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Canadian Mining History

[Saskatchewan Uranium Mining] A restart 15 years in the making – by Trish Saywell (CIM Magazine – May 02, 2024)

https://magazine.cim.org/en/

Mining at the McClean Lake uranium mine in Saskatchewan, which has been suspended since 2009, will restart in 2025 using technology developed to extract high-grade ore from small ore bodies

After spending 15 years and more than $100 million on research and development, partners Orano Canada Inc. and Denison Mines have built mining equipment that is deployed from surface to extract high-grade uranium ore. They plan to use it to restart mining operations at their McClean Lake property in northern Saskatchewan; Orano owns a 77.5 per cent stake and is the operator of the McClean Lake Joint Venture (MLJV), while Denison owns 22.5 per cent.

Restarting uranium production at McClean Lake is a major milestone. Mining operations at the site began in 1995 and the MLJV extracted ore from five open pits, producing approximately 50 million pounds on a 100 per cent basis, before operations were suspended in 2009 due to low uranium prices.

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Cobalt’s boomtown blues – by John Sandlos (Canadian Mining Journal – March 7, 2024)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

Every mine develops at a different pace. The discovery of a major mineral deposits may create feverish excitement, but an actual mine may remain undeveloped for decades, waiting for a favourable alignment of investors, infrastructure developments, or market conditions.

Some mines develop rather suddenly, however, leading to the “rush” conditions that have been romanticized in popular culture. Mineral rushes may lead to riches for some, but they also can create impossibly difficult conditions for miners and their families, including poor housing, hunger, diseases, and high accident rates in the mines.

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Heart of gold: the legend of Nellie Cashman – by A.J. Roan (North of 60 Mining News – March 1, 2024)

https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/

Undertake an adventure through the riveting tale of Ellen “Nellie” Cashman, perhaps one of the most inspiring women of the 18th century.

Perhaps no other individual could be regarded as true an American pioneer as Irish immigrant Ellen “Nellie” Cashman. Easily regarded as a quintessential gold mining stampeder with her acumen in business and the nose to sniff out opportunity, she traveled the width and breadth of America, leaving success and hope in her wake.

Known as the Angel of the Mining Camps, this is the story of a woman whose family name may have once been O’Kissane, but through her exploits, lived up to the name Cashman.

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After the gold rush: The rise and fall of Ontario’s own Eldorado – by Jamie Bradburn (TVO Today – January 30, 2024)

https://www.tvo.org/

You might blink and miss it if you’re travelling along Highway 62 today, but in the late 1860s, thousands went there in hopes of striking it rich

“Eldorado is one of those cities which American genius calls into existence in some emergency of speculation, which rise like a mushroom, sometimes attaining a world-wide celebrity, and often sinking as mysteriously as they have risen.” — “Orlando,” Hamilton Spectator, September 10, 1867

For a brief moment in the late 1860s, central Ontario provided visions of riches for thousands of prospectors, speculators, and others caught up in the province’s first gold rush. While our own Eldorado still exists as a small hamlet you might blink and miss while driving along Highway 62 between Madoc and Bancroft, it has yet to fulfil the dreams that continue to this day.

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Canadian Mining Hall of Fame celebrates industry-making feats of five new inductees – by Blair McBride (Northern Miner – January 12, 2024)

https://www.northernminer.com/

The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame (CMHF) held its 36th annual induction ceremony on Jan. 11 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, welcoming five new honourees, and bringing total membership up to 208. The celebration, attended by 720 people, was hosted by Northern Miner Group president Anthony Vaccaro. Full bios of all the inductees are available here.

From office workers to standard-makers

The first new members of the night were William E. Roscoe and John T. Postle, joint inductees whose eight decades of combined work formed the system of mining consulting and standards development the industry now relies on. Roscoe, an exploration geologist by training and Postle, a mining engineer, had both developed their own careers in mining before they first met in 1967, at Cominco’s Wedge mine in New Brunswick.

