Preface. This book is about the history of the town of Cobalt and would make a great horror movie — the disease, filth, poverty, poor wages, racism, and destruction of the environment — the biodiversity, fresh water and more.

However terrifying the horrors of Cobalt Canada are, it’s even worse in the DRC today. Check out Siddharth Kara’s 2023 book “Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our lives”.  Over 90% of the world’s mining workforce are in these “artisanal” mines, with 45 million people suffering in every conceiveable way to mine gold, silver, and other valuable minerals to buy their next meal while destroying their countries ecosystems for future generations.

The Democratic Republic of Congo produces 70% of cobalt, much of the rest is a byproduct of copper and nickel mining (each of which have limited reserves), making it difficult to ramp up cobalt production, since it can take 20 years to open new copper or nickel mines.

Just a few things cobalt is used in: power tools, cell phones, ceramics, magnets, tires, paint driers, hard facing, pigments, catalysts, hard metals, super alloys, polyester, cameras, flashlights, portable fans, electronic toys, medical equipment and hundreds of other kinds of electronic devices.

There is no substitute for cobalt.

Since transportation must use the lightest possible batteries, which means lithium, the third lightest element in the periodic table, it takes cobalt to make them perform better, not catch on fire, and improve lithium battery life.  Here are some details of how it helps lithium batteries perform better.  First is the high cycling ability. Short recharge times preserve battery strength and lifespan. Cobalt allows batteries to complete charge and discharge cycles over an extended period of time due to cobalt’s tight molecular structure which provides for a hard wearing, wear-resistant, physical-chemical structure and also low self-discharge and high discharge voltage within the battery. Secondly, cobalt provides high thermal stability with its melting point of 1,493 C, critical to battery safety. Finally, cobalt’s ability to alloy and impart strength at high temperatures and its ability to retain ferromagnetic properties at high temperatures, contribute to cobalt’s ability to provide stability within the rechargeable battery.

Making a clean, green renewable world requires billions of tons of metals and minerals to construct wind turbines, solar panels, nuclear power plants, electronics, computer controlling systems, transmission, and more. Kiss the planet goodbye and witness Hell On Earth if Wall Street manages to keep this last boom before collapse going so a few billionaires can make enormous profits while destroying the planet and the lives of third world miners.

Here’s a passage describing some of the harm done in the town of Cobalt in Canada:

“Cobalt ores contain very high levels of arsenic, so when the ore was smelted to separate the metal, the heat created arsenic oxide, a toxic by-product. Also, mercury and cyanide were used to separate silver from other compounds in the rock. Mercury had been an integral part of silver mining since the 1500s, in the famous mines of Potosí and Huancavelica. The process was so toxic that the Indigenous people forced to work in the South American mercury extraction plants referred to the labor as being sent to the slaughterhouse.

At the Nipissing high-grade mill, crushed silver was run through a tube mill, where it was washed with mercury to create a product that was 97%t silver. The residue was then washed again with a 5% cyanide solution to recover the other 3%. The remaining waste included mercury, cyanide, arsenic, and other chemical traces, all of which were flushed from the mills into the nearby lakes. As a result, the lakes of