Odds ‘n’ sods: Listening to Old Pete’s stories

During my forty years in the mining business I have listened to hundreds of stories about lost mineral showings, rich gold deposits just over this hill or that, odd-looking rock types that elude scientific description and even fur trappers whose canoes sank due to extremely heavy loads thought to be gold. The stories are endless.

The first thing you learn as a prospector or geologist, and usually the hard way, is to listen to the story, carefully and attentively, noting every nuance and subtlety of the details. Then you might wonder, “Hey, what does this Indian know about anything? Is all he wants is a grubstake for the summer? To find some gullible young geologist and lead him around the bush all summer, chasing some trumped-up copper deposit that exists only in the mind of the Indian?”

I among many listened to this story in a bar in Watson Lake, Yukon. Of course I was far too sophisticated to fall for that old line. The same Indian piled a bunch of rocks behind the bar, which was finally looked at by a geologist who had the good sense to use a black light as part of his physical examination of the samples. There it was, the wonderful blue florescence of tungsten. The mine was Cantung, one of the riches tungsten deposits in the world. I had the energy of youth and the grub but I didn’t listen carefully enough to the story.

But the most dramatic event in my mining life was yet to occur.

My brother and I were camped not far from McDame Lake in the Cassiar Mountains. We were planning a prospecting trip at Needle Point Mountain. At the bottom of an old trappers’ trail was Pete Hamlin’s cabin, where we planned to stay the night. We were pleased to find old Pete himself in the cabin when we got there. We pitched a small sleep tent and stayed the night, with Pete joining us for a camp meal and coffee. We got a good fire going and sat for several hours telling stories.

Pete Hamlin was an amazing individual who was born in Chicago and went west to Nevada to the “Dry Belt” to improve his health and become a prospector. He told stories of Las Vegas in the early days, when there was nothing more than a cat house and few old buildings. Pete tired of the desert and moved to the “wood and water” country of Telegraph Creek in Northern B.C. He married an “Indian princess” and had three lovely daughters. I never questioned Pete’s description of his lifelong mate since most of his companions up to that time had probably been a pack rat or two under his old cabin, perhaps a grizzly bear who knocked over his meat cache, or even a beaver or two.

Pete’s eyes danced in the firelight when he talked about his gold vein down at the south end of Pooley Pass. “Boys, did you ever notice those two red tits, hummocks, at the far end of the pass?” We hadn’t. “How could you not have seen them?” Pete, of course, had the highly developed skill of total recall of almost every rock outcrop he had ever seen, which is the essence of a professional prospector. “It reminds me of some of the rock around Tonopah, Nevada, and the Mother Lode country of California.”

This time we listened to every word. Pete was about 70 years old at the time, so we were careful not to press him too hard. “Boys, how would you like me to show you in there?” It was not that far away, perhaps five miles from the top of Table Mountain, which we could get to by truck.

We started early in the morning. Pete was just fine walking down the south face of Table Mountain, which took and hour or so. He was a small wiry man, maybe 120 pounds soaking wet.

Everything was going pretty well until we reached the low bog area in the pass. Pete’s feet, like ours, were very hard to retrieve up and out of the wet bog. We stopped many times so Pete could get his breath. But at one point during a trail break, we noticed Pete was turning a little blue. “Oh my God, he’s going to die!” We carried him the last two miles, and sat him down in a small little one-man cabin which he had built some years before. He looked poorly.

But about an hour later he emerged through the door asking about supper. What we didn’t know was Pete always carried a small flask of whisky for “emergencies” and it perked him right up.

We pumped out his shallow shaft and there was the “Pete vein” with 2 oz. gold per ton over two feet. The two “red tits” turned out to be quartz carbonate rock, rich in chrome micas (fuchsite) very common to gold camps like the Mother Lode in California.

We took some samples of the rock back to Vancouver in the fall. I eventually showed them to Stan Leaming of the Geological Survey of Canada and he identified the rock as “listwanite,” a word used in Russian geological literature. I quickly seized upon this new word and used it in subsequent written reports. It is now in common use throughout the industry, at least in Western Canada.

After many years of follow-up prospecting, line cutting, geochemical surveys, geophysical surveys, mapping, etc., I, along with others, discovered some of the richest quartz veins ever found in B.C. The Table Mountain (Cusac mine) has produced approximately $140 million worth of gold. The veins were just about where old Pete said they would be found.

If you require a more sophisticated example of the importance of knowledge transfer through written stories, consider a PhD I once met fishing off Bella Coola.

He came aboard our scrubby-looking working boat The Jager to find out what we were doing in those waters. We told him we were conducting the first geochemical stream sediment sampling program in the area.

He was delighted to find some rock hounds to talk to, so he stayed aboard for a couple hours explaining to us what his life was all about. He had done his PhD in geology with a specialty in “historical geology,” a term I was not familiar with. This discipline is not to be confused with the study of the earth’s crust (i.e. age dating). No, his work was to consider the stories as told in ancient Sanskrit which required a complete fluency in the language. If these stories or written narratives as told and recorded by early camel traders in the Middle East could be understood and mapped clearly, then the vast wealth (i.e. gold) could be traced back to its origin. Coupled with the aid of all the modern, hi-tech geological tools now available, the task becomes much simpler.

In summary: it is the “story,” then the scholarship.

Mining companies must capture these stories from their staff before they tell them to me — or I will stake them!

— Based in Vancouver, the author is a founder and former president of Cusac Gold Mines and is chairman of Pacific Bay Minerals.

He recommends knowledge management software such as Knexa’s as the answer to how to handle “stories,” because its unique reward system is perfectly suited to provide incentives to those special people who can pass along this type of experiential knowledge to their peers within a firm. 

Since mining is big business, a reward system would have to be designed to handle the enormity of such an exchange of knowledge, which could lead to a major, billion-dollar discovery.