Highgrading, Part 1 (First of a 4-part series) Cobalt shop owner

From the far reaches of Alaska and the Yukon to the near- Antarctic lands of South Africa, gold has drawn fortune-seekers like honey bees to pollen. A good many of the adventurists took advantage of prospectors, claim jumpers, and unsophisticated mining companies. Gold thievery, which never had a special place in criminal history until the 20th century, was all part of the 18th- and 19th-century lifestyle. The term “highgrading” refers to the theft of precious metals. The earliest references to “modern” highgrading came from the silver camp of Cobalt, Ont. At the turn of the century, Cobalt, then a modern-day version of big city hustle and bustle, was wrought with hustlers, gamblers and con men looking for ways to make a quick buck.

Stealing the silver from Cobalt mines was simple enough. Moving it to a black market was a little tougher. One of the most intriguing cases is that of an old- time Cobalt shopkeeper. The Ontario Northland Railway, then the spinal cord of the north, was a daily spectacle. So much silver was produced in Cobalt that carts full of silver bullion were often loaded daily on to the ONR box cars. Many of Cobalt’s 12,000 residents would watch as the bullion was shipped south.

To the astonishment of many, the bullion would often sit at the local train depot, unguarded along with other freight marked for shipping. Some of that “other freight” included various items from Cobalt shop owners who, on occasion, had to ship merchandise and equipment to Toronto for repair.

One such individual was a general store operator who apparently had the misfortune of a faulty cash register. Cash registers in the early 1900s were monstrous, heavy contraptions that would often take two men to lift.

One day, a train security official was helping load the shopkeeper’s cash register marked, “ship for repair.” It was the third or fourth time that he had strained his back lifting the container on to the box car floor. Curious, he opened the wooden crate and discovered several pounds of highgrade silver tucked inconspicuously into the cavity of an old cash register. There’s no record of what happened to the shopkeeper.

The absence of a record of what happened to that “entrepreneur” is not surprising. The organized theft of silver and gold from Canadian mines has never been a major priority. Some would suggest that organized gold smuggling operations have always operated with the blessing of mine management (not ownership) because the financial rewards have literally always filtered upward from the bottom of the mines from the miners themselves.

Indeed, there is many a tale, particularly in the Porcupine Camp, of mine managers (or agents of the managers) sitting quietly in bars and saloons with wads of company cash ready to purchase highgrade off the streets to be returned to the mine where it would be milled with the gold that made it through the system.

Highgrading has also involved many mill and refinery thefts. One of the most infamous was the $50,000 robbery of the Dome mine in June, 1938 — the topic of my next feature.006 This 4-part series is based on the author’s interviews with former police officers, newspaper sources and court documents.