Mining illustrations from a Cobalt Lad

by Ron Cook

Cobalt, known as the most historical little town in Ontario, has produced some of the greatest names in the mining history; not only in Ontario, but across Canada and around the world.

It doesn’t matter which mining camp you visit, if you talk to the miners you will inevitably talk to someone who has worked with somebody from Cobalt or knows someone who came from that famous little town.

They always tend to be characters of the packsack-miner class, not much for sitting around discussing what to do, but getting the job done. In Cobalt, learning the trade of a miner to a miner’s level pay was developed from a sense of independence acquired working in the narrow shrinkage stopes, following the narrow veins of silver, cobalt and nickel arsenides of sulphur. There was not a lot of detailed planning for the design of the stope. Nor did you have mounds of paper showing every single hole, stull, spragge or bulkhead that had to be considered to successfully mine these veins.

A geologist, of the Haileybury School of Mines (HSM) variety, would lay-out a diamond drill program, knowing that the upper and lower contacts of the famous Cobalt diabase provided the best target zones to find the high grade silver veins. If the drilling encountered a silver-rich calcite-quartz vein of significance, then a development cross-cut would be driven to where the drill encountered the vein and if it showed enough continuity of length with width, a decision to mine the vein would be made by the mine manager.

Some old timers would not consider starting a career in mining at the beginning of the sixties, that’s fifty years ago, as real, hard-rock times to have gotten into mining. And I would have to generally agree with them. The old Lyner-type machine had been replaced with jacklegs, through the steel water systems for dust suppression had been incorporated, the beginnings of serious mine safety methods were introduced, thermo-lite had been invented to ignite the fuse tapes instead of individual lighting of the fuse tapes in the round, slash or breast.

The big labour strikes in Cobalt, Timmins and Kirkland Lake had been fought for work place conditions, hours of work, rates of pay, and use of proper safety procedure required safety toed boots, protective glasses and gloves. The lamps used for underground lighting became more dependable and there were also efforts to install proper ventilation in the work areas.

When I started mining, indeed, the underground work place had become a safer, better controlled environment, but the business of hard manual labour had not been replaced. I look back and remember my struggles getting a handle on the jack-leg, the stoper, slushing machines, the Eimco Model 12B rocker loaders and lifting the side-dump mucking cars at the ore passes.

After this there is the process of learning the drill patterns of the cuts, drift rounds, the setting-up for taking raise rounds, both open and timbered raises, whether to mine a stope section by breasting or drilling uppers depending on how the stope was initiated and the type of mining in progress.

After completion of a shrinkage stope, there was the job of pulling down the broken muck to empty the stope that required the installation of timber stulls for ground support of the open area above the mucking level of the slusher and this was only to work in a small Cobalt shrinkage stope mine.

I did manage to work at Lynn Lake in northern Manitoba and Manitouwadge in western Ontario before I was able to get back to college in Haileybury, then known as the Provincial Institute of Mining.

Yes, there was a lot to become aware of for one’s own well-being underground and today, as I look back nostalgically, I remember some of the incredibly interesting characters I met and worked with along with other events, some funny, some serious, some tragic, and certainly, some fortunate.

I’ll tell you these stories in upcoming issues of Mining Life.