Canadian Mining History – Page 12

Norman B. Keevil book reveals tactics of 1970s B.C. flirtation with resource nationalism – by Greg Klein (Resource Clips – September 29, 2017)

October 2, 2017

The year was 1973. No sooner had Teck Resources transplanted its HQ to Vancouver than British Columbia premier W.A.C. Bennett’s 20-year reign fell to defeat at NDP hands. Resource nationalism proved to be one of new premier Dave Barrett’s earliest enthusiasms. But the guy who bragged about his commitment to doing “what was needed and right” showed a peculiar modus operandi.

That’s just one of the stories related by Norman B. Keevil in a history of Teck to be released next week, Never Rest on your Ores: Building a Mining Company, One Stone at a Time. Keevil relates that on summoning him and Bob Hallbauer into the premier’s Victoria office, Barrett’s first words were, “I want your coal.”

Interest had been growing in northeastern B.C.’s deposits, among them Teck’s Sukunka. “Well, at least he did call it our coal,” Keevil notes. “That would become questionable as the situation evolved.” The duo declined but Barrett wouldn’t give up. He kept calling them back to Victoria on an almost weekly basis.

[J.P. Bickell and McIntyre Mine] Literary hockey history at Timmins Museum – by Emma Meldrum (Timmins Daily Press – October 2, 2017)

October 2, 2017

http://www.timminspress.com/

J.P. Bickell was the CEO of McIntyre Mine which produced slightly over 10 million ounces of gold from 1912 – 1988. Gold mines that produce over 10 million ounces of gold are very rare, even today. – Stan Sudol

TIMMINS – In a darkened room, men mill about the bar while a reggae band plays. On Friday evening, the Timmins Museum: National Exhibition Centre’s permanent gallery space hosted Books, Bands, Beer and Beards. The evening started off with Jason Wilson & the Perennials’ version of the classic Hockey Night in Canada theme song – the hockey theme only grew from there.

Graham MacLaughlan and Kevin Shea, who wrote “J.P. Bickell: The Life, the Leafs, and the Legacy” along with Wilson, spoke at length about the man’s contributions to the sport and to this city.

When asked by host Andrew Autio about what surprised them while they researched the book, Shea highlighted the depth of Bickell’s philanthropy. “He was behind so many things that still exist to this day and flourished because of his money in the early days,” said Shea. “It doesn’t really resonate until you really start to research the book.

Chief Isaac and the mass media – by Dorota Kupis (Yukon News – September 28, 2017)

September 29, 2017

The Yukon’s earliest newspapers frequently treated the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in poorly

The Klondike Gold Rush altered the lives of several Yukon First Nations. The most affected were the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, living near Dawson City. The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in came in contact with white people years before the gold rush. The first traders (Jack McQuesten, Frank Bonfield) arrived in their territories as early as 1874. Other than traders, early newcomers were missionaries and miners.

After gold was discovered on Rabbit Creek in 1896, enormous waves of white newcomers came to the Yukon. By 1898, about 40,000 people settled in Dawson City, the center of the Klondike Gold Rush, and the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in living in this area became a minority in their traditional territories.

The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, who relocated to the little community of Moosehide, three kilometers downriver from the new town, had to adapt their lives to interact with the residents of Dawson City and miners working on the adjacent creeks.

Excerpt from J.P. BICKELL: The Life, the Leafs, and the Legacy – by Jason Wilson, Kevin Shea and Graham MacLachlan

September 28, 2017

To order a copy of “J.P. BICKELL: The Life, the Leafs, and the Legacy”: https://www.dundurn.com/books/JP-Bickell

Jason Wilson is a bestselling Canadian author, a two-time Juno Awards Nominee, and an Adjunct Professor of History at the University of Guelph. He has performed and recorded with UB40, Ron Sexsmith, Pee Wee Ellis, and Dave Swarbrick. Jason lives in Stouffville, Ontario.

Kevin Shea is a renowned hockey historian and bestselling author of fourteen hockey books. He is the Editor of Publications and Online Features for the Hockey Hall of Fame, a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs Historical Committee, and a founding member of Road Hockey to Conquer Cancer. Kevin lives in Toronto.

