— The following is an edited excerpt from Jewel of the Kootenays: The Emerald Mine, an oral history of British Columbia’s Emerald lead-zinc-tungsten mine by Larry Jacobsen. The 335-page book is available for $29.95 at Chapters bookstores and is distributed by Gordon Soules Book Publishers Ltd. in West Vancouver, B. C. www.gordonsoules.com.
It came to me as a shock. In 2006, I was visiting my old friend Denis Hartland at Williams Lake, when he told me that the Emerald mine near Salmo, in southeastern British Columbia, might reopen. The old girl might not be dead quite yet; they had discovered a lot more ore. Since I worked in this mine 55 years ago, I had a personal connection to it.
The name “Emerald” refers to a mine that never produced emeralds. After Canadian Exploration Ltd. acquired the property in 1947, it became more generally known as “Canex” and came to include several orebodies close to each other on Iron Mountain. The Emerald, though the first orebody mined, was just one of six — Emerald lead-zinc, Jersey lead-zinc, Emerald tungsten, Dodger, Invincible and Feeney, the last three being chiefly tungsten with small amounts of molybdenum. Still, the name “Emerald” is often used for the entire mining operation on Iron Mountain.
The Emerald owed its existence and most of its success especially to a handful of men who had the foresight, courage and special talents needed to make this mine the success it became.
John Waldbeser staked the Emerald claim in 1896 and shipped the first ore nine years later. When Iron Mountain Mines Ltd. purchased the mine from him, he stayed on as the manager, and he was still in that position in 1942, when the Wartime Metals Corp. (Canadian government) expropriated it.
Another significant contributor was Harold Lakes, whose detailed mapping and exploration during the late 1930s and early 1940s led to the discovery of tungsten and the other orebodies. His maps were so thorough that some of them are still being used, says Ed Lawrence, who is now overseeing the present drilling program.
There was also Charles A. Banks, cofounder of Placer Development Co. in 1926 and lieutenant-governor of B. C. when Placer acquired the property from the Wartime Metals Corp. in 1947. He mentored some of the key people who turned the mine into a major success.
These same people later opened a number of other mines in B. C., including the Craigmont copper mine at Merritt, the Endako molybdenum mine at Fraser Lake, and the Gibraltar copper mine, near Williams Lake, as well as mines in the Philippines and New Guinea.
One characteristic of mining is that what is uneconomic today may be profitable later as technology advances or commodity prices improve. During the 1900s, the miners did not bother with ore that did not run from 35-40% lead. Fifty years later, Canex mined 8 million tons of ore that averaged 2% lead and 3.8% zinc.
The Emerald mine operated during two extended periods: 1905 to 1925 and from 1947 to 1973. It appears that it might now be on the verge of yet another life; recent diamond drilling results suggest that there are large tonnages of molybdenum and tungsten ore remaining.
Canex was for a few years the largest producer of tungsten in Canada and the second largest in North America. During the Second World War and the Korean War, tungsten from China (the largest supplier of the metal) was cut off and a frantic search was launched for Western sources. The metal is used in many steel alloys and, when combined with carbide, is used in a large number of cutting tools.
Canex was the first mining company in Canada to go “trackless.” Instead of laying track (rail) for transporting ore to surface, it pioneered the use of large diesel equipment underground to load and haul the ore. This was not as simple as it sounds, because it created formidable ventilation demands, as well as unforeseen opportunities.
When the expanded output overwhelmed the capacity of the aerial tramway that carried the ore down to the concentrator, the company was forced to rethink its entire materials handling strategy. This resulted in the installation of a system of tunnels and belt conveyors that radically cut those costs.
The mine was the only one known to have a heated Olympic-sized swimming pool for its employees, built with company supplied materials and volunteer labour. The pool was fed with the cooling water from the giant air compressors used to power the underground drills.
Mining is a risky business, and the odds stacked against success are formidable. Exploring for metals is costly. Finding economic quantities of any is unlikely, and running the gauntlet of today’s regulatory agencies is frustrating and daunting. It presently takes more than 10 years to bring a good mining prospect into production, and the odds of completing it successfully are low. A mining company must not only contend with existing laws, but with the unpredictable demands of future regulations as well. What kind of people will invest their efforts and money on such poor chances of success? A prospector has to be a dreamer, for how else can one account for the fact that people do continue to search for and occasionally open new mines?
Part of the history of the Emerald is the story of the people who worked and lived there. I was fortunate enough to be able to track down and interview many people between the ages of 54 and 90, who had worked at the mine, as well as the wives and children who had lived there. What struck me about the older people was that many were still active, some of them still working. Not knowing when to quit is one characteristic that set them apart from ordinary folks and is also the quality that made them leaders. One such man, who is 80, together with his 67-year-old partner, recently travelled to Colombia to help a mining company modernize its operations. Robert Fulford recently wrote in the National Post, “Never retire. Don’t even think of it. It’s a killer.” That attitude describes a number of mining men in this book.
It seems to me that so much of the popular literature casts company towns in a poor light, but the most repeated phrase I heard from the miners’ children who grew up at the Emerald was: “It was wonderful!” They would then elaborate on the joy and freedom of roaming the mountainside, swimming, skating, fishing, building forts and tree houses, or playing “kick the can.”
The Emerald had more than its share of the special kinds of men and women it takes to make a mine work. There were many intriguing people I could not interview because they have long since died. Two such people were Russians (one a prince) who had fled with their families during the revolution of 1917. The best I could do was to read their obituaries and talk to those who had known them. Another was an Australian geologist who was so polite that he’d apologize to his chair if he accidentally knocked it over. Yet he was a decorated pilot who had flown unarmed supply planes from India to China over Japanese-held territory during the Second World War. When Canex hired him, they thought they were hiring his father, who was a noted geologist.
Large companies are often perceived as heartless. Yet the management at Canex was able to infuse its workforce with a fierce loyalty. One reason was that the company repaid that loyalty in kind. One man, who lost an arm on the job, was sent to welding school. Later, when he worked at the company’s Gibraltar mine near Williams Lake, Canex provided him with a second mortgage for the house he built there. When he died at an early age, the company, without being asked to, forgave that mortgage. In another instance, when a woman with several young children suddenly lost her husband to illness, the chief accountant urged her to take secretarial training, after which he hired her. Mine management charged her for neither rent nor utilities for almost a year while she
was in school.
The Emerald was an important part of the local mining scene. During its last lifespan, it had more employees than the other two nearby mines combined. Although many of these people lived in the town site at the mine, the impact on the local economies of Salmo, Nelson, and Trail was considerable.
The mine closed in 1973, when the new NDP government changed the economics of mining with a proposed super-royalty. This made it uneconomic to develop the remaining low-grade ore, and the mine was shut down. The property was later acquired by Bob Bourdon and Lloyd Addie, who in turn sold it to Sultan Minerals. Sultan has discovered important new orebodies and extensions to the old ones.
Will the Emerald, like the phoenix of myth, arise out of its ashes and return to life? We don’t know, but you can bet that the people of Salmo and the surrounding areas will be eagerly waiting for it to happen.
My father worked at the Emerald mine from early 1950’s to 1957.
His name was Ross Chenoweth . We lived in the Townsite and my brother and me delivered newspapers in those years and got to know many of the people there!! We went to school in Salmo . Swam in the pool prior to moving to Ontario