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Who was Skookum Jim? – by John Sandlos (Canadian Mining Journal – November 1, 2023)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

John Sandlos is a professor in the History Department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the co-author (with Arn Keeling) of “Mining Country: A History of Canada’s Mines and Miners,” published by James Lorimer and Co. in 2021.

Among the thousands of people who searched for gold amid the rivers and creeks of the Klondike in the late 1890s, Skookum Jim stands out as one of the most famous, but also perhaps the most enigmatic. The basics of Jim’s life story, and his role in the gold rush, are well-known. He was born among the Tagish people near Bennett Lake in 1854 (perhaps 1855), and his real name was Keish.

By 1885, the first small groups of prospectors had arrived in Dyea, Alaska, and Keish and his nephew Kaa Goox (also knowns as Dawson or Tagish Charlie) found work as packers and guides, ferrying supplies up over the notorious steep and rocky slope of the Chilkoot Pass. It was there that Keish first met a 24-year-old prospector from California, George Carmack, who eventually married Jim’s sister, Shaaw Tlaa (or Kate Carmack).

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Springhill mining disaster remains a horrific memory – by Patrick Kennedy (Kingston Whig Standard – October 28,2023)

https://www.thewhig.com/

Dave Cochrane leans forward and unpacks a memory from more than a half-century ago, back to a winter’s day in Sudbury at the Inco employment office. He had ventured to the Nickel City to land a mining job and go to work in the bowels of Mother Earth, much like his father and his grandfathers had done before him back home in Nova Scotia.

At the time, Cochrane weighed maybe a buck-forty, well under the company’s 160-pound minimum weight requirement for underground workers. “Sorry, son, you’re 20 pounds too light,” the Inco man at the employment centre said.

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A deadly Canadian mining disaster: exactly 65 years later, there are still lessons for us – by Ken Cuthbertson (Toronto Star – October 28, 2023)

https://www.thestar.com/

The warning signs were all there. Yet economics dictated that the residents of Springhill, N.S., continue their blind reliance on coal — the ultimate fossil fuel.

One hundred and seventy-four men were working deep within the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (DOSCO) colliery at Springhill, N.S., on the evening of Oct. 23, 1958. That’s when death came calling. “At the surface (in Springhill), people … felt a bump,” a Nova Scotia Energy and Mines senior geologist would say many years later. “That wouldn’t explain what the miners felt deep underground. It was much more violent.”

It has been guesstimated that the force of what locals ever after came to refer to as “the Bump” was the equivalent of about 1,000 tonnes of dynamite being exploded underground. That may well have been so, for the grim consequences of the upheaval still stand as one of Canada’s worst workplace disasters. the hard-luck town of Springhill had a long, painful history of such misfortunes.

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A deadly Canadian mining disaster: exactly 65 years later, there are still lessons for us – by Ken Cuthbertson (Toronto Star – October 23, 2023)

https://www.thestar.com/

The warning signs were all there. Yet economics dictated that the residents of Springhill, N.S., continue their blind reliance on coal — the ultimate fossil fuel.

One hundred and seventy-four men were working deep within the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (DOSCO) colliery at Springhill, N.S., on the evening of Oct. 23, 1958. That’s when death came calling. “At the surface (in Springhill), people … felt a bump,” a Nova Scotia Energy and Mines senior geologist would say many years later. “That wouldn’t explain what the miners felt deep underground. It was much more violent.”

It has been guesstimated that the force of what locals ever after came to refer to as “the Bump” was the equivalent of about 1,000 tonnes of dynamite being exploded underground. That may well have been so, for the grim consequences of the upheaval still stand as one of Canada’s worst workplace disasters. the hard-luck town of Springhill had a long, painful history of such misfortunes.

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Kingston author looks back at one of the greatest disasters in Canadian history – by Peter Hendra (Kingston Whig Standard – October 2023)

https://www.thewhig.com/

Sixty-five years ago, in the tiny coal-mining town of Springhill, N.S., a mini-earthquake — what they called a “bump” — in the No. 2 mine took the lives of 75 people, making it one of the worst workplace disasters in Canadian history.

While he was born and lives in Kingston, Ken Cuthbertson, the author of the just-published “Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster,” has roots in Nova Scotia and remembers his grandparents talking about the Halifax Explosion of 1917 and Springhill, a story that had captured the nation’s attention.

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Unearthing Black history in the mining industry in Canada – by John Sandlos (Canadian Mining – October 2, 2023)

https://www.canadianminingjournal.com/

In recent years, Black history in Canada has received growing attention, as topics such as slavery, civil rights struggles, the origins of Canadian hip hop, and Black labour struggles finally get their due. But what about Black people in the mining industry?

In the U.S., there are several excellent full-length books on Black miners, such as Joe William Trotter’s, Coal, Class, and Color; Robert Woodrum’s Everybody was Black Down There; and Sylvia Alden Roberts’ Mining for Freedom. In Canada, there is nothing of the sort.

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OPINION: The Springhill Mine disaster is a cautionary tale the world would do well to remember – by Ken Cuthbertson (Globe and Mail – September 16, 2023)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Ken Cuthbertson’s latest book is Blood on the Coal: The True Story of the Great Springhill Mine Disaster.

Mark Twain once quipped, “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.” Twain was right about that. The urge to deny inconvenient truths is as widespread as it is timeless. We’ve had yet another vivid reminder of that in our summer of wildfires, droughts and monster storms.

Despite the cacophony of alarm bells warning us that if we continue doing what we’re doing, our addiction to fossil fuels won’t end well for us or for our planet, climate-change skeptics and energy-industry lobbyists insist that, at least for now, there’s no realistic option.

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Woman who helped discover the Klondike – by A.J. Roan (North of 60 Mining News – June 30, 2023)

https://www.miningnewsnorth.com/

For over a century, the men of the Discovery enjoyed the reputation, renown, and riches; now, Kate Carmack will be remembered too.

Tales of the original Klondike discoverers that opened the floodgates for tens of thousands of stampeders to make their way North in search of gold often forget a First Woman of the Yukon that supported them through the challenging times of the early 20th century.

A person of quiet stoicism and dutiful integrity, this figure weathered a time where the fairer sex saw anything but fair treatment; she was Shaaw Tláa – a Tagish First Nation woman who was a member of the party that discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896 – or as history recalls her, Kate Carmack.

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How Three Torontonians Trapped In A Mine Changed News Forever – by Adam Bunch (Toronto History – June 25, 2023)

 

https://torontohistory.substack.com/

It began with an ominous rumbling. Three men from Toronto were standing more than a hundred metres beneath the surface of Nova Scotia. They’d come to visit the Moose River quartz mine, having just leased it. But while they were down there inspecting the tunnels on that Easter Sunday in 1936, a distant noise caught their attention

The three men didn’t have a lot of experience with mining. Dr. David Robertson was chief surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children. Herman Magill was a lawyer who lived in Forest Hill. Alfred Scadding was their bookkeeper and timekeeper. They don’t seem to have realized how unsafe the mine was; it had long been out of service and only recently reopened. But even they knew that rumbling sound couldn’t be good. They ran.

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‘If that wouldn’t heal your soul, nothing would:’ Cape Breton’s Davis Day recognizes coal mining legacy – by Barb Sweet (Salt Wire – June 11, 2023)

https://www.saltwire.com/

SYDNEY MINES, N.S. — As the Men of the Deeps sang “there’s a pick and shovel waiting down the Coal Town Road,” Lorraine Head teared up as she had a number of times Sunday morning. Nearly 100 years — 98 to be exact — after the gruesome events that inspired Davis Day, the descendent of the man it honours broke down on the grounds of the Miner’s Park in Sydney Mines.

“My mother, her siblings — always, always,” she said of the motivation to return each year to the ceremony she has been attending since she was a little girl. Davis Day is named for her grandfather, New Waterford resident William Davis, 38, who was one of the coal miners protesting deplorable conditions at a Cape Breton coal mine near Waterford Lake in 1925.

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