Graham MacLachlan is a relative of J.P. Bickell who has an extensive business background in international trade that is equalled by his involvement in hockey in the IIHF, the WHL, Hockey Canada, Hockey Alberta, and Hockey Calgary. Graham lives in Calgary, Alberta.

OVERVIEW

He stayed out of the spotlight, but Leafs fans know J.P. Bickell cast a long shadow.

A self-made mining magnate and the man who kept the Maple Leafs in Toronto and financed Maple Leaf Gardens, J.P. Bickell lived an extraordinary and purposeful life. As one of the most important industrialists in Canadian history, Bickell left his mark on communities across the nation. He was a cornerstone of the Toronto Maple Leafs, which awards the J.P. Bickell Memorial Award to recognize outstanding service to the organization.

Bickell’s story is also tied up with some of the most famous Canadians of his day, including Mitchell Hepburn, Roy Thomson, and Conn Smythe. Through his charitable foundation, he has been a key benefactor of the Hospital for Sick Children, and his legacy continues to transform Toronto.

Excerpt from J.P. BICKELL: The Life, the Leafs, and the Legacy – by Jason Wilson, Kevin Shea and Graham MacLachlan

September 25, 2017

To order a copy of “J.P. BICKELL: The Life, the Leafs, and the Legacy”: https://www.dundurn.com/books/JP-Bickell

OVERVIEW

He stayed out of the spotlight, but Leafs fans know J.P. Bickell cast a long shadow.

ARCHIVES: The Murders In The Mine – by Katherine Laidlaw (Up Here.com – September 18, 2012)

September 18, 2017

http://uphere.ca/

Eighteen months on the picket line. Thirty-eight kilos of explosives. Nine men dead. 20 years passed.

It’s the story that made world news and changed a mining town forever. The Giant Mine strike stands as one of the longest and bloodiest in Canadian history, punctuated by one of the worst mass murders the country has ever seen. For those who lived through September 18, 1992, the scars have never healed. Here are their stories …

On May 22, 1992, a company called Royal Oak Mines Inc. locked out its workforce at Giant Mine in Yellowknife. The union, the local 4 chapter of the Canadian Association of Smelter and Allied Workers, and management couldn’t reach a settlement. Before the strike, it was a good, if finite, time to be a gold miner.

The average worker at Giant was pulling in $77,000 a year, and those clocking overtime were making more than $100,000. But the strike got dirty quickly as rumours swirled of Royal Oak CEO Peggy Witte’s intent to break the union. One thing she did break was an unwritten labour rule in Canada: you don’t bring in replacement workers. No mining company had done that in 45 years. Nevada-born Witte flew them in by helicopter the next day.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: ‘It was like one big family’: 25 years later, a B.C. ghost town’s former residents still miss their home – by Maryse Zeidler (CBC News British Columbia – September 17, 2017)

September 18, 2017

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/

Cassiar, B.C., was once centred around now-closed asbestos mine

When Herb Daum thinks of growing up in Cassiar, B.C., a lot of his memories seem to be about how frigid it was. “The winters were long, cold and hard,” said Daum, 63, from his home in Powell River, B.C.

Cassiar sits near the Yukon border. Temperatures as low as – 40 C weren’t unusual there, Daum says, and lakes in the area often wouldn’t thaw until June. As a pastime when Daum was little, he and his neighbourhood friends would climb onto the roof of his porch, pull down their toques over their heads, and dive head-first into the snow.

But the house that he grew up in doesn’t exist anymore. In fact, the entire town of Cassiar is gone, razed to the ground. “It’s kind of weird losing your roots like that,” Daum said. Twenty-five years ago this week, Cassiar, B.C., held an auction like none other: up for grabs was the entire contents of the company town.

[Northwestern Quebec] The Birth of Rouyn and Noranda: A Mining Story (Website Historical Resource)

September 7, 2017

1932 Group Photo of Noranda Executives – James Murdoch and Noah Timmins in front row centre wearing fur coats

For an excellent website historical resource on Rouyn and Noranda: http://www.virtualmuseum.ca/community-stories_histoires-de-chez-nous/rouyn-noranda-une-histoire-de-mines_a-mining-story/

In the mid-1920s, discovery of copper and gold deposits in Northwestern Quebec resulted in an epic mining rush. Prospectors, followed by thousands of men and women, gathered there to work and live. Two neighbouring mushroom towns with many fundamental differences, Rouyn and Noranda, quickly came to life in the boreal forest, becoming populous and organized communities.

