Canadian Mining History – Page 16

[Jules Timmins] The Shy Midas Behind Ungava – by McKenzie Porter (MACLEAN’S Magazine – February 1, 1952)

August 30, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

Jules Timmins was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he has since gold-plated it from the fabulous mining ventures he has led. Now he’s the dynamo that’s powering the vast Ungava iron development. Yet even in the town they named for his family, cops and bellboys don’t know his face

TOWARD the end of November last a chunky jut-jawed cigar-toting millionaire called Jules Timmins talked about gold in Noranda, northwestern Quebec, on Sunday; about iron in Montreal on Monday; about steel in Cleveland, Ohio, on Tuesday; about copper in Toronto on Wednesday; about silver back in Montreal on Thursday; and about mining finance in New York on Friday.

[Labrador Iron Trough] The Legacy Of The Rail Lives On, But Could It Be Built Today? – by Donna Yoshimatsu (Canadian Mining Journal – June/July 2009)

August 29, 2016

http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

History is witness that the people who built the foundation for Canada’s iron ore industry back in 1950 faced near insurmountable odds that would have stymied even the most ambitious industrialist today.

Among the likes of Timmins, Hollinger, Humphrey, movers and shakers of mining empires, sprung generations of entrepreneurs in search of a piece of history, drawn to the biggest railroad building project the continent had seen in half a century — the Quebec North Shore & Labrador Railway (QNS&L).

How Joe Hirshhorn Hit the Uranium Jackpot – by David MacDonald (MACLEAN’S Magazine – October 29, 1955)

August 29, 2016August 29, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

Even when geologists said there couldn’t be uranium at Blind River this brash and bouncy little financial wizard tossed in $30,000 and struck a spectacular bonanza. He wasn’t surprised. “Making money comes easy to me,” he says, “ — like breathing”

ALONG Toronto’s Bay Street, the frenetic mining capital of North America, veteran prospector and minemaker Gilbert A. LaBine had long been acknowledged—until recently—as the uranium king of Canada. The reason was obvious. It was LaBine who had found the continent’s first pitchblende, at Great Bear Lake, in 1930; LaBine whose Eldorado mine helped usher in the atomic age over Hiroshima; and LaBine who, in the northern wilds of Saskatchewan, came up with Gunnar, Canada’s first truly big uranium strike.

Today—for reasons equally obvious—the top man in uranium is no longer LaBine, a conservative grey-haired elder of the industry, but Joseph H. Hirshhorn, a flashy fast-talking little mining promoter from the borough of Brooklyn, N.Y., whose exploits on Bay and Wall Streets have won him millions of dollars and a gambler’s reputation for playing long shots.

[Uranium City] ATHABASKA’S ATOM BOOM – by Ronald Schiller (MACLEAN’S Magazine – March 1, 1954)

August 29, 2016August 29, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

Uranium City, Sask., can’t afford the time to develop the social graces— companies are formed in the beer parlor, women are outnumbered fifty to one, there’s no plumbing, and every man you meet wants to let you in on his own private bonanza

ONE DAY in the summer of 1952 Gilbert LaBine, the almost legendary Toronto mining millionaire who discovered the original deposit of pitchblende on Great Bear Lake, received a radiogram in Toronto from young geologist Albert Zeemel at Lake Athabaska in northern Saskatchewan. “Come quick,” the message read, “I’ve shot an elephant.”

Although LaBine is aware that there are no elephants in the northern wilds, he chartered a plane immediately and flew to Lake Athabaska. Zeemel strapped a Geiger counter to his boss’ hack, clapped a set of earphones on his head and conducted him to Crackingstone Peninsula. There LaBine heard a crackling roar in his ears like a thousand eggs frying in a pan.

Wherever he walked -for three days the sputtering continued, sometimes fading to a whisper, sometimes rising to a howl, but never stopping. Finally he look the phones from his tingling ears and exulted: “It’s an elephant, all right! Biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

The Fairy Tale Romance of the Canadian Shield – by Blair Fraser (MACLEAN’S Magazine – December 24, 1955)

September 5, 2016August 16, 2016

http://www.macleans.ca/

This Christmas thousands of children will read about the Ugly Duckling. But here’s a stranger tale — about an enormous rocky desert, scorned for centuries, and how its hidden treasures changed Canada.

THE HARDIEST of fairy tale themes have always had to do with the finding of treasure in the commonplace, the scorned and the rejected. In these classic stories ugly ducklings turn into swans, and battered tinderboxes or dirty old lamps are found to contain the key to wealth and power. Canada’s ugly duckling is the Canadian Shield, a great rugged horseshoe of muskeg and stunted forest, lake and bald grey rock that makes up more than half the whole dominion.

