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

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/

JOHN NORTH (1842-1896) Chile’s Nitrates King

John Thomas North was known as the nitrates king as a result of his dominance of Chile’s nitrates industry in the latter part of the 19th century and his web of listed nitrates companies in London. He was also an active promoter and owner of coal mines in Chile and the UK and gold mines in Australia.

The son of a prosperous coal merchant, North was born in Holbeck, near Leeds in Yorkshire, in the north of England, in 1842. He served an apprenticeship in a local engineering firm, Fowler & Co, and then went out to southern Peru in 1869 where he installed machinery to treat nitrates. At the time nitrates – nitrogen rich salts – were beginning to be the fertiliser of choice for farmers, and Peru and Bolivia had the largest reserves of the mineral.

In 1879 the War of the Pacific broke out between Chile and Peru and Bolivia and as a result there was concern for the nitrate fields in southern Peru. One of the main problems was that the Peruvian government had issued government nitrate bonds in 1875 in an attempt to nationalise the largely British and Chilean owned nitrate deposits in Peru. With the outbreak of war the value of the bonds plunged and North, who had by then established his own nitrate works and invested in a water company which supplied the desert-located nitrate fields, began to purchase these nitrate bonds at less than 15% of face value.

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Stompin Tom Connors Wiki Profile and Mining Songs

Inco Nickel Miners – Sudbury Saturday Night

Charles Thomas “Stompin’ Tom” Connors, OC (born February 9, 1936) is one of Canada’s most prolific and well-known country and folk singers. Focusing his career exclusively on his native Canada, Connors is credited with writing more than 300 songs and has released four dozen albums, with total sales of nearly 4 million copies.[1]

Elliot Lake Uranium Miners – Dam Good Song For A Miner

Early life

He was born Charles Thomas Connors (known as Tommy Messer) in Saint John, New Brunswick to the teenaged Isabel Connors and her boyfriend Thomas Sullivan. He was a cousin of New Brunswick fiddling sensation, Ned Landry. He spent a short time living with his mother in a low-security women’s penitentiary before he was seized by Children’s Aid Society and was later adopted by the Aylward family in Skinners Pond, Prince Edward Island.

At the age of 15 he left his adoptive family to hitchhike across Canada, a journey that consumed the next 13 years of his life as he travelled between various part-time jobs while writing songs on his guitar. At his last stop in Timmins, Ontario, which may also have been his big “break”, he found himself a nickel short of a beer at the city’s Maple Leaf Hotel. The bartender, Gaet Lepine, agreed to give Tom a beer if he would play a few songs. These few songs turned into a 13-month contract to play at the hotel, a weekly spot on the CKGB radio station in Timmins, eight 45-RPM recordings, and the end of the beginning for Tom Connors.

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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/

BROKEN HILL, AUSTRALIA – SILVER IS DISCOVERED

The story of Broken Hill began on the NSW state border with South Australia when silver was found at Thackaringa in 1876. Prospectors, excited by the news, pushed west from the copper discoveries at Cobar. The Thackaringa silver deposits, however, did not have a long life and soon petered out.

In due course prospectors found gold in modest amounts at Mount Browne, 200 miles north of Thackaringa, and this started a mini-rush to the new goldfield. Conditions were appalling with temperatures holding steady for weeks at an end at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Disease was rife and the cost of supplying food and water so high that Mount Browne never really had a chance of measuring up to other gold fields in Australia and around the world. Interest soon switched back south towards Thackaringa, where prospectors had begun to search for silver again.

The first of these new discoveries was the Umberumberka silver and lead mine and this spawned the town of Silverton, which today – though pretty much a ghost town – is a magnet for tourists and film makers. At the time it was the centre for some highly profitable silver mines and a busy stock exchange.

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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/

HOW THE PROSPECTORS GOT TO CALIFORNIA

The experience of those taking part in the California Rush was easier than the privations that would be experienced by those making it to the Klondike in that later rush. However, getting to the Californian gold fields was no picnic. Whilst today there are many road and rail routes across and through the great Sierra Mountains into the Pacific USA, in the 19th century the overland crossing from the eastern and central states into California was fraught with danger.

The other routes used were sea routes, first the long voyage down to the tip of South America, round Cape Horn and up to San Francisco, before the relatively short land journey south to the gold fields. The time this route took and the considerable dangers posed by the huge storms that often blew around Cape Horn led to a third route being established, sailing to the Panama Isthmus and then going by land to the Pacific side to board ships to San Francisco at the Gulf of Panama. Whilst this latter route was obviously faster than the Cape Horn route it was not without danger as Panama’s climate harboured diseases such as malaria and yellow fever, which led to many fatalities amongst the travellers.

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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/

THOMAS FROOD (1837-1916)

Thomas Frood was one of a large number of amateur mineral prospectors who opened up the great Canadian north for mining development. Frood, however, was one of an exclusive group who could claim a major discovery, which in his case was the Sudbury copper and nickel district of central Ontario, the home of Inco and Falconbridge, Canada’s two largest nickel miners.

Frood was born in McNab in Renfrew County, eastern Ontario, in 1837. His parents Thomas and Barbara Frood were immigrants from Scotland and his father farmed in McNab. He was educated, as was the practice then, at home and as a youth also worked on the family farm. He took up teaching himself and for many years taught in a variety of Ontario townships as Canada developed its public school system. He also worked in the army medical corps between 1866 and 1871 during the Fenian raids over the border made by dissident Irishmen resident in the US. Following this, Frood became a chemist and opened his own chemist’s shop in Southampton, a seaside town on Lake Huron. He also married his first wife, Mary, in 1865 and they had two daughters.

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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/

CECIL RHODES (1853-1902)

Once one of the British Empire’s most revered but also widely hated figures, Cecil John Rhodes enjoyed a burst of popularity after his death when his legacy, the Rhodes Scholar awards to Oriel College, Oxford, in particular marked him as a great philanthropist and visionary. Since then his reputation seems to have been in almost permanent decline as first his admiration for the Anglo Saxon ‘race’ and then his vision of a worldwide British Empire poisoned his public esteem and earned the contempt, particularly, of modern historians.

Rhodes was born in Bishops Stortford 30 miles north of London, the son of a clergyman. Whilst his brothers attended England’s great public schools and went up to Oxford, Rhodes was sickly and was educated locally. His health meant that he did not initially go to university but left school at 16. After being diagnosed with TB he went to South Africa to join his brother Herbert on his cotton farm in Natal. After a couple of years building up the farm Herbert, who had earlier spent a short time in the diamond fields near Kimberley in Griqualand West, returned to Kimberley and Rhodes followed. Herbert earlier had some success with his claims, but under Cecil’s direction things took on a more organised and businesslike tone.

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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/

BRAZIL and MARRO VEHLO

At least one of the companies that Disraeli was pushing, Imperial Brazilian, established a profitable mining business in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil at the old and rich Gongo Soco mine, which lasted from 1826 until 1856 when flooding led to the mine’s collapse. Over 30 years it produced more than 400,000 ozs of gold, the revenue generated being divided 60% to costs, 20% to shareholder dividends and 20% to the Brazilian government in taxes, making it one of the few profitable companies to come under Disraeli’s gaze.

Brazil had been a major gold producer since gold was first discovered in Minas Gerais at the end of the 17th century. Gold production is thought to have been around 1,200 tonnes between 1700 and 1820, at which time British capital was allowed in, following independence from Portugal, to revive the ageing mines of the region. The British had in fact benefited for decades from the growth of gold mining in the pre-independence era as Portugal ran a permanent trade deficit with Britain which was plugged by gold deliveries from Brazil.

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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/

PADDY HANNAN (1840-1925)

The history of gold prospecting in Australia is populated by countless thousands of mostly unlucky and long forgotten men. One of the few whose name still survives is Paddy Hannan, who found the fabulous Kalgoorlie gold field in Western Australia in 1893 and whose statue is still to be seen in the centre of Kalgoorlie today.

