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Canadian Mining History

Prospector’s wealth was her heart of gold – by Susanna McLeod (Kingston Whig Standard – December 31, 2020)

https://www.thewhig.com/

Adventure takes on many forms. It could be jungle escapes, ziplining or maybe sailing ocean waves. Ellen (Nellie) Cashman’s life was an adventure into gold rushes, establishing businesses, and grubstaking prospectors.

Her work included philanthropy, especially where miners were concerned. A single woman, she earned the respect of stampeders and adoration from the causes she supported.

Cashman took a circuitous route to Canada. When a teenager, Cashman (born circa 1845) immigrated to Boston in about 1860 with her sister and widowed mother. The women were part of a Catholic Irish migration wave searching for a better life.

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They heated with coal in P.E.I.’s Bygone Days (CBC News – November 22, 2020)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/

Coal from Springhill, N.S., was said to be the best for steam-engine trains

As oil heat falls out of fashion for polluting the environment and heating with wood falls out of fashion for all the back-breaking work involved, more Islanders are turning to electricity, powered in part by wind or solar.

But did you know many homes and businesses were heated with coal in Prince Edward Island’s bygone days?

The black rocks were shipped to the Island on wooden schooners from Cape Breton Island, Pictou and Springhill, N.S., as well as Minto, N.B.

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OBITUARY: Aviation pioneer Max Ward, who built a regional carrier into Canada’s largest charter airline, dies at 98 – by Bob Weber (Globe and Mail – November 4, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

A northern bush pilot who built a regional carrier into Canada’s largest charter airline has died. Max Ward collapsed Monday at his Edmonton home and died in hospital shortly after, surrounded by family. He was 20 days shy of his 99th birthday.

“He’d been in failing health for some time,” said family friend Jacquie Perrin, who confirmed Mr. Ward’s death. “He did his best to hang in for the 99th, but he didn’t quite make it.” It was a rare example of Mr. Ward not reaching his goals.

Born in Edmonton in 1921, Mr. Ward got his pilot’s licence in 1941 during the Second World War, a conflict he spent training fellow pilots across Western Canada under the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan. After the war, with his new bride Marjorie Skelton, he headed north to Yellowknife to fly the Arctic skies.

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Canadian Mining Hall of Fame to Welcome Five New Members in 2021

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TORONTO, OCTOBER 22, 2020 – The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame (CMHF) will welcome five extraordinary individuals who have made incredible and lasting contributions to Canada’s mining industry:

• Patricia Dillon
• David Elliott
• William Gladstone Jewitt
• Steven D. Scott
• Mary Edith Tyrrell

Over the past 33 years, the CMHF has recognized 190 exemplary men and women who helped build Canada’s mining industry into the global leader, embodied the important role mining plays in Canadian society and inspired future generations in mining. While the global pandemic has altered plans for the Annual Dinner & Induction Ceremony, the CMHF remains steadfast in its vision to be the enduring source of information that shares the significant contributions of individuals who shape Canada’s global mining industry.

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The Price of Gold – Lessons From Previous Price Cycles – Canadian Business History Association Webinar With Tony Fell, Stan Sudol and Mike Parkins (Albany Club Toronto – September 17, 2020)

  Gold has been an alluring commodity for centuries as both an investment, an industrial input, and a consumer product. With the price of gold hitting all-time highs, what can past price cycles reveal about today and the future? This timely CBHA/ACHA webinar investigates this question from the point of view of three experts. Mr. …

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Electric vehicles are a great story, but oil and gas may be the better investment – by Martin Pelletier (Financial Post – October 5, 2020)

https://financialpost.com/

Everybody loves a good story especially when it comes to buying and selling certain themes in the market. This phenomenon is more apparent now than ever as investors herd into those segments telling the best story while selling those that tell a bad one.

This type of dualistic thinking is only widening the gap between the have and the have nots, when in reality the truth isn’t black and white but often some shade of grey.

A great example of this is what is happening with the electric vehicle and oil and gas industries. We don’t think it’s a coincidence that companies such as Tesla are setting new highs pushing the boundaries of euphoric valuations as investors are eager to drink the peak oil demand Kool-Aid that is being accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Wanted: stories, memories and tales from the Inco strike of 1958 (CBC News Sudbury – September 22, 2020)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/

Elizabeth Quinlan wants to hear from people who lived through the 3-month strike

A professor of social studies in Saskatchewan is putting a call-out for stories from people who remember the Inco strike of 1958.

The strike involved 17,000 workers who were part of Mine Mill — then, one of the largest unions in Canada — who were pitted against Inco, a powerful company supplying 90 per cent of the world’s nickel.

Elizabeth Quinlan from the University of Saskatchewan is writing a book about the historic event and is looking for anyone who has memories of being affected by the strike.

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Timmins-James Bay MP Charlie Angus announces new book about Cobalt: the town and the metal – by Lydia Chubak (CTV Northern Ontario – September 13, 2020)

https://northernontario.ctvnews.ca/

TIMMINS — He’s a member of parliament, a musician and an author. Timmins-James Bay MP (NDP) Charlie Angus has written a new book–his eighth–and this time, it’s focussed on the town of Cobalt which he calls ‘the cradle of Canada’s mining industry.’

It’s not out yet, but he said he’s already signed a deal with a national publisher.

“We’re going to see this town play I think and an important role. (Cobalt) is a mineral that should not be the blood mineral and a mineral of such toxic environmental damage but a mineral that could actually lead us to a better and cleaner digital future,” said Angus.

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[MINING HISTORY] Elihu James Davis: He Built the Road to Eldorado – by Leslie Roberts (MACLEAN’S Magazine – November 15, 1930)

https://archive.macleans.ca/

An intimate sketch of the man [ Elihu James Davis] whose courage and faith created the T. and N. O., “the discovery railroad which opened Northern Ontario’s treasure chest”

THIS is the story of a man who proved by his foresight and his deeds that politicians do get things done, their traducers to the contrary. What is more, it proves that the smiling goddess, sometimes called Lady Luck, is cast in important roles in the fashioning of any young country, bestowing her favors on those who have the courage to set up new milestones of empire, no matter how the scoffers oppose.

As is the case with all pioneering achievement, it is a story of the faith that moves mountains, of dreams and vision and belief. It is the story of Elihu James Davis, the tanner of Newmarket, whose determination and courage brought into being the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway, hoping thereby to create a new agricultural empire, only to find that Dame Fortune had flung wide the portals to a Canadian Eldorado.

Not even Davis, in the days when the T. and N. O’s. right-of-way was still a figment of fancy, could dream of the riches that were to come. Here was to be a prosperous new farming region, with New Liskeard its market town. Colonists, hearing of the wealth of the soil, would come to join those who were opening up the country.

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MINING HISTORY: The world’s busiest gambling house [Toronto Stock Exchange] – by Alan Phillips (MACLEAN’S Magazine – August 29, 1959)

https://archive.macleans.ca/

Behind its respectable facade, the Toronto Stock Exchange is a rowdy casino where a stenographer may win a fortune or a tycoon may lose his shirt. It’s also an essential source of vitality for Canada’s expanding economy

The Toronto Stock Exchange has a curiously fitting façade. It sheers up from Bay Street in downtown Toronto, austere as befits a national shrine to mammon. Coin-like metal discs stud its door grilles. Above them carved stone figures form a frieze. It represents a nation in growth, wresting wealth from the earth.

This is what the designer. Charles Comfort, intended. But, apparently through an oversight, he has shown at the right of the door a top-hatted man thrusting one hand into a worker’s pocket thus suggesting, however inadvertently, the strange schizophrenia of the exchange; at once a mirror of growth and a mirror of greed; a temple of finance and a temple of chance; the best institution yet devised for sharing the national wealth, and, in the heart of Toronto the Good, where even bingo is frowned on, a private club for public gambling, probably the world’s biggest.

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Remember This? Mowat and MacGillivray — [Mining] stock market swindlers – by James Powell (Ottawa Matters – August 31, 2020)

https://www.ottawamatters.com/

Two young men were sent to jail for taking advantage of Ottawans during the 1920’s before watching their network come crumbling down due to the Great Depression.

August 30, 1930

It was Saturday, August 30, 1930. Two men, soberly dressed in dark suits, waited quietly in an Ottawa courtroom to hear their fate, as they had just pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the public and to manipulating the prices of mining companies’ shares.

Judge Daly broke the news — three years for each of them in the Collins Bay Penitentiary. It could have been worse.

The law allowed for a sentence of up to seven years for their crimes, but they had hoped to get away with just two. However, Justice Daly said that he couldn’t see how a sentence of less than three years would meet the circumstances. He had to look toward to future cases and this would set a precedent. After the pair received their sentences, former colleagues came up to shake their hands and offer condolences.

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A heroic sacrifice at the East Sullivan mine – by Tijana Mitrovic (CIM Magazine – August 10, 2020)

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

The forgotten story of a Polish immigrant who saved the lives of his colleagues after an underground accident

In 1950, CIM president-elect A.O. Dufresne handed the CIM Medal for Bravery to Father Titus Wiktor of Val-d’Or, Quebec. “This particular ceremony,” it was reported in the CIM Bulletin from the time, “was this year more significant than usual due to the fact that the Medal had been awarded posthumously and for an extraordinarily brave deed.”

Wiktor received the award on behalf of his countryman and friend Watsik Koltan, who had valiantly sacrificed himself to save the lives of his coworkers in an accident at the East Sullivan mine in Val-d’Or, Quebec.

Koltan, who also went by Waclaw, grew up in Poland during the tumultuous years of the early-20th century. In 1939 he fought for his country in the Second World War and was imprisoned by the Russians for several months. He was later captured again by the Germans and held from 1943 to 1945.

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Spectre of atomic bomb still looms over N.W.T. community 75 years after Hiroshima – by Katie Toth (CBC News North – August 5, 2020)

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/

Please note that the Germans and Japanese were also working to develop an Atomic bomb. https://lat.ms/39XwV1P and https://bit.ly/3fv8Oc6 – RepublicOfMining.com

Délı̨nę is haunted by its connection to the Manhattan Project and creation of the nuclear bomb

Seventy-five years after two nuclear bombs were dropped in Japan — killing hundreds of thousands of people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — one small community in the Northwest Territories is still haunted by its connection to the blasts.

Across Great Bear Lake from the 533-person hamlet of Délı̨nę sits the historic mining site of Port Radium.

Workers originally mined radium for medical use. But at the height of the Second World War, the Canadian government quietly called for uranium production as part of the country’s involvement in the Manhattan Project.

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OPINION: Canada must acknowledge our key role in developing the deadly atomic bomb – by Setsuko Thurlow (Globe and Mail – August 1, 2020)

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/

Please note that the Germans and Japanese were also working to develop an Atomic bomb. https://lat.ms/39XwV1P and https://bit.ly/3fv8Oc6 – RepublicOfMining.com

Setsuko Thurlow is a Canadian nuclear disarmament campaigner who survived the bombing of Hiroshima.

On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the largest bell in the Peace Tower at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa will ring 75 times to mark the dropping of the two atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The arrangement was made by the Green Party’s Elizabeth May and Canada’s Speaker of the House, Liberal MP Anthony Rota. The bell ringing by the Dominion carillonneur Andrea McCrady will be livestreamed by the Peace Tower Carillon website so that it may be heard across Canada and around the world.

As someone who witnessed and experienced the consequences of nuclear war, I very often have brutal images in my mind of the atomic bombing.

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Miners’ Houses: Lawren Harris in Glace Bay – by David Frank (Active History – June 2020)

http://activehistory.ca/

David Frank is a professor emeritus in Canadian history at the University of New Brunswick.

I think I first learned about this remarkable painting when my friend Allen Seager sent me a postcard from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Eventually I used it as the cover illustration for my biography of the union leader J.B. McLachlan.

More recently, it was featured in an exhibition at the AGO and in a documentary film. It is in the public eye again with the release this spring of stamps to mark the centennial of the first public show by the Group of Seven. Among the seven stamps, Lawren Harris is represented by Miners’ Houses, Glace Bay (1926).

This was not the most obvious choice. Only a few years ago, one of Harris’s iconic images of the north, Mountain Forms (1926), broke the record for Canadian art prices when it sold at auction for $11.2 million. But the lesser known Miners’ Houses was a very good choice. Within its limits, this is a “labour stamp” that acknowledges the often-overlooked working-class presence in Canadian history. It also opens up interesting questions about Harris’s social and political engagement and his evolution as an artist.

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