I think it will be almost worth your while to pay a visit to the locality before navigation closes.” It was only after the samples had been examined by A. Gibson identified the mineral as niccolite, an ore rich in nickel, and forwarded it to Willet Green Miller, Ontario’s first provincial geologist, with a note which said in part, “If the deposit is of any considerable size it will be a valuable one on account of the high percentage of nickel which this mineral contains. Gibson the director of the Bureau of Mines. LaRose showed some samples of the rock to Arthur Ferland, proprietor of the Matabanick Hotel in Haileybury, remarking that it seemed to contain “some kind of damn metal”. This became the LaRose Mine, and probably never in history has so haphazard a method of rock sampling yielded such rich dividends. On this claim grew the McKinley-Darragh mine.Ī few weeks later, as the story goes, Fred LaRose, a blacksmith at work at his forge, was so annoyed by an inquisitive fox that he threw his heavy hammer at the animal, missed it but knocked off a piece of rock to expose a glittering vein of silver. The first claim was dubbed “J.B.l” and the first chapter of Cobalt’s rise to fame and fortune was begun. The following spring they did further prospecting and erected a small plant. It was a glittering prospect, and the two applied for and received a mining lease from the government. They sent a number of the rock samples to Montreal for assay, and the word came back that what they had submitted was native silver, assaying 4,000 ounces to the ton. They found other flakes in the gravel on the beach, found that they were soft enough to mark with their teeth and so pliable that they could be bent. On August 7, 1903, while cruising the Booth Limits for timber, their eyes were caught by the gleam of metallic flakes in the rock at the southeast end of Loog Lake, later re-named Cobalt Lake. McKinley and Ernest Darragh who were engaged as contractors to supply ties for the railway. So favourable was their report that the government decided to finance the construction of a railroad from North Bay to open up the country for full development of its agricultural possibilities and its forest resources.The line inched northward, skirting lakes, spanning rivers and blasting its right-of-way through solid rock.Īt mileage point 103 it passed directly over rich silver veins, and there came the discovery that was to make Cobalt a household word throughout Canada and the whole mining world.Ĭredit for the discovery belongs to J. Largely as the result of his campaign to convince southerners of the importance Or Northern Ontario’s agricultural potential, the provincial government sent in a team of experts to assess the possibilities. After his retirement from the Company’s service he had secured a land grant which included the present site of Haileybury. Farr, a former factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Little Clay Belt had a strong protagonist. A certain amount of timber was being taken from the heavy forest and floated down Lake Timiskaming to the Ottawa River on its way south, but the lumbermen kept their eyes on the tree tops while their boots scuffed over the veins of silver ore. The Hudson’s Bay Company had a fur trading post not far away but its agents had failed to detect the other, greater, form of wealth. Their centres of population were the villages of New Liskeard and Haileybury. A few hardy farmers were breaking ground in the rich clay belt north, east and west of Lake Timiskaming.
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