"A grey wee town": An environmental history of early silver mining at Cobalt, Ontario

Urban History Review

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 71-87

  Baldwin, Douglas O ^a   Duke, David F ^a  

^a ACADIA UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; MINING; NATURE-SOCIETY RELATIONS; SILVER; TWENTIETH CENTURY; URBAN HISTORY;

CANADA; COBALT; NORTH AMERICA; ONTARIO;

EID: 27844494195     PISSN: 07030428     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.7202/1016048ar     Document Type: Article

References (81)

1. Edward, Prince of Wales, referred to Cobalt as a "grey wee town" on his visit to the area in 1919. See Charlie Angus and Brit Griffin, We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death, and Life of a Mining Town (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1996), 49.
2. Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, "The Cobalt Discoverers," The Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, http:// www.halloffame.mining.ca/halloffame/english/industry.html.
3. Canadian Mining Review, December 1897, 335-336.
4. Doug Baldwin, "A Study in Social Control: The Life of the Silver Miner in Northern Ontario," Labour (1977): 79.
5. Bilson was a prolific investigator of the cholera phenomenon from the perspective of social and intellectual history. For examples of his analysis of cholera's social impact, see his "Cholera!" Canada: An Historical Magazine 1, no. 2 (1973): 41-56;
6. his "Two Cholera Ships in Halifax," Dalhousie Review 53, no. 3 (1973): 449-459;
7. and his "Canadian Doctors and the Cholera" CHA Historical Papers (1977): 104-119.
8. Norman E. P. Pressman and Kathleen Lauder, "Resource Towns as New Towns," Urban History Review 1, no. 78 (June 1978): 78-95.
9. For an excellent overview of the relationship between urban history and environmental history as it pertains to the United States, see Joel A. Tarr, "Urban History and Environmental History in the United States: Complementary and Overlapping Fields," in Environmental Problems in European Cities of the 19th and 20th Century, ed. Christoph Bernhardt (New York: Waxmann, Muenster, forthcoming). An earlier draft of the article is available from H-Net at http://www.h-net.org/~environ/ historiography/usurban.htm.
10. An important new addition, however, is Kathryn Morse's outstanding The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003). Even here, in the foreword to what is a narrative discussion of a definitively Canadian event, William Cronon argues that "the movement of U.S. citizens into the Canadian Far North was so enormous that history books usually commit a temporary act of narrative imperialism by annexing the Yukon to the United States just long enough to tell this story." Cronon, "Foreword," Nature of Gold, xi.
11. " Cronon, "Foreword," Nature of Gold, xi.
12. H. P. Davis, The Davis Handbook of the Cobalt Silver District (New York, 1910), 13;
13. Ontario, Provincial Bureau of Mines, Annual Report, 1906.
14. Roy M. Longo, ed., Historical Highlights of Canadian Mining (Toronto: Pitt Publishing, 1973), 71.
15. Ibid., 68.
16. Ontario, Bureau of Mines, Annual Report, 1906, Baldwin private collection.
17. Kathyrn Morse has described a similar process, which she called "disassembly" of the land, in the Klondike gold rush. Morse, Nature of Gold, 93.
18. G. L. Cassidy, Arrow North: The Story of Temiskaming (New Liskeard, ON: Temiskaming, 1976), 138-139. Major mining interests nevertheless trenched widely also: in 1908 and 1909 the Nipissing Mine alone dug over one hundred kilometres of trenches on its property.
19. The Sanitary Journal of the Provincial Board of Health of Ontario, Annual Report, 1905, Baldwin private collection.
20. Ibid., 4 Dec. 1907 and 12 Jan. 1908.
21. The Haileyburian and Temiskaming Mining Journal, 2 Mar. 1906.
22. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 12 Jan. 1907, Cobalt Township Office
23. Cobalt Nugget, 20 Aug. 1909.
24. Englehart to Whitney, 5 Dec. 1905, J. P. Whitney Papers, Ontario Archives.
25. This provision was passed in April 1908 and was to apply only to Cobalt. Ontario, Statutes, 1908, 414-415.
26. Cobalt Nugget, 12 Aug. 1909 and 12 Nov. 1912;
27. Municipal Audit Books, 1910-1913 (in the possession of David Duke).
28. Cobalt and Coleman Assessment Rolls, 1913, Baldwin private collection.
29. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, Jan. 1907, Cobalt Township Office.
30. Leslie McFarlane, A Kid in Haileybury (Cobalt: Highway Book Store, 1975), 38. McFarlane lived in Haileybury and wrote many of the books in the Hardy Boys series.
31. Michael Barnes, Looking Back: Cobalt, Ontario (St. Catharines: Looking Back, 2004), 61. The T. & N.O. Railway Commission approved Nipissing's request to erect this tramway above the railway tracks on 20 Oct. 1911. Minutes of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission, acc. 11444, RG 14, Ontario Archives.
32. Cobalt Nugget, 28 May 1908.
33. Cobalt Nugget, 6 Feb. 1909.
34. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 21 Mar. and 2 Apr. 1907, Cobalt Township Office.
35. Cobalt Nugget, 10 Sept. 1910.
36. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 9 May, 17 May, 25 May, 29 Oct. 1907, Cobalt Township Office.
37. See Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 15 April, 17 June, 5 Aug. 1908; 26 July 1909.
38. Haileybury Silver City News, 24 Dec. 1907.
39. Ibid., 10 Feb. 1908.
40. Ibid., 1 April, 17 June, 30 June, 15 July 1908.
41. Ibid., 17, 20, 22 July, 5 Aug. 1908. Even then, Coniagas left its trenches on Argentite Street in "dangerous condition."
42. Cobalt Citizen, 12 June 1909. By the end of 1907 the mining companies owned the surface rights to 80 per cent of the town site.
43. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 17 July, 8 Sept. 1908.
44. Coniagas letter book, 30 Oct. 1908, Cobalt Miners' Museum.
45. Cobalt Citizen, 12 June 1909.
46. Cobalt Town Audit 1911, in possession of David Duke.
47. Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 18 May, 29 Oct. 1908.
48. Leonard and Trethewey to Whitney, 20 Apr. 1906, J. P. Whitney Papers, Ontario Archives;
49. C. B. Smith (chair of the T. & N. O. Railway Commission) to Whitney, 23 Apr. 1906.
50. "A Letter from Mayor Lang to the Citizens of Cobalt," 27 Dec. 1909, Cobalt Miners' Museum Scrapbook.
51. Cobalt Nugget, 4 Jan. 1910.
52. Coniagas Scrapbook, 24 Sept., 21 Oct. 1912, Cobalt Miners' Museum.
53. "Adventures and Exploration in Ontario's Far North: No. V. - Cobalt as She Is," Canada First: The Canadian Preference League Magazine (Oct. 1905), 433.
54. Ontario, Provincial Health Report, 1905, 185, Baldwin private collection.
55. Ontario, Provincial Health Report, 1906, 98.
56. In fact, Cobalt was billed for dumping its rubbish on the Silver Queen Mining Company's property without permission. Coleman Township Minute Book, 4 June 1907.
57. Cobalt Board of Trade to the Town Council, June 1909, Cobalt Museum Scrapbook.
58. Cobalt Board of Health Minutes, 21 July 1909, Cobalt Township Office.
59. Ontario, Board of Health Report, 1909, 30, Baldwin private collection.
60. Ibid., 32, 41.
61. Ibid., 34.
62. The commission was operated by a committee consisting of the mayor of Cobalt, the reeve of Coleman Township, and the manager of the Nipissing Mining Company - a mine that had no direct interest in Sasaginaga Lake.
63. Ontario, Department of Public Works, Annual Report, 1911;
64. Cobalt Water Works Minutes, 6 Jan. 1911, Cobalt Township Office.
65. Twenty-Five Years of Ontario Mining History, bulletin no. 83 (Toronto: King's Printer, 1932), 53.
66. Cobalt Lake was only two kilometres long and two hundred to four hundred metres wide, and but thirteen metres at its deepest. The Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission Minutes of Meetings, 13 Dec. 1905; 15 May 1906; 1 June 1906; 19 Jan. 1910, acc. 11444, RG 14, Archives of Ontario (hereafter cited as AO).
67. New York Engineering and Mining Journal, 24 Nov. 1906, 968;
68. A. A. Cole, Mining Practice in the Cobalt Area (Haileybury School of Mining: Haileybury, 1926).
69. A. E. Munro, "An Era of Progression: The Draining of Cobalt Lake and Its Effect on the Town" (pamphlet, Cobalt Miners' Museum, 1913).
70. Ibid.
71. Whitney General Office Records, J. P. Whitney Papers, Office of the Premier, reel MS 1649, RG 3-2, AO.
72. Munro, "The Draining of Cobalt Lake," and Cobalt Town Council Minutes, 8 July 1913.
73. T. E. Godson, "Cobalt Lake Mining Company, 1913," 23 Feb. 1914, Mining Lands Correspondence, box 2, RG 1-360-0-15, AO.
74. T. & N.O. Engineer's Report, 1920, 25.
75. Robert Livermore, "Draining Kerr Lake, Cobalt District, Ontario," Journal of the Canadian Mining Institute, 1914, 180.
76. Munro, "An Era of Progression."
77. Eduard G. Reinhardt, Andrew P. Dalby, Arun Kumar, and R. Timothy Patterson, "Arcellaceans as Pollution Indicators in Mine Tailing Contaminated Lakes near Cobalt, Ontario, Canada," Micropalaeontology 44, no. 2 (1998), 131-132.
78. Ibid., 139.
79. Homer Aschmann, "The Natural History of a Mine," Economic Geography, 46, no. 2 (Apr. 1970): 172-189.
80. Cobalt Nugget, 23 Jan. 1912.
81. In its peak year, 1911, Cobalt's mines accounted for 34 million ounces of silver. In total the community's output of silver neared a half-billion ounces. At present silver deposits remain in the area, but the commodity's low price prevents their development.