ODDS’N’SODS — Red Lake’s melting pot

In the spring of 1961, I was in the process of finishing my first year in geology at Nova Scotia’s Acadia University. I badly needed a summer job if I was to return to university the next fall, but the industry was in a slump and jobs were few and far between.

After sending out applications to any company that looked the least bit active, I was rewarded with an offer — my one and only — from Madsen Red Lake Gold Mines in Ontario’s Red Lake camp. For a young lad from a small, sleepy town in southwestern Nova Scotia, the thought of getting out of the province to travel halfway across the Dominion was an exciting prospect. In many ways, however, my experience was one of culture shock, for upon my arrival I discovered I had been transplanted into a what seemed like a miniature version of the United Nations.

Red Lake, like many Canadian gold mining camps, had been a focus of immigration over the previous three decades. The first wave of immigrants consisted of westerners of Ukrainian, Polish, Scandinavian and British descent. Seeking relief from the dustbowl of the prairies, they converged at the camp during the Great Depression.

The next wave consisted of Central and Western Europeans, all of whom looked to Canada to improve their fortunes after suffering through the Second World War and the hardships of post-war reconstruction. This group included people of German, Polish and Italian stock, along with Central Europeans who had managed to make it to North America before the Iron Curtain was drawn.

By the time I arrived on the scene, this second wave had become the backbone of mining operations in Red Lake. Although a large segment of this population moved from the bush to the cities of southern Ontario, the children of those who stayed behind provided a lasting legacy and remained the foundation of Ontario’s — and, to a considerable degree, Canada’s — mining industry.

The third wave of immigrants was smaller, but no less important, than those that preceded it. It consisted of men who seized the opportunity to exchange their labor for relatively high Canadian mining wages. Some wanted to return to their families in Italy, Spain, Portugal or the Azores, where they intended to buy small vineyards and become farmers.

The last group was the smallest and consisted of political refugees who had escaped from under the Iron Curtain in the aftermath of post-war, anti-communist uprisings. One of my roommates that summer was a lad of 24 who, five years earlier, had participated in the futile attempt to change Hungary’s political structure. With a machine gun under his arm, he escaped and made his way to Canada with little more than the shirt on his back.

That summer marked my introduction to the real world, and there is no doubt that my first experience in the Canadian mining industry forever enriched my life.

— The author, a consulting geologist, resides in Thunder Bay, Ont.