The other day a large ad appeared in a major Canadian daily newspaper portraying a “prospector” (it was actually an ad for a computer firm) with all the usual visual cliches — a grizzled, bearded, roughly dressed older man carrying a pick on his shoulder and smoking a corn-cob pipe.
About the only thing missing was the mule.
Our initial reaction (with our interest heightened anyway by the fact that the annual convention of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada is just around the corner) was that, dammit, this kind of cartoon-style prospector went out with the dodo bird and with Hollywood movies like the “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”
The modern-day prospector, we mused, is a far different sort of guy. He doesn’t drag a mule, he has a 4-wheel-drive truck. He’s more educated, sophisticated — he can run ground EM equipment, he can interpret an airborne survey, he uses assays instead of gold pans, he knows how to identify rocks and minerals, he has better maps, he has better tents, heaters and stoves.
He is, in short, a new breed in a lot of respects, even though what he does is still a rough, tough kind of business, in a frequently- harsh physical environment that’s no different from what it was a hundred years ago, when the prospector-as-mule-driver image got its start. Sure, our new men have got the better equipment to deal with it, but the hazards and hardships largely remain.
We’re not sure, on the other hand, that the old image of the prospector, Hollywood-style, is such a bad thing. There’s something positive in it — a reminder that the business of prospecting is very much an elemental pursuit, an exciting venture into discovery that has the same kind of appeal to jaded men in fast-paced urban environments as almost any other kind of back-to-nature adventure.
Be the first to comment on "Editorial No more mules, anyway"