and today it is nearer to $45 billion.

Today Canada’s population is only around 35 million, making it very much a mid-range country in those terms, but it is a long-standing member of the Group of 7 (or G7), the meeting of the largest economies in the world. Its standard of living is amongst the highest in the world and its proximity to the world’s largest economy, the USA, is of major benefit as Canada is an exporter of high quality, high value, advanced products to its rich neighbour.

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