Fortunes in the Ground: Cobalt, Porcupine and Kirkland Lake

L.J. Rouse was a freelance writer in Toronto.

The trappers and loggers who first came to make a laborious living out of northern Ontario wilderness unknowingly tramped over some of the richest gold and silver deposits ever to be discovered. But not until 1902 when the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Line made the Northland accessible to all were the unbelievable riches of the silver deposits at Cobalt uncovered. It was then that the northern boom years began.

This is the stony of the three greatest mining towns, and of the winners and losers in the great mining gamble. For every one who struck it rich, a Hollinger, a Timmins, Sir Harry Oakes, there were hundreds of others just as determined and hardworking who continued to grub for subsistence. Luck played the star role, as everyone agreed.

A wealth of period photographs, all naturally black-and-white, reveal the comfortless, muddy little pioneer towns, the primitive mining equipment, the workworn but jaunty young men (hardly any women), and the earliest town plans of what were to become the cities of the North. Then, as now, they abounded in colorful characters such as Sandy McIntyre, who struck it rich but died penniless, a victim of drink; David Dunlap, who gave Toronto the Observatory that bears his name; eccentric Roza Brown, the most memorable of the lot, and William Wright, said to be the richest private in World War I. Though meticulously researched, the book sadly lacks indexing for accessibility of information.