Hannan was born in Ireland in 1840, one of five brothers and six sisters. He travelled to Australia in 1862 and worked for several years as a miner in the gold fields of Ballarat in Victoria where his uncle, William Lynch, was a miner. After that he went to work in the gold fields of New Zealand for several years and returned to prospect in New South Wales and then South Australia. He later crossed Australia to prospect for gold in Western Australia around Southern Cross. Hannan was a careful man with an ability to find water as well as gold, something that stood him in good stead in parched Western Australia. It was this skill at finding water that led to Hannan’s discovery of the famous Kalgoorlie gold field in 1892, for it was while he was looking for sources to fill his waterbags that he stumbled over surface gold.

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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 INDUSTRY THAT FORGED THE MODERN WORLD

Throughout history metals and raw materials have underpinned human activity. So it is that the industry responsible for extracting these materials from the ground – mining – has been ever present throughout the history of civilisation, from the ancient world of the Egyptians and Romans, to the industrial revolution and the British Empire, and through to the present day, with mining firms well represented on the world’s most important stock indexes including the FTSE100.

This book traces the history of mining from those early moments when man first started using tools to the present day where metals continue to underpin economic activity in the post industrial age. In doing so, the history of mining methods, important events, technological developments, the important firms and the sparkling personalities that built the industry are examined in detail.

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Coltan: Michael Nest – Book Review – by Stephen Williams (African Business – September 10, 2012)

http://africanbusinessmagazine.com/main-articles/ic-publications

Just one of many resources that the DR Congo has in abundance, coltan, has received an unprecedented amount of attention from Western-based NGOs. They accuse the world’s technology corporations of fuelling the bloody conflict in the eastern Congo region where this metal is found. More accurately termed columbite-tantalite, but universally known by its abbreviation ‘coltan’, author Michael Nest explodes many of the myths that have grown around this controversial metal.

Like any good researcher, Nest takes the time to crosscheck and corroborate the basic facts and figures. One of the first ‘facts’ that he debunks is the commonly cited figure of 80% as the DR Congo’s share of the world’s reserves, or even the world’s production of coltan.

The earliest article he could find that gave this figure was a story from Agence France-Presse that quoted the 80% as Africa’s total, which was then repeated in March and April 2001 respectively by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and New Scientist magazine. It was the BBC News website, in the same year, that first attributed the 80% tag to DR Congo itself.

Nest tells us that there is no shortage of coltan, and it is, in fact, found in many countries around the world. The author’s own research suggests an “informed estimate” that Central Africa has about 9% of the world’s total and the DR Congo has about 7-8% of global reserves. Nest also believes that for much of the 2000s, the DR Congo may have produced around 20% of the world’s total, but historically the largest producer has been Australia.

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Cage Call: Artist explores lost [mining] histories – by Laura Stricker (Sudbury Star – September 22, 2012)

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

When photographer Louie Palu set out to learn more about mining, his plan was to spend one month at a mine in Kirkland Lake. That was in 1991. Instead, 12 years, two provinces and thousands of photos later, the project came to an end.

“My dad told me about Kirkland Lake,” Palu said, speaking on the phone. “He was working up there. He’s not a miner. He was just working with some mining people.

“I’ve always been interested in these underrepresented histories and stories, especially sociopolitical ones. Suddenly from Kirkland Lake I got to Timmins, then Sudbury, Val d’Or and (Rouyn)-Noranda. There were all these sort of lost histories, these really important lost histories. I just felt like this story needed to be told.”

Since then, he’s been telling the story through two books and his photos, which have been put on display at art galleries and shows all over the world, including Sweden, France and the United States.

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Excerpt from Bootleg Gold – by Kevin Vincent

To order Bootleg Gold Volume One, please click here: www.bootleggold.net

Introduction

“Is my Dad in your book? You didn’t mention my grandfather by any chance did ya’? Is ‘you-know-who’ in the book?” As a writer, if you live in a gold mining town, and it becomes common knowledge that you’re writing a book about highgrading, which is basically the theft of gold from a mine, as well as long-forgotten gold robberies, almost everyone will approach you with a story to share.

Timmins, Ontario is such a town. There are others, such as Sidney, Nevada, Dawson Creek, Yukon, and Forbes, Australia. The same stories are heard in hundreds of towns and villages across Africa, dozens of communities in California, Colorado, Alaska, Québec and even the state of Idaho where the first thing that leaps to mind is potatoes, not gold.