Unlike the farming parishes established earlier on in Abitibi and Témiscamingue, Rouyn and Noranda were built as a result of mining developments. In but a few short years, the landscape changed drastically: In the 1910s, only Aboriginal peoples and prospectors looking for precious metals were seen around Osisko Lake, but in 1925, a large influx of newcomers settled in the area.

Historicist: The Man the Rocks Talked To: A.P. Coleman uncovered Toronto’s prehistory, among other adventures – by Dennis Duffy (Torontoist.com – August 19, 2017)

August 19, 2017

http://torontoist.com/

Such a map as Coleman’s (and he drew many such, across Canada and elsewhere as he
took his geology students along on summer expeditions) was more than a guide to the
origins of the Sudbury Big Nickel that you can spy from the Trans-Canada. It helped
provide the kickoff for the exploitation of Northern Ontario’s mineral—as opposed
to timber—resources. It also promoted the growth of Bay Street, which has done so
much to reshape Ontario’s image and boost Toronto’s takeoff toward its present
position in the financial and commercial life of the country.

If you’re at the Evergreen Brick Works Market in the Don Valley, walk north along some 200 yards of lovingly created wetland. When you’ve gone about 50 yards past that, you will be on a little rise. Look behind over your shoulder for a view of the downtown skyline.

Then keep on walking until you get to a little cul-de-sac and look at the cliff face that you have been staring ahead at for the last while. It is overgrown. The small plaque in front of you states that you are facing one of the oldest geological formations in the Toronto region and that it was first “discovered” (let’s be more precise and call it “labelled”) in the 1890s by geologist A.P. Coleman (April 4, 1852–February 26, 1939), a scientist and public intellectual of great renown in his day and a figure still dimly remembered now. Coleman’s work on the traces of the last great ice age (the Pleistocene) enable us to view the Brick Works park within the broad perspective of the long history of our city.

Casanova of the Klondike – by Pierre Berton (Globe and Mail – December 24, 2004)

August 17, 2017

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Of all the eccentric characters who made their pile in the Klondike, my favourite is Swiftwater Bill Gates, a moon-faced little American smooth-talker who was transformed from a penniless dishwasher in Circle City, Alaska, to a potential millionaire.

He might have become a millionaire, had he managed to hold on to his wealth, the bulk of which came from a share he held in Claim No. 13 on Eldorado Creek. Considered unlucky at first because of its number, it turned out to be one of the richest pieces of ground in the gold fields.

A legendary gambler and skirt-chaser, he dropped $500 in less than five minutes at faro and promptly stood drinks for the crowd at a cost of $112. He also lost $5,000 on one bet during a stud poker game he was just watching. When short of cash, he would borrow it at 10 per cent a month in interest so he could shoot pool at $100 a frame.

[Joe Boyle] King of the gold diggers – by Pierre Berton (Globe and Mail – September 25, 2004)

August 16, 2017

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

“Placer gold is known as Poor Man’s Gold because a lone prospector can
wrest it from the ground with little more than a spade and a sluice box.”

Joseph Whiteside Boyle was a force of nature, albeit a flawed one. In the early days of the 20th century, he was famous, even notorious, on two continents. A man who craved action for its own sake, he had an uncanny instinct for finding where the action was. When the first news of the Klondike strike was making headlines in Seattle and San Francisco, Boyle was already in the vanguard of the ragtag army of gold seekers stampeding north.

Old-time mining methods were not for him. Though he began with virtually nothing, he went on to build, under almost impossible conditions, the largest gold dredges in the world — monstrous floating machines that churned up the storied creek beds and helped revolutionize the placer mining industry in the Yukon.

He came from a middle-class family of four siblings, and there is no suggestion that his upbringing in the quiet ambiance of Woodstock, Ont., was anything but happy. He feared no man but held no grudges. He got along with his opponents, both legal and financial, and they got along with him.

