EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Getting the house in order

In 1925, I was finishing a job for Longyear in West Virginia and, at the same time, looking for work in Canada.

A.D. Wentworth, a Boston mining engineer, offered me a job at what was known as the W.A.D. gold discovery in Manitoba. The mine, which later became known as Central Manitoba Mines, was in the bush, about 150 miles northeast of Winnipeg. The route to the mine was over water by canoe or by a winter road over Lac du Bonnet, depending on the season.

The first time I trekked to the camp was with two prospectors in their canoe. I found the portages and paddling hard work after driving around in a car in the U.S. for the last few months. The trip took us three and a half days, with many bad portages, and when we at last got to the landing on Long Lake, it was still four miles to the site. I was nearly done for when we finally arrived. An old mining acquaintance there, Jack Rodgers, poured me a scotch. I needed it.

I met some of the crew that night and was impressed by them, but when I had breakfast the next day, I knew we needed a better cook. I made a hasty visit to the shaft and, seeing it was capably handled, returned to the camp for a more thorough inspection.

Woe is me! I had inherited a bad set of conditions as my predecessor, a man from the southern U.S., had erected his camp on an undrained muskeg.

The cookery was the first place to inspect. When asked about water supply, the cook proudly pointed to a pump on the sink. I asked him to lift the trap door over the well and discovered that the well was contaminated. I took the pump out right then and there. Thereafter, water was gotten by hand from a nearby lake.

Later, I encountered a husky young man standing around, surveying the camp and, presumably, his new boss. He told me that he was a medical student in for the summer to look after the health of the men. I suggested that he get a little practical experience in sanitation by digging a ditch to drain the well, in reality a very small job. He looked at me as if I was crazy but did as he was told.

The sleeping camps were well-built and clean but they were anchored in muskeg. Another problem was that the outdoor toilets were also built on muskeg and only 100 ft. from the kitchen. It was a perfect scenario for a typhoid epidemic.

My heart sank when I visited the grub warehouse. My American counterpart had ordered too much coffee and not enough tea, the latter being what Canadian bushmen preferred. The supply of bacon had been piled on the floor, not hung from the rafters as is proper, and had a covering of verdigris all over it. It took two men and two days of scrubbing to remove the verdigris, and even then the bacon, all the meat we had, was barely fit to eat. A good many quarters of beef had been brought in over the last winter road, but the ice supply was limited. Most of the meat rotted before it could be eaten.

A supply of meat was a pressing necessity if we were to get any work out of the crew. The woods were full of deer and moose. When the local Mountie visited soon after I arrived, I took him to the side and suggested that I had but two options to make the best of our bad situation: I could pay off the crew and put 35 men out of work or we could live off the land. I told him that fresh meat would not keep in the time it took to be delivered from the city, and assured him that this situation would never occur again as long as I ran the camp. I proposed to feed the men on deer and moose until we were told to stop. As the old song goes, “he didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no.” He did, however, keep away from us for the rest of the summer. I offered the crew $5 for each deer and $10 for each moose. We were never long without meat after that.

What we needed was lumber for new camp buildings, offices, warehouses and a mill. Hauling it in over winter roads would have been expensive. Near Long Lake, however, was a sizable stand of good spruce. We sought and received, from the lumber company that owned the land, cutting rights. We established a camp and, when ice permitted, hauled the logs close to the mining site. We also bought a small saw mill, which came with the former owner to operate it. For two years, the constant whine of the saw was music to my ears, even if it was hard on the nerves. In less than a year, what was a ramshackle camp had new bunkhouses and a good cookery on a new site, as well as an office, change house and power house.

— The preceding is an excerpt from A Mining Trail: 1902-1945. The author, who retired in 1945, was a manager of the Dome, Sigma and Red Lake mines in Porcupine, Ont.