ODDS’N’SODS — The age of the leasers

The 1920s marked the end of the road for most of the original silver mines in Cobalt, Ont.

The sudden collapse of the local industry created a unique situation in the town. Many of the workings were still intact, the surface buildings were still standing and the dumps were often full of good ore that had been passed over in the search for high-grade material. It wasn’t long before experienced mining men with an intimate knowledge of old properties began leasing the sites and running the mines themselves.

Today, it is hard to imagine the circumstances that made the work of the leasers possible. Mining has become capital-intensive, requiring an investment of millions of dollars. The industry is also strictly regulated.

In the 1920s, however, five or six men could easily enter an old mine and try their hand at picking the meat off the bones, so to speak.

Issues of structural engineering weren’t often considered at many of these ragtag projects. For example, silver that was left on support pillars was often blasted out. Since many properties were leased again and again by different crews, the damage done to the mines was cumulative.

John Gore, a lifelong resident of Cobalt, says few leasers realized the long-term implications of these scavenging operations. “They were good, practical men,” he says, “but they were not engineers. They worked in places where men wouldn’t work today. They took chances, and that’s when there were cave-ins. When the leasers went after the ore that was left in the pillars underground, they went closer to the surface than they should have.” For children growing up in the shadow of the boom, the once-rich mines offered promise, and they earned money by picking ore from the dumps.

Children brought their haul, in little buckets, to the leasers, who paid them for what they found. Ralph Benner, who outlined the famous Denison orebody near Elliot Lake, Ont., got his first lessons in geology while trying to raise enough money to go to the movies.

“We’d go out after a rain because the cobalt and metallics shined through,” he explains. “There’s an intelligent system to picking at the dumps. You’d find ore in the dumps, just as you would a vein. We got paid ten cents a pound for high-grade silver.”

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