Mining warfare in WWI – by Cecilia Keating (CIM Magazine – November 04, 2016)

July 28, 2017

http://magazine.cim.org/en/

During the critical battles of World War One, skilled miners – many of them Canadian – made Allied victories possible

In the First World War trenches cleaved Europe from the North Sea to Switzerland. While the battlefield above ground was static, a secret subterranean war raged underground.

The British Army began to form specialist army units of trained tunnellers in 1915, initially recruiting men from poor coal mining communities in Britain. Their job was to create a labyrinth of long underground tunnels that extended under enemy lines and could be packed with explosives, and to dig ‘camouflets’, smaller mines used to collapse enemy tunnels. They were also tasked with building extensive networks of tunnels behind Allied lines, allowing for undetected movement of men and supplies.

Faced with growing demand for skilled miners, the British government appealed to Canada to raise tunnelling units, or ‘companies’, in September 1915. The first was mobilised in Pembroke, Ontario and recruited men from mining centres in Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.

AWARD: Ross Beaty receives Order of Canada (Canadian Mining Journal – July 10, 2017)

July 11, 2017

http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

OTTAWA – Mining magnate and philanthropist Ross Beaty is among the 99 prominent Canadians awarded membership in the 2017 Order of Canada.

The award shows that mining and environmentalism are not necessarily incompatible. Beaty, the founder and chairman of Pan American Silver and executive chairman of Alterra Power Corp – a geothermal, wind and hydro power company – is also a generous philanthropist. In May he gave $5 million over 10 years to Panthera, which is a global wild cat conservation organization.

A few month earlier the Canadian Museum of Nature announced that Beaty would be providing it with its largest ever philanthropic gift: a $4 million investment to enhance the museum’s national research and collections that are focused on species discovery. The gift was through the Sitka Foundation, which Beaty founded in 2007 to be a catalyst in the protection of the environment and promotion of biodiversity.

Community’s long history seen as a gift by residents – by Elizabeth Patterson (Cape Breton Post – July 8, 2017)

July 10, 2017

http://www.capebretonpost.com/

SYDNEY MINES – If you offered Sheila MacCormick a chance to buy a brand new house, she probably wouldn’t be that interested. MacCormick lives in a brick and stone home that was built in 1853 for a mine office manager by the name of Sutherland who worked for the General Mining Association. It comes complete with hardwood peg floors, five fireplaces and uneven windows and she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I just love old buildings and old things,” MacCormick told The Cape Breton Post at a heritage display and storytelling session at Holy Family Church hall on Saturday. “It’s got a lot of history and I just love it.”

MacCormick is just one of about three dozen people who attended the session held to mark Heritage Day in Sydney Mines. While the morning event, an outdoor heritage hunt, didn’t attract a lot of people mainly due to poor weather, many instead came in the afternoon to hear a discussion led by Ronald Labelle, Cape Breton Regional Library’s storyteller-in-residence.

Jack Bickell Chairman of McIntyre-Porcupine Mines: The Man Who Built Maple Leaf Gardens in the 1930s

July 16, 2017July 9, 2017

Video from: http://www.sportsnet.ca/

“You could say, without exaggerating, that Bickell was the cornerstone of the whole project.” – Conn Smythe on Bickell’s role in the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens

Canadian Mining Hall Fame: John Paris Bickell (1884 – 1951) Inducted in 2000

Most follow one path, but John Paris Bickell commanded several successful careers during his extraordinary life. He opened a brokerage firm at the age of 23 and was a millionaire by 30. In 1919, he left the investment business to become president and, later, chairman of McIntyre-Porcupine Mines, one of Ontario’s first and most important gold producers.

Bickell’s achievements went beyond the realm of business, as he had a keen sense of civic duty. During the Second World War, he was appointed by Lord Beaverbrook to Britain’s Ministry of Aircraft Production, where he served with the airplane supply board during the blitz. Upon his return to Canada, he assumed responsibility for Victory Aircraft, the federal agency that manufactured Lancaster bombers for the Royal Canadian Air Force.