For more than three hundred years -eight hundred if you go back to Leif Ericsson’s time — the Shield was known only as a rocky waste, a barrier to progress and a blight to Canada’s future. Ericsson called it Helluland, “the land of flat stones”; Jacques Cartier reported to King Francis I of France that “there isn’t a cartload of dirt in the whole of it”; and it broke the heart of the gullible settlers who tried to clear and farm it, as earlier generations had done the St. Lawrence lowlands. Along its southern edge dense second-growth forest has already rubbed out all but a few pathetic traces of pioneer farms only eighty years old.

Story of a forgotten town – by Alex Browne (Peace Arch News – August 5, 2016)

August 6, 2016

http://www.peacearchnews.com/

South Surrey writer Patricia Sandberg admits she has mining in her blood – although she claims her former career as a securities lawyer for mining companies came about more as a matter of accident, than design.

The fact remains that both her grandfather, Fred, and father Jack, were both deeply involved in the construction end of the mining industry and had an extended working relationship with 20th century Canadian prospector and mining pioneer Gilbert LaBine, first president of Eldorado Mining and Refining from the late 1920s until 1947.

The uranium boom of the late 1940s led LaBine to discover deposits of the metal on the shores of Lake Athabaska in Northern Saskatchewan. In the early 1950s he established Gunnar Mines there – and the company town that was built around it.

Nuke the oilsands: Alberta’s narrowly cancelled plan to drill for oil with atomic weapons – by Tristin Hopper (National Post – August 3, 2016)

August 4, 2016

http://news.nationalpost.com/

It’s often forgotten what a technological feat it was to pump oil out of the Fort McMurray area. While it’s long been known that the Athabasca region is swimming with petroleum, geologists spent decades banging their head against the problem of how to turn oily sand into something that could be refined into gasoline.

Which makes it all the more fortunate that — just before science figured it out — Alberta kiboshed a plan that would have simply thrown nuclear bombs at the problem. “Nuclear miracles will make us rich,” declared famed physicist Edward Teller in a 1959 syndicated editorial.

As the first seeds of the anti-nuclear movement began to show themselves, Teller was trying to assure a worried public that they should welcome atomic bombs as bringers of “as rich a harvest as man’s ingenuity ever has produced.”

Franc Joubin – The Father of Elliot Lake – by Dit Holt (Northern Miner – March 19, 2001)

August 2, 2016

http://www.northernminer.com/

Without the foresight, initiative and leadership of Franc Joubin (1911-1997), the mines of Elliot Lake, Ont., might never have come about. Joubin was one of the most outstanding explorers in North America, if not the world. His achievements, awards, degrees and world-wide experience speak for themselves.

I first met Joubin back in 1949 at a gathering in Toronto to kick off the Beaverlodge uranium campaign. A young geologist who knew him turned to me and asked if I had met the man before. When I said no, he said “mark my work words: he’ll set the world on fire.” How prophetic that turned out to be.

Joubin inspired and affected our lives dramatically. With his natural wit and warmth, this quiet-spoken man was a born leader. “Knowledge is power,” he would often say, and he was living proof.

Victoria’s other Nellie: Entrepreneur Nellie Cashman searched for gold and saved lives during the gold rush – by Patrick Perry Lydon and Donna Chaytor (Victoria Times Colonist – July 24, 2016)

July 26, 2016

http://www.timescolonist.com/

The story of gold-rush entrepreneur Nellie Cashman, who is best known as “the Miners’ Angel,” is full of courage, fortitude, faith and determination. Cashman loved Victoria and returned here to die. She was buried in 1925 in Ross Bay Cemetery.

Cashman displayed an unquenchable concern for the sick and those in need. Her life declaration was: “We pass this way but once and we must help those who need our assistance.”

She was born in Midleton, Cork, Ireland, in August 1845, when great famine, starvation and despair ravaged Ireland. With her father dead, Cashman, her mother and her sister fled to America as refugees and settled in Boston. Cashman received a good basic education and her penmanship was excellent.

The shifting sands of history: Just as the words we use to describe our past change, so too does our understanding – by Robert Fulford (National Post – March 15, 2016)

March 15, 2016

http://news.nationalpost.com/

Word has seeped out of Ottawa that the citizenship guide for new Canadians, Discover Canada, will soon be rewritten by the still newish Liberal government.

With education mainly in the hands of the provinces, this is a rare chance for the federal government to express itself on the nature of Canada and its history. There’s no doubt our past as seen by the Liberals will turn out to be subtly different from the version the Conservatives published.

You may find this process scandalous, politics intruding where it shouldn’t, but experienced readers of history will see it as the normal evolution of opinion. The past has a way of changing. Annoyingly, it won’t stay past. We constantly re-examine it, adjusting our views in the light of newly acquired data and newly adopted passions.

