THE LUCK OF THE SILVER-STRUCK CATTLEWOMAN

In researching a story on record-breaking events in mining for our April issue, I visited the office of our publisher emeritus, Mort Brown. He’s been in the business for practically half a century. I put to him this question: Which exploration company got the biggest bang (in terms of a producing mine) for its exploration buck? Well, he couldn’t say for sure. But had I heard about a promoter called Louis Cadesky? he asked. No, I said, so Mort, a rich vein of mining lore, offered the following tale.

Lou Cadesky, the Murray Pezim of the 1950s and ’60s, was once approached by a wealthy woman from the U.S. She was a cattlewoman. That’s how Cadesky, a Black Angus breeder, had come to know her. She believed silver was the investment of the future. So she gave Cadesky $25,000 in 1961 to find her a silver mine. He spent $5,000 incorporating the right public vehicle — Glen Lake Silver Mines. A portion went into Cadesky’s pockets for his efforts and the remainder went into the ground to find the lady’s mine.

Mort himself was enlisted to help “define” drill targets at a former tiny producer at Cobalt that was owned by the company. So he and Cadesky’s engineer Nick Carter quite arbitrarily paced off 1,000-ft. intervals in a narrow, half-flooded drift. Nothing suggested mineralization beckoned below that level. All they knew was that a distaff Yank with a fondness for silver had unloaded a few grand on Cadesky. Please note that Cadesky was as skeptical as Brown and Carter.

Well guess what? Drills were shunted underground. They were dutifully fired up and collared. And son-of-a-gun if they didn’t cut rich silver values. A mine was born, small, shortlived, but a mine for all that. Mort says the silver-struck cattlewoman’s $25,000 investment returned more than six million ounces of silver, representing a finding cost of less than a cent per ounce. The company eventually divided the spoils — about $1.6 million in dividends — to shareholders. The stock price, naturally, climbed to better than $3 from 50 cents soon after the discovery was made.

And the story gets better. The Glen Lake find led directly to richer ore on an adjoining claim, which Cadesky thought he had tied up for himself. The property subsequently fell into the Teck fold — to the chagrin of Cadesky — and produced more than 16 million ounces of silver.

Now that’s shoestring mine-finding at its best.