Curiously, everyone wants to see their family name in print – not their own name, they’d prefer to see their uncle’s name or their great-grandfather’s name. It’s an unofficial badge of honour – one where “sticking it to the man” – in this case, multinational gold mines – was justified, and almost bordered, somehow on righteous.

None of these many people who approach the writer were ever personally involved in high-grading, of course, but they happen to know someone who, (wink wink, nudge nudge) just might have been “involved.”

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Stories about people stealing gold in Timmins … New book Bootleg Gold – by Len Gillis (Timmins Times – August 1, 2012)

http://www.timminstimes.com/

Copies of the book can be ordered online at: www.bootleggold.net.

Local author releases new book on high-grading.

For the City of Timmins having been around 100 years, there has to be a thousand stories about high-grading in this city. High-grading, also simply known as stealing gold from the mines, has been going on in Timmins since the day the big mines opened.

It’s no wonder that a local writer has finally made an effort to do some reputable research on the topic and come up with a few of those stories.

Kevin Vincent has authored Volume One of Bootleg Gold, a close look at the impact of high-grading on the gold mining industry here in Timmins, Ontario, — one of the world’s foremost gold mining camps. He has been working on the story and gathering research for 25 years. Vincent has done his homework, starting with exclusive interviews with the late Gregory Evans, the venerable Timmins lawyer who went on to become chief justice of the Supreme Court of Ontario.

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Mining the Treasure Trove (Ring of Fire): Excerpt from Northern Ontario: Introducing the Unknown Country – Michael Barnes

Michael Barnes is the author of more than fifty books about characters, communities, mining, and police work. He is a Member of the Order of Canada and makes his home in Haliburton, Ontario, Canada. While living in Northern Ontario most of his life, he has come to know and admire those who make their living in the mining industry.

To order a copy of “Fortunes Found – Canadian Mining Success” go to: General Store Publishing House

Mining the Treasure Trove (Ring of Fire) Excerpt

Geologists have two theories as to the origins of the metals that are driving the push to access the potential bounty of the Ring of Fire deposits. The area it covers may well be bigger than the Sudbury Basin. One theory has it that the volcanics in the great arc were there first and then the granite intruded, bringing up host rocks for the minerals.

The other is connected with Continental Drift during the earth’s early history. In this line of thought, two separate subcontinents collided, and between the faulted contact between the two, mineral plumes brought up the minerals. More drilling in the granite should eventually settle the matter.

In the meantime, the rare mix of metals waiting for harvest has excited more interest than any other mining boom in Canada in decades. One estimate of the value of the chromium alone currently known to be present is set at $30 billion. As diamond drills continue to define the different ore bodies, and geologists ponder each metre of core brought to surface, there is much debate as to how mining will be done and the way it will be brought to market. (Continued after video)

In 2010, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada awarded the discoverers of the Ontario Ring of Fire mining camp – Richard E. Nemis, John D. Harvey, Mac Watson,  Donald Hoy, Neil D. Novak – the Prospectors of the Year Award. The above video highlights the most significant Canadian mineral discovery in almost a century.  

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Drawings of the Porcupine Camp 1909-2009 Graphic Book – by Denis Newman

 

A Great Christmas Gift

To order a copy of this $33.00 book, click here: http://www.highgradermagazine.com/books.html

Drawings of the Porcupine Camp 1909-2009 is a compendium of the Porcupine drawings of Denis Newman as we celebrate the Porcupine mines’ centennial.

Reminisce as you appreciate Denis Newman’s renderings of places where you worked and lived, or perhaps only visited in years past. These sketches will surely engender memories, both happy and sad, of all tha was near and dear to tose of us who knew and loved the Porcupine.- Syl Belisle

Denis Newman was born in Timmins and spent his early years on the Paymaster and Dome properties. After working at the Dome, Denis graduated from North Bay’s TEachers College and later Queen’s University. He now lives in Bellville with his wife Geneva. Most of his renderings focus on mine head frames and landscapes.

See below for more images:

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