GUEST COLUMN — As ye sow, so shall ye reap

Prospectors are optimists. They work on hope and hunches, on experience and faith. But despite the prospector’s solitary image, he seldom works alone. Behind the scenes are those who also have faith — in the skill or ideas or luck of the prospector they support. Prospectors need money to complete their tasks, and behind them are grubstakers or “the syndicate.”

Perhaps the best known was the Tremoy Syndicate. Ed Horne had a hunch that the “sudden change in the rocks” he saw at Osisko Lake in northwestern Quebec, in 1914, deserved a careful look. A quiet man, Horne could not raise any prospecting money to do the job until 1920 when, in John Bucher’s Grand Union Hotel, 12 Haileybury residents formed the Tremoy Lake Syndicate to support Ed Horne and his partner Ed Miller.

Horne’s hunch proved to be a good one, and they discovered sulphides which carried 0.5 oz. gold per ton. They staked 800 acres and dealt them to the Thomson-Chadbourne Syndicate. Out of this union came Noranda Mines in 1923. Without the two syndicates’ backing, the Rouyn-Noranda area of today might have had a much different beginning, and Canada a much slower development of mining.

In 1962 Timmins prospector George Jamieson died after a lifetime of working around Kamiskotia Lake. He had lived in a log cabin close to his claims, and kept his seldom-seen early 1930s Chrysler Imperial automobile nearby. His estate was administered by the Royal Trust Co., and geologist A.T. Griffis, a founding partner of Watts, Griffis and McOuat Ltd., was asked to evaluate the Jamieson properties.

Tom Griffis had looked at them for Hollinger Mines during the 1940s and liked the potential of the ground, but Jamieson was difficult to deal with and he preferred to do his own trenching and drilling. Viola and George MacMillan were able to option his ground in the late 1950s, but found only limited mineralization of merit before circumstances forced their dropping of the project.

But in the summer of 1963 a group of Timmins businessmen believed that undiscovered orebodies awaited those who would take risks to seek them out. Sixteen men approached Tom Griffis and asked him to lead a syndicate to acquire and explore some of the Jamieson property. They each put up $600 to get the work started.

Griffis’ confidence in the geology and the faith of the Timmins investors were rewarded with success. Not only did they cut good sulphides in the drill holes and outline several orebodies, but a few months after they had taken their leap of faith, Texas Gulf drilled the Kidd 55 anomaly and discovered the great Kidd Creek mine. Suddenly, the world was full of believers, and Canadian Jamieson Mines was created.

There are several key elements in this success story. George Jamieson, a virtual recluse, had confidence in his claims but not in those who wanted to explore them. With no professional guidance, he scored little success. He trusted Viola MacMillan and optioned the ground to her, but Viola had a heart attack while the work was going on and she had to dispose of her interest on doctor’s orders. The option lapsed.

When Jamieson died, Tom Griffis reviewed the property for the trust company. Griffis was a thorough geologist. It was he who “discovered” the copper zone in the McIntyre mine which kept the operation alive during the 1960s. It was he who realized that the Jamieson property had been drilled in the wrong direction.

But it was the initiative and willingness of 16 Timmins citizens to put up their own money, at a time when others saw only the impending decline of the town, that was so important. The Canadian Jamieson mine operated for five years and made an operating profit of about $7 million. Kidd Creek was the discovery which caught, and deserved, the attention of the world. — This is the second essay in a trilogy about mining history at Timmins, Ont. The first was “A field of dreams” (T.N.M., Aug. 3/92). Robert Ginn is a former president of The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada.