Odds ‘n’ sods — Cobalt’s canine mascot

By 1909, the northeastern Ontario town of Cobalt boasted a rag-tag downtown consisting of tailors, dressmakers, haberdashers and ice cream makers. The merchants, like the miners themselves, came from all over the world. Soon, there were more than 100 shopkeepers — Russian Jews, Syrians, Lebanese and Greeks, among other nationalities — operating on Swamp and Lang Streets.

The merchants gave flavor to the developing community, and took up residence in neighborhoods with names such as Frenchtown, Pigtown and Swamp Street — each with its own character and identity. Small communities also sprung up around the mining operations scattered throughout the bush.

The burgeoning population created a demand for entertainment and recreation, and the town maintained a facade of geniality and culture. Tennis courts were fashioned beside the waste dumps at the Coniagas mine. On the Nipissing mine property, a private zoo of exotic animals was installed; the creatures occupied cages on a hill beside the timber yards and mine track.

Culture could be found in theatres such as the Bijou, the Lyric, the Grand, the Orpheum and the Idle Hour. Haileybury Road was renamed Rue de l’Opera.

Even Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, the famous actor from England, performed in Cobalt, as did Russia’s Cherniavsky Trio.

As the town began to grow, so too did the need to provide adequate services.

The Bank of Commerce set up its first branch in a tent, then moved to a Chinese laundry. When the company eventually made the move to a real building, the managers had to remove the windows on payday so that miners could get in and out more quickly. The restaurants, it is said, were so busy that one owner operated 24 hours a day, closing only when he ran out of pots.

In 1910, a streetcar line was opened to connect Cobalt with nearby Haileybury and New Liskard. The streetcar, which carried 30,000 passengers in its first nine days, ran every 15 minutes, from early in the morning until midnight.

With mining communities also sprouting up at Kerr Lake and Giroux Lake, streetcar service was extended into the bush. Even the new town of Silver Centre, 40 km down the Lorraine Valley, had regular service.

The culture that developed in Cobalt was well-spiced with a casual acceptance of outrageous rumor. People believed in the fantastic, and perhaps that was why otherwise ordinary events acquired almost mythic proportions. The presence of a stray mutt named Cobalt, for example, was the topic of much conversation. That little bulldog could have lived the life of a typical stray, sleeping in doorways and getting food on the sly. The residents of Cobalt, however, looked upon Cobalt the dog as a talisman of great fortune.

No hotel or restaurant would refuse him a meal. Indeed, his presence in a hotel lobby was a sign of the establishment’s prestige. When Cobalt followed prospectors into the bush, people looked on it as a sign of good luck. The dog often rode the streetcar into Haileybury and occasionally took The Meteor, the local ferry, into Quebec. He always returned from Quebec and caught the streetcar back to Cobalt.

Cobalt was also a regular on the train to Toronto. No one is sure what he did on his short jaunts to the big city, but he would always appear in the hustle and bustle of Union Station to catch his train home.

When Cobalt was mortally injured in a fight with a less illustrious mutt, news of his condition displaced battle reports from Flanders, Belgium, as the front page story in The Cobalt Nugget. Seventy-five years later, stories about Cobalt the dog persist, and the local mining museum proudly displays his ugly mug on its T-shirts.

— The preceding is from the recently published book “We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life and Death of a Mining Town,” which chronicles the history of Cobalt, Ont.