Donald Trump’s grandfather ran Canadian brothel during gold rush, author says – by Alexander Panetta (CBC News – September 19, 2015)

March 14, 2016March 14, 2016

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/

Friedrich Trump amassed ‘substantial nest-egg’ from Yukon hotel before heading to New York

The Canadian Press – Canadians amused by the improbable presidential run of Donald Trump might be surprised to learn the role their own country played in shaping his story.

Trump’s grandfather started the family fortune in an adventure that involved the Klondike gold rush, the Mounties, prostitution and twists of fate that pushed him to New York City.

Friedrich Trump had been in North America a few years when he set out for the Yukon, says an author who’s just completed a new edition of her multi-generational family biography.

That Canadian chapter proved pivotal for the entrepreneurial German immigrant, says Gwenda Blair, author of The Trumps: Three Generations That Built An Empire.

History: How the Trumps Struck Klondike Gold – by Eva Holland (Uphere: The Voice of Canada’s Far North – September 2012)

March 14, 2016

http://uphere.ca/

Long before ‘the Donald,’ his stampeder grandpa’s seedy restaurant gave birth to a glittering dynasty

There’s not much left of Bennett Town today: just the old wooden church high up above the blue water of Lake Bennett and the empty mountains and sky all around. In summer, the White Pass and Yukon Route train, its engine painted bright green and yellow, still chugs through the space where the tent city used to be. In winter, the whole area is quiet, layered in snow.

The abandoned townsite is more than 4,600 kilometres by road from Chicago’s Trump Tower – the 11th tallest building in the world. It’s a cool 6,000 kilometres from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the Trump Taj Mahal, a neon parody, sits above the waves. And it’s 4,300 kilometres from Las Vegas, where the Trump International Hotel’s 64 storeys are sheathed, appropriately enough, in glass that’s tinted gold.

It’s a very long way from the Yukon to any of Donald Trump’s glittering properties, scattered across the major cities of the world.

Last working coal mine on Vancouver Island shuts down, marking end of era (CBC News British Columbia – January 17, 2016)

January 18, 2016

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

‘In so many ways, coal has laid the foundation for the island,” says historian

The last working coal mine on Vancouver Island has halted production indefinitely, marking the end of an industry that established towns, a railway, and some of the province’s first labour unions, says a B.C. historian.

The owners of Quinsam coal mine near Campbell River suspended operations earlier this month, stating the move is in response to a decline in coal prices and market demand.

“In so many ways, coal has laid the foundation for the island,” said University of Victoria history professor John Lutz. “Between the 1850s and the early 20th century coal was the main economic resource on the island.”

MINE SITE NEWS Remembering the Polaris Mine – by Donna Cragg (Canadian Mining Journal – October 31, 2002)

January 6, 2016

http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

Teck Cominco’s Polaris base metal mine closed in August 2002. It was the most northerly base metal mine in the world

Teck Cominco’s Polaris base metal mine closed in August 2002. It was the most northerly base metal mine in the world, which meant dealing with permafrost and the Arctic. Life on site was unique. Here are the recollections of Donna Cragg, paymaster accounting assistant. More tributes to Polaris can be found at www.teckcominco.com and in the latest Orbit magazine.

When the Polaris lead/zinc mine on Little Cornwallis Island in Canada’s high arctic was being planned, commissioned and started up in the late 1970s and early ’80s, I had no idea how important a role the mine would play for me. Now, as operations wind down, I can’t imagine what life would have been like without the opportunity to work and live here in the north.

Lacking proof, Mitsubishi unwilling to apologize to Canadian POWs [Mine slave labour] – by Iain Marlow (Globe and Mail – July 24, 2015)

September 5, 2016July 24, 2015

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.

On Christmas morning, 1944, 23-year-old Corporal George Peterson of the Winnipeg Grenadiers was told by his Japanese guards that he wouldn’t have to go down the Mitsubishi-owned coal mine that day.

Mr. Peterson, who had already spent three grueling years as a prisoner of war, said it looked as though the POWs were about to get a break from the slave-like working conditions. The guards first dragged out a fir tree, then brought out extra food for the famished prisoners, including riceballs and beer.

“They lined us up behind the table and took a picture,” says Mr. Peterson, now 94. But then “they said we could go back down the mine. … When we came up from the mine at about 5 p.m., the guards were laughing at us, saying the food was pretty good. We laughed right back, because we were trying not to let them know how much it hurt.”

Nearly 70 years after the end of the Second World War, Mitsubishi Materials Corp. has begun to issue historic apologies to POWs – but it has not yet apologized to Canadians.