EDITORIAL & OPINION — ODDS ‘N’ SODS — Win some, lose some

In 1919, I left my job as an Ontario mines inspector to work for the Longyear Company in Minneapolis, Minn., on its shaft contracts.

My family came from Ontario with me, but, because I was often on the road seeking contracts and supervising work, I became almost a stranger to them. I covered many of the mining districts in the United States and had sufficient contracts to keep me busy. The company worked in Alabama, Missouri, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Manitoba. Two jobs on which I worked were particularly memorable.

Following a contract job in Bessemer, Ala., Mr. Cooper, our general manager, asked me to help him with cost estimates. At the time, Longyear was engaged by a family of distillers in Louisiana. The plantation owned by the family was built near a salt deposit, and Cooper took me down to help with the shaft estimate. He introduced me as the company’s shaft expert before I even had a chance to look the job over.

Drilling revealed that the salt was overlain by quicksand, with which I had no experience. I told Cooper that I was not competent to make the estimate. He argued that the company had plenty of men with such experience, and that he had already introduced me as the expert. He said that he would take care of calculations involving the quicksand and that I was to figure the numbers for the salt. I was a fool to consent and got a fool’s payment.

We got the contract, and Captain Holman went down to sink the timbered shaft. I wrote Holman that I would play no part until he reached the salt, and that he was in charge of the shaft until then. However, a few days before Christmas, Holman phoned Cooper and me in Bessemer to report that the shaft timbers had twisted. As Cooper wanted to be home for Christmas, he sent me to take a look. Never have I seen shaft timbers as twisted as those. I told the family that only a concrete caisson could successfully reach the salt. They weren’t happy about the change in plans, and the younger members couldn’t find enough bad words for me.

I told the story to Mr. Longyear in Minneapolis, and he accompanied me to the plantation. He agreed with my assessment of the situation, and informed the family. I took another verbal beating at their hands, but Mr. Longyear persuaded them to sink the concrete caisson. Their proviso, however, was that “that man Stovel” have nothing to do with the work.

I didn’t, and as a result of the incident, I was moved to the Minneapolis office as manager. Not long after I arrived, Longyear was contracted by Thompson Copper from New York to do a little underground sampling near Flin Flin, Man.

The company gave us a contract for two 100-ft. shafts and a drift between them. It wasn’t much of a contract, but, as the project was 85 miles by road from The Pas, it did entail careful preparation.

We had to take in with us every blessed thing we would need from March to December. All our equipment had to go in by sleigh, and figuring our needs was no easy task. If we forgot anything, it either had to be done without or brought in by freight canoes in the summer.

A horse-drawn convoy of sleighs — not a small one for those times — was used to haul in our supplies. When the team arrived, it was 40 below zero and the loads were dumped off near the shaft sites, except for perishable food, which went into one of the cabins. The crew arrived at the site on foot, skis or with the supply sleds.

We figured the job pretty well in every way but one — the weather. We planned to send the crew out in early December, but they were delayed by an unusually late freeze-up on the lakes that they would have to traverse. The crew reached The Pas on Christmas Eve.

Since I was a manager, I remained in Minneapolis. Our Christmas present that year was that all our men made it safely to the camp. I made the trip to the project the following summer, with two natives as guides.

All at the project seemed to be going well, but I needed to replace four men. After preliminary talks with the immigration department at Winnipeg, I prepared four Finnish miners, each of whom had shaft experience, for the long trip. Later, the immigration department informed me that importing these men would not be allowed. I was told to look for men in Sudbury, and I showed up at the camp with four Slavic men who claimed to be miners.

However, in Winnipeg, all four of them deserted me for the harvest field.

I was still short of manpower. I was at a Winnipeg hotel when in walked the four Finns I hired earlier. They said they jumped the border at Fort Frances. Quickly, I got them to The Pas and out to the camp and no one was the wiser for it.

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