From cook to crazy

The following is the second of three excerpts from Quin Kola: Tom Payne’s Search for Gold. The book is published by Crossfield Publishing in Okotoks, Alta. Copies are available for $25 at CSPG.org or by calling (403) 286-1816. The author is the daughter of Tom Payne and president of Calgary-based Arctic Enterprises.

Alice Payne: “Dad didn’t do too badly as a cook. He became an expert at making soup, and one day made a special pot for Paul Trudel, the mining recorder. Paul said it was the best he’d ever tasted . . . but didn’t find out until later that it was muskrat.

“While Dad was spending the rest of his warm, well-fed winter at Fort Smith, Cominco began to examine their property at Yellowknife. A number of narrow high-grade veins were discovered, and Mike Finland’s crew began diamond drilling and trenching. They set up their camp near the lake at the foot of the draw. From there, prospecting and development work was still a lengthy walk every day over the rocks.”

Tom Payne: “I returned to Yellowknife in the late spring of 1936 and staked several more claim groups for the Ryaps. One day I ran into Dave McCrae, who had staked the Con. He was working on one of the shear zones, making drill holes by hand-steel in order to blast out pits for sampling. ‘Come down on Sunday,’ said Dave, ‘I’ll be up in the blacksmith’s shop pointing up some steel. There won’t be anyone around, and I’ll show you what we have there in the pits.’

“I took him up on the offer and slipped my canoe down to the island opposite the Con camp. That canoe was only twelve feet long and specially made to tie on to the fuselage of an airplane. But you couldn’t spit out of the damn thing or it would tip over. It might as well have been made out of birch bark. No one would ever think of going anywhere in a boat like that nowadays.

“I reached the northern end of the island, later named after Mosher, and decided to wait because the winds blowing off Great Slave Lake made it too risky to cross. The water between the island and the mainland was like a mill race: fast and turbulent with many white caps. When the wind changed and there was a lull between me and the school draw, I paddled over to a nick next to a fault and pulled my canoe up on the steep banks. The canoe was so light that you could hoist it with one finger, but I needed to weigh it down with rocks to keep it from blowing away.

“On the way to the Con camp, behind what is now the old powder house, I came across a rusty gossan shear zone, which I picked away at with no result. Then I went on to see McCrae who was sharpening some steel getting ready for Monday morning. He showed me everything they had, and I promised myself I’d go back to do more investigating, because my little shear zone looked better than anything he’d shown to me.

“So I strayed from the path a bit, and ran into it again. At first I couldn’t find anything and was pretty disappointed. It appeared to be exactly like the Con show. But since the quartz looked so similar, I dug down in the rust until I came near to quartz. Filling my pockets with this crumbly gossan stuff, I scooped out another handful to see if it panned. I had a large Yukon pan in the bow of my canoe, and I dumped the contents of my pockets into it, added some water and shook it up. I wasn’t particularly careful with it. I must admit that I just stupidly surged it under the water pretty roughly, and, my God, I cocked the pan up and the bottom rattled like shot. GOLD! I was stunned, I couldn’t believe it, and just like everybody else, I had passed right by it the first time. Every day people stepped right over that vein on their way to the cook shack, but nobody paid any attention, even though the area had been staked before. Con was busy working on their ground, and the path between there and the cook shack bisected my vein. It was a skinny section, about six to eight inches in a shear zone, but I couldn’t take a chance. I went back and spent hours covering it up and left it just as God made it. I packed moss, windfalls, and little sticks into it, and covered up my boot marks with more twigs and leaves to make it invisible.

“Now came the big problem: who in hell owned these claims? I wrote to my friend, Paul Trudel at Fort Smith, and he replied that Alex Mosher, a prospector from the east, had staked them the year before. No development work had been listed, so the current claims would expire and reopen for staking in three months.

What a long stretch. Everyone kept asking me why I was sticking around. All I could say was that I was waiting for the caribou to come and acted as crazy as possible. I was worried stiff. One flick of an eyebrow would do it. There must have been about thirty discoveries of free gold out in the bush around Yellowknife and at Ptarmigan, so everyone was out beating the bushes for more. When the news leaked out of a find by Don Cameron and the McLaren brothers, who were prospecting for the Mining Corporation and the A.X. Syndicate, everyone headed northeast to Gordon Lake. Everyone, that is, but me. 1 didn’t have much trouble convincing people I was screwy. They thought that I was really ‘bushed’ this time.

“I knew that I needed some extra help and wrote to Jack Taylor and Joe Lacombe, at Fort Smith, with no luck. Then to Jack Stevens at Bear Lake, but he’d gone to Goldfields along with my old partner, Pete Lauder. No one seemed interested. My tent was opposite the hump, over by the graveyard, where Vic Stevens and Ed McLellan had camped. I made a cache and prepared myself to wait it out. I read and re-read the rulebook, planning the way to be first. The timing looked tight to me, but I knew I had it right. Frank Camsell had tried to restake the claims, but his paperwork was faulty. You got a month’s grace in those days, and he hadn’t waited the thirty days.”

Vic Stevens: “After break-up we went prospecting on the islands at Great Slave Lake, where we found gold in a large quartz vein. Because our assays were done in Yellowknife, we returned to our old camping spot and found Tom as the only occupant. The other prospectors had pulled out and gone to Gordon Lake to work on the Cameron show. While waiting for the assay results, I had long chats with Tom, and his anxiety became very obvious. It wasn’t too long before he blurted out, ‘Suppose you are after the same thing that I am.’ I had no idea what he meant, but I answered, ‘It could be.’ Whereupon he said, ‘I knew it. What should we do?’ He then told me the full story and suggested we go fifty-fifty in the staking. He said there were others in Yellowknife who knew that the claims would come open and, like him, were just biding their time.”