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Northern Ontario History

Josephine Cone: Metis Mining Pioneer (1913-2011) – by Joanne Wetelainen (Wawatay News – July 1983)

Wawatay News, published by Wawatay Native Communications Society since 1974, is an Aboriginal newspaper serving Northern Ontario.

“This is a story built upon happy memories, a story of hardship and struggle. It is a true account of a Metis woman’s life. The material for this article was collected through my many years of knowing her and listening to her wisdom. This is the story of my grandmother Josephine Cone.” (Joanne Wetalainen)

Mail-order ballet lessons, travelling the Northwestern Ontario waters by right with two young children and guiding groups of prospectors through the wilderness in sub-zero temperatures are all treasured memories of seventy-year old Josephine Cone.

Born in May 1913 in Dinorwic, Ontario, to an Italian father and an Objiway mother, Josephine has a wealth of life’s experience to share with those willing to listen. She doesn’t call herself an “Ojibway” nor does she call herself a “Metis” but readily admits it was her mother who was the driving force in her upbringing.

After only a few years of marriage, her father became tri-lingual; speaking not only native Italian and English but learning to speak fluently in Objiway. “He could speak better Indian than some of the Indians in Dinorwic could,” Josephine recalls affectionately.

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HISTORICAL: How will Sudbury mines compete – John Ibbitson (Sudbury Star/Southam Newspapers – November 9, 1996)

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

Please note: Voisey’s Bay nickel reserves have subsequently been proven to be much, much less than the legendary Sudbury Basin. Furthermore, the commitment to mining robotics was significantly reduced and Voisey’s Bay did not start commercial production until 2005. – Stan Sudol

Voisey’s Bay raises the question

A student who wants to graduate with a mining engineering degree from Sudbury’s Laurentian University must be able to sit in a room and pilot a miniature truck with a television camera strapped to it along the university’s corridors.

Some believe Sudbury’s ultimate fate rests on this skill.

Sudbury has reigned for a century as the nickel capital of the world. Even today, despite new mines that have opened around the globe, the Sudbury basin and its 17 mines account for about 11 per cent of the world’s total nickel supply. And there are an estimated 30 to 80 years of reserves left, depending on what new ore bodies are discovered.

But every year, the miners must delve deeper to get at the ore, making that ore ever more expensive.

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HISTORICAL: The stuff of dreams in Kirkland Lake – Bill Twatio (Toronto Star – January 16, 1998)

The Toronto Star, has the largest circulation in Canada, primarily in the Greater Toronto Area and Ontario. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

The Tech-Hughes ore conveyor used to pass over the road into town proudly bearing the slogan, “Welcome To Kirkland Lake – On The Mile of Gold.”

The conveyor and the mine are gone now, along with the Lake Shore Mine, Wright-Hargreaves, Sylvanite, Toburn, Tough-Oaks, and most of the gold. Hard times have come to this once-flourishing mining town 600 km north of Toronto. Recently, the town has been reduced to promoting a plan that would see millions of tones of Toronto garbage dumped into an abandoned mine pit. The old-timers would weep.

They were a feisty lot with a common contempt for things southern. Toronto-bashing was endemic. There was Harry Oaks, who arrived broke after prospecting around the world, struck gold, and brought in the Lake Shore Mine which made him the richest man in Canada. As Sir Harry, the most taxed, he moved on to the Bahamas, where he was spectacularly murdered in 1943.

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Be Not Afraid of Greatness or Sudbury: A Cosmic Accident – by Kenneth Hayes (Part 2 of 2)

Sudbury-born Kenneth Hayes currently teaches  architectural history at the University of Toronto.

This essay was commissioned by the Musagetes Foundation on the occasion of the Musagetes Sudbury Cafe. It appears in the book Sudbury: Life in a Northern Town / Sudbury: au nord de notre vie.

Musagetes is a private foundation based in Guelph, Ontario which seeks to transform contemporary life by working with artists, cultural mediators, public intellectuals and other partners to develop new approaches to building community and culture.

Kenneth Hayes – Be Not Afraid of Greatness or Sudbury: A Cosmic Accident (Part 2 of 2)

Sudbury’s development displays some of these features in their later, more advanced forms. The “I” in Inco’s name proclaimed the venture international, but the dominant company in the exploitation of Sudbury’s ore reserves was essentially American. Inco may nominally have been based in Toronto, but Canada’s role in this relationship was at best that of junior partner in a kind of corporate suzerainty.

