The hammer and the fox

There’s a story about the discovery of silver in northern Ontario, and this is how it goes:

When the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway (T&NO) line from North Bay to Haileybury and New Liskeard was being completed, it had to pass through a rugged section of the Canadian Shield around the area known as Long Lake. Fred LaRose was a blacksmith hired to work this section. One day in late August 1903, he was working at his forge and a fox suddenly appeared. Startled, LaRose threw a hammer at the creature. The hammer missed and bounced off an outcropping rock. When LaRose went to retrieve the hammer, he realized that the rock was a vein of metal that turned out to be pure silver.

In all probability, LaRose didn’t throw a hammer and there wasn’t a fox, and although he did discover a massive vein of silver, at the time, he thought it was copper. Nor was LaRose the first to make this discovery. Two other railway workers, James McKinley and Ernest Darragh, had discovered silver just south of the same spot a month before.

Such are the facts, but the story of the hammer and the fox found a place in the popular history. It was repeated all over the world by men enthralled by the casual simplicity of it all. This was the era of the great gold rushes. While LaRose was labouring over the forge, the great drama of the Klondike was winding down. The Klondike was the pinnacle of a strong counter-cultural yearning that had been unleashed in the California gold rush of 1849. The California rush created a myth that incited thousands of men to leave the comforts of civilization and wander the far frontiers in search of mineral wealth. Tales of the sourdoughs and the forty-niners were spread in penny novels and poems, and by word-of-mouth. They celebrated the accidental and championed the nobodies.

The story of the hammer and the fox was part of this tradition. Perhaps LaRose himself had heard of the tale of Edward Bray. Bray unleashed the Transvaal gold rush in South Africa after the shovel he threw at a black man bounced off a rock rich in gold. The fundamental tenet of the fox story was that mere luck revealed the riches. LaRose was depicted as the archetypal rough-and-simple bush man. His discovery was purely accidental, a work of fate. What if he had not thrown that hammer? What if his camp had been set up somewhere else? How many other men walked past the rock without stopping to look?

In reality, Fred LaRose wasn’t just a lucky rube who fell over a treasure. He took his prospecting seriously, having gained some very practical knowledge working in the phosphate mines in Quebec. He found something because he was looking. Yet the fox story implied it wasn’t skill that made the discovery possible; rather, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time. You can’t win unless you play. And you can’t play unless you go there. Thousands of men did just that. When LaRose set the record straight to a Toronto Globe reporter five years later, it no longer mattered. People liked the story and the story became history.

Fred LaRose wasn’t the first to discover silver in the region, but his tale overshadowed the story of McKinley and Darragh, who made the first discovery in August 1903. At the time, they were working for the railway, gathering timber, and both had made a trek to the famous gold fields of California. Like LaRose, they found something because they were looking. While scouring for railway timbers at the south end of Long Lake, they stopped to examine some rocks showing leaves of bright metal. They knew it wasn’t gold but decided nonetheless to submit it to the only assay test they knew. As Darragh explained later, “I immediately took the advice of the old forty-niner and placed a piece between my teeth and I succeeded in marking it very easily.”

After carefully staking their claim, they set about getting legal access to the land. They then sent a mineral sample to be analyzed by an assay office in Ottawa. The results that came back were disappointing: the metal showed only traces of bismuth and arsenic. Indeed, added the assayer, if the arsenic had been present in higher quantities the tooth test might have proved fatal.

Although dejected, the two men decided to keep trying. Returning to the beach, they sought out more samples and this time took the rocks that did not sparkle but were grayish white in colour. They sent their samples off to McGill University, and the results showed that what they had found was silver. Moreover, the specimen graded a spectacular 4,000 oz. to the ton.

They secured their claim and the McKinley-Darragh mine eventually produced $13 million in silver. When the two men sold the mine to American interests, they were careful to retain shares in the project. It was classic success story, the rags-to-riches saga of two determined businessmen.

LaRose never came close to that level of success, and yet his story personified the drama of Cobalt in a way that McKinley and Darragh never did. The way the story is told, the gregarious LaRose sold the rights to his mine to a couple of wily shopkeepers, Noah and Henry Timmins, while waiting for a train in Mattawa. With the millions they had made from the LaRose mine, the Timmins brothers moved on to buy up the claims of a young barber from Haileybury — one Benny Hollinger, who in 1909 discovered what was to become the biggest gold mine in North America. The Timmins brothers had a town named after them, and their Hollinger mine became an economic giant. And LaRose? It appears he returned to his forge.

There is an element of tragedy in all the great gold rush sagas: as much as they exalted the men who became kings overnight, they also immortalize the tragic return of these kings to obscurity — whether it be Big Alex McDonald, the King of Dawson City who died a pauper, or Sandy McIntyre, who sold a massive gold mine for drinking money. The coach turns back into a pumpkin, and the gown is left in tatters, but the prince never comes with the shoe.

Such myths represent a fundamental cultural divide between the wild west and the settled east, between the squandering of easy money and the penny-pinching ways of the careful. Diligence, sobriety and hard-working Calvinism were the expressed values of North America’s farm-based founders, but they didn’t fuel the fires of mineral seekers. The moral of the gold rush sagas is that, for a time these men lived glory like no others. They gambled on the long shot that brought them wealth and then, to complete the cycle, they threw their riches back into the bitter lottery of fate.

Cobalt is the daughter of such myths. The generations born and raised along its tottering streets and scarred hills carry with them the mark of tragic glory.

— The preceding is an edited version of the first chapter of a book on Cobalt titled We Lived a Life and Then Some: The Life, Death, and Life of a Mining Town. It was written by Charlie Angus, editor of HighGrader Magazine, and Britt Griffin, the magazine’s publisher. The book was published by Toronto-based Between the Lines.