Odds ‘n’ sods: Mining the Memories – Tough muckers

Many of the miners — or muckers, as those men who loaded the ore cars were called — came to Canada from Europe after the First and Second World Wars in search of a more peaceful life where one could earn an honest dollar, without fear of political strife or famine.

To earn their passage they signed up for two years labour on farms or in the mines. Life in the mines “hooked” many, and they stayed on after their two-year indenturship. There was a soothing silence to underground, an enveloping, womblike protection to the darkness — an anonymity desired by many.

Muckers were tough, muscled men whose job was to shovel broken rock into ore cars for an eight-hour shift, six days a week.

It was a dangerous, back-breaking job that often left men with broken and twisted limbs and silicosis, or cancer of the lung. At first sight they looked a fearsome lot: dressed in black slickers, rubber boots and lighted helmets, they marched from the changing room — or “Dry” — to the shaft head uttering guttural and threatening sounding words in foreign tongues.

But they were the same men who, after shift, had time to play ball with us children, carve out wooden whistles from poplar boughs or make a slingshot from a notched stick and piece of bicycle tire tube.

Each one of them must have had an individual history that brought him to the backwoods of Ontario and underground. If they did, they kept their stories buried in the chambers of their minds, dark and secretive as the tunnels of the mine.

I remember Mother picking up a hitch-hiker near New Liskeard once. He said he had been in treatment for silicosis at the sanatorium there, was considered recovered enough to resume work and was hitching it right back to Kirkland Lake to the mines.

“Aren’t you afraid of succumbing to silicosis again if you return underground?” Mother asked.

“Oh no, Missus, it isn’t death I fear. It’s the daylight,” he answered. “The darkness protects me, sets my soul at ease.”

I did not know the man, never saw him again after we dropped him at the Wright Hargreave gates, but those words have stuck with me. It seemed a fitting epitaph for so many of those “tough” muckers.

I have mentioned before one miner I got to know, Paddy Gagnon, his love of horses and his patience with a small girl who wanted to know them too. In those months he did not drive the Percheron team Paddy worked as a mucker.

Although the Bidgood gold mine was relatively safe from rock bursts and cave-ins since it was not a very deep mine, it did have the occasional “bump” — a rock burst due to build-up of gas behind stratum already weakened from the daily blasting operations.

One day Paddy was caught in such a bump. He was buried to the neck in chunks of rock debris. By the time his fellow workers dug him out the body basket had been sent to the level on which the blast occurred. The body basket looked like a wire sarcophagus shaped in the form of a human body. It allowed injured men to be taken to the surface in standing position in the narrow cage used to transport workers up and down the mine shaft.

Paddy refused to be placed in the body basket and then declined the ambulance awaiting him on the surface. He was not going to town covered in muck and grime.

He walked to the Dry, showered and changed, and then walked to the office where he requested a cab be called from town to take him to hospital.

Upon examination and X-ray it was discovered Paddy had some twenty-seven broken bones including pelvis and collar bone. He remained in hospital in traction for several months.

I wanted to visit him but was too shy to ask, however, on several occasions my father did. I remember him saying Paddy was the toughest man he’d ever known. Perhaps he said this because the men who dug him out of the rock burst and the hospital staff who cared for him during his long convalescence all claimed he never flinched or cried out in pain.

One would think such an experience would leave a man searching for another means of making a living, but not Paddy. Just like the miner suffering from silicosis he too, once healed from his accident, returned underground.

— The preceding is one story from Suzanne Sloan’s self-published memoir Mining the Memories, which is a compilation of stories recalling her experiences as a young girl growing up in the gold mining camps of northern B.C., Manitoba and Ontario during the 1930s and 1940s.

The book can be purchased by emailing the author at kidfromthebush@outlook.com. See http://miningthememories.com for more information.