Falconbridge, the newer and smaller corporation in Sudbury, generally enjoyed a better reputation than Inco, but it was not that different. In fact, the rivalry between Inco and Falconbridge over the course of the twentieth century often had the unreal air of a duopoly — the minimum diversity required to maintain the appearance of open competition while colluding for the same ends. (11)  In the last decade, Inco and Falconbridge were purchased, respectively, by the giant mining corporations Vale, from Brazil, and Xstrata, from Switzerland. This situation is still regarded (not without some degree of xenophobia) as abnormal, but the truth is that Sudbury has never really ruled itself.

Understandably, diversification has been Sudbury’s cultural and economic mandate in recent decades. Fuelled by the North’s long-standing regionalist grievances, the city went through a phase of public investment that resulted in the creation of the Taxation Data Centre, Science North and improved health-care and educational facilities, but there are now signs that vigorous private initiative is rising from the thrall of the mines, and doing so in Sudbury’s own inimitable way.

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[Northern Ontario: Group of Seven] Brush with greatness – by Joe O’Connor (National Post – August 20, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Sue Waddington looks at her husband, Jim, and shrugs. There was not a master list taped to the kitchen fridge with “invent a new and unique hobby” written across the top. What happened just happened.

“I mean, I guess I always liked the Group of Seven as a child,” Ms. Waddington says. In 1976, she already had a hobby: rug-hooking. For a class project she decided to copy a Group of Seven work, an A.Y. Jackson painting called Hills.

Hills, according to the description the artist attached to it, was somewhere in Killarney. The iconic Canadian landscape painter included another detail in brackets: “Nellie Lake.”

Sue, now a retired nurse, and Jim, a retired physicist at McMaster University, loved camping. And all those years ago they had a life-altering hypothesis: What if A.Y. Jackson’s Nellie Lake was an actual place?

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Northern Ontario: A Golden Klondike – 192 million ounces of gold and counting – by Stan Sudol

(Wiki Photo)

Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant and mining columnist. Stan.sudol@republicofmining.com

A much shorter version of this article appears in the September, 2011 issue of the Northern Miner’s Mining Markets: A Resource for Investors magazine.

A fever is spreading throughout northern Ontario, from the eastern districts adjacent Quebec to the far reaches of the northwest right up to the Manitoba border. This raging malaise is caused by a metal that has captured mankind’s attention from the dawn of time. I am referring to “gold fever” and many in northern Ontario – a vast northern territory, which is almost equal to Germany, United Kingdon, Greece and Ireland combined – are thoroughly infected or obsessed over this beautiful precious metal.

Historically, Ontario’s gold mining industry has played a major role in the settlement of the province’s northern regions and along with the Cobalt silver boom and further gold and base metal discoveries in northwestern Quebec were primarily responsible for the establishment of Toronto as today’s mine financing capital of the world.

The many gold mines that came into production during the Depression of the 1930s made a vital contribution to keeping the province solvent and with over a century of experience building many underground mines helped solidify Ontario’s hard-rock mining expertise that is well respected globally.

However, northern Ontario’s gold rushes have always seemed to play second-fiddle to the legendary Klondike in the Yukon, aided by famous writers like Jack London, Robert W. Service – of the Cremation of Sam McGee fame – and Canadian literary icon, Pierre Berton. At it’s peak, the Klondike gold rush only lasted for a few years – 1896-99 – and produced a miserly 12.5 million ounces of gold. “Chump change” compared to northern Ontario’s four major gold rushes and a number of smaller gold districts, most of which are still producing the precious metal today.

Considering the record setting price of gold, moving upwards almost daily, the political stability of northern Ontario and its strong world-class mining infrastructure versus lesser developed countries like Tanzania, Guatemala or Papua New Guinea, exploration in all current and former gold mining camps is booming.

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Gold runs in their veins – by Joe O’Connor (National Post – August 13, 2011)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

“By 1930, Canada became the world’s second-largest producer of gold, with
 Ontario responsible for most of that output,” Stan Sudol writes in a recent
Canadian Mining Journal article.

It is an awkward moment, and it happens all the time. Jessica Bjorkman will meet a stranger, a new face in town, and if they start talking, and if the conversation winds around to the inevitable career question – ”So, what do you do for a living?” – she will sigh, just a little. See, it is complicated.

Ms. Bjorkman is not a wildeyed old man with a grizzled beard yodelling around the great north woods on the back of a donkey. And she does not live in the Yukon. And she has not memorized all the words to Robert Service’s poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee. So when she tells someone, “I am a prospector,” that someone will invariably shoot her a curious look.

“Most everybody is surprised,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “I say we go out looking for rocks that have potential. We are the step before a mine. Basically, we are the ones out there, on the ground, looking for something promising.”

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History of Building Roads and the Railway in Northern Ontario – by Gregory Reynolds (Highgrader – Spring 2008)

This column was originally published in the Spring, 2008 issue of Highgrader Magazine which is committed to serve the interests of northerners by bringing the issues, concerns and culture of the north to the world through the writings and art of award-winning journalists as well as talented freelance artists, writers and photographers.

Since mankind came down from its caves and established huts on the plains in order to grow food rather than to hunt it, the need for roads became apparent.

Just who would build them and who would pay for them became an early issue, perhaps the reason why politics was inflicted on the new civilizations. Fast forward to three momentous events, the decision by the Ontario Legislature in 1902 to build a railway north from North Bay to open up the vastness of Northern Ontario, the discovery of silver at Cobalt in 1903 and the discovery of gold in 1909 in what was to become the Town of Timmins.

The railway was to be the first step to staking a legal claim to the North by enticing farmers to homestead the region, thus blocking Quebec from making any claims on what was actually an empty land. The problem was that the legislators sitting in Toronto basically forgot to take the second step, constructing roads to link not just the various mining and farming communities that sprang up but North to South.

Development tended to occur close to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway which reached Timmins on Jan.1, 1912 but it took another 20 years to reach Moosonee.

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Movie looks at Timmins’ first 100 years Movie looks at Timmins’ first 100 years – by Kristine MacDougall (Timmins Daily Press – July 20, 2011)

The Daily Press is the newspaper of record for the city of Timmins.

The history of Timmins is coming to the big screen.

Timmins: The first 100 is an independently produced film about the city’s rich history. “It struck me about three or four months ago that we’re having the 100th year celebrations and there was no film,” said producer Kevin Vincent.

The 90-minute movie provides a look at life in the Porcupine Camp, the men and women who fought their way into the camp in search of gold, and the devastating 1911 fire. It also chronicles the bitter labour battles, the folklore of hotel life, Timmins rich multicultural heritage, and Timmins highgrading industry, and related crime, as a result of gold mining in the area.

Work and research for the movie was compiled over the last two and a half decades.

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Ontario Marches North – by Douglas Lapham (Maclean’s May 1, 1931)

Thirty years ago North Bay was “Far North” in Ontario. Now the railway builder is reaching out 400 miles still farther north to a “back-door” ocean port and the power engineer is taming mighty torrents in the heart of the wilderness

Two big acts of a drama of winter are drawing to a successful close in the bleak wilderness that stretches north of Cochrane in Northern Ontario, in that No Man’s Land which lies between the Canadian National transcontinental line and James Bay, downthrust spur of Hudson Bay.

They are unrelated scenes in a panorama of development which for years has been changing this once distant North into an annex of the industrial South. But the same man is behind them both. The same dynamic figure is pulling the strings, urging , striving, fighting. He is Harry Falconer McLean, president of the Dominion Construction Company, Ltd., a twentieth-century figure as picturesque as any of the Dominion builders Canada has known.

But first let us get the two acts straight. One is the damming of the east branch of the Moose River at Murray Island, less than fifty miles from Moose Factory, the erection of seventeen concrete piers across the west branch of the same river for a million-dollar steel bridge, so that the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway – Ontario’s publicly owned railroad – may reach Moose Factory and tidewater before fall.

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Hec McQuarrie’s Wedding [Cobalt History] – by A.E. Alpine (Northern Miner – July 17, 1989)

My father-in-law, “Ole Hec” McQuarrie was a colourful, ebullient hardrock shaftman and nowhere was this more evident than at table No. 7 (Ole Hec’s table) at Albert’s Hotel, Timmins, Ontario.

George Hector McQuarrie was born in Dartmouth Nova Scotia, was orphaned at an early age and raised by a doting aunt. He was educated in private school where he excelled in mathematics. Things went smoothly until the summer he turned 18 and got a job in a gold mine in Moose River Nova Scotia. He liked mining and would not return to school. By 19 he was working in the shaft.

Cobalt was the hot spot in mining then so Hector said goodbye to Moose River and headed to silver. He started in a shaft being sunk by the well-known shaft contractor Foghorn MacDonald and it wasn’t long before he was leading a shift. When Foghorn was awarded the contract to sink the shafts and do the connecting work for the world famous compressed air plant at Ragged Chutes, he named Hec as leader of the “Nova Scotian” unit. Foghorn always kept the Cape Breton ex-coal miners on one shift and the Nova Scotian “herring chokers” on another shift to avoid dissension (and broken heads).

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Along the Blacktop of Riches: The Abitibi-Greenstone Belt – by Charlie Angus (1999)

Excerpt from Industrial Cathedrals of the North written by Charlie Angus and photographed by Louie Palu (1999)

To order a copy of Industrial Cathedrals of the North, please go to Between the Lines press.

Take a drive along the blacktop as Highway 66 turns into 117 and you’ll be taking a drive over one of the richest geological treasures in the world. The highway forms the lower part of a belt of riches known as the Abitibi-Greenstone belt. Over 140 million ounces of gold have been mined from the belt, a feat unparalleled anywhere except in the gold fields of South Africa. The belt is made up of two parallel fault lines running east-west from Ontario into Quebec. The northern edge of the belt – the Porcupine-Destor Fault – runs from the Porcupine along Highway 101 to Destor, Quebec, while the lower fault – the Larder-Cadillac Break – runs from Matachewan, Ontario along 66 towards Val d’Or, Quebec. The fault lines have been the source of some of Canada’s biggest gold mines. The ground between the faults is host to numerous base metal deposits.

The Larder-Cadillac Break is as much a social line as it is a geological formation. The fault runs straight through the heart of many historic gold camps: Matachewan, Kirkland Lake, Larder Lake, V-Town, Rouyn-Noranda, McWatters, Cadillac, Malarctic and Val d’Or. The Abitibi-Greenstone belt has created a natural east-west link across the two provinces. Communities along the fault lines share common links of history, work and identity. Indeed the whole opening up of Northwestern Quebec to mining is a direct result of the movement of prospectors and miners along the lines of the Abitibi-Greenstone belt.

Prospector Ed Horne played a pivotal role in this early development. Before the first World War he was prospecting in Gowganda, Kirkland Lake and the Porcupine. He then moved along the westerly axis from the Kirkland-Larder camps into the Lake Osisko region of Rouyn Township, Quebec.

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[Great Porcupine Fire] Timmins Pioneers share deadly 1911 fire tales – by Karen Bachmann (Timmins Daily Press – July 9, 2011)

The Daily Press is the newspaper of record for the city of Timmins. Karen Bachmann is the director/curator of the Timmins Museum and a local author.

Ceremony at Deadman’s Point on Monday will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Great Porcupine Fire

I could recount the history of the Porcupine Fire for you today, but I have chosen not to do so. Why hear it from me, when you can hear what it was like from the people who actually survived that fateful day.

Thanks to the early work of the Porcupine Camp Historical Society, we have wonderful recordings of our early pioneers, and their memories of what life was like in the Porcupine.

So, today, I keep my ideas to myself, and I’ll let those in the know tell you about the Great Porcupine Fire of 1911. Elizabeth Pearl Heath was a survivor that day. She was a young married woman in July 1911.

“The fire did bear down on us speedily and with fury. I made sure that my billfold was in my patchpocket of my skirt, threw my knapsack and a light blanket over my shoulder and struck out for the lake.

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Master Plan To Destroy Northern Ontario – by Gregory Reynolds (Highgrader Magazine – Summer 2011)

This column was originally published in the Late Summer, 2011 issue of Highgrader Magazine which is committed to serve the interests of northerners by bringing the issues, concerns and culture of the north to the world through the writings and art of award-winning journalists as well as talented freelance artists, writers and photographers.

The recent annual meeting of Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) heard a great deal of comment, and concern, expressed about the Ontario government’s love affair with Greater Sudbury and Thunder Bay. Speakers claimed these two cities appear to be favoured when the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty doles out assistance to the North.

That the two largest centres are special, even privileged, should not have been a surprise to those in attendance.

Members of Timmins city council should have been least surprised since famous prospector, and equally famous outspoken advocate for Northern Ontario, Don McKinnon presented each of them with two documents in 2004: The Master Plan to Destroy Northern Ontario; and Addendum to The Master Plan to Destroy Northern Ontario.

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HISTORY: Porcupine Camp ablaze [The Great Fire of 1911] – by Karen Bachmann (The Daily Press – June 30, 2011)

The Daily Press is the newspaper of record for the city of Timmins. Karen Bachmann is the director/curator of the Timmins Museum and a local author.

As local milestones go, next week will mark a very important one for the Porcupine Goldfields. July 11, 2011 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Great Porcupine Fire of 1911. Environment Canada described this event as one of the five greatest Canadian fire disasters. Its magnitude and severity shaped the early mining communities and truly tested the rugged pioneers.

Just barely two years into its existence, the small towns that had sprung up around the mining camps were annihilated by a huge forest fire. It is because of the determination of those early people (and let’s face it – the lure of untold riches from the gold in the area) that we are still here today.

It didn’t take long for the world to learn about the tragedy. A number of Canadian and American newspapers were quick to file stories. Some of these first-hand accounts give us a glimpse into that fateful day and graphically describe how events unfolded.

The Globe (Toronto) sets the tone with this article printed on July 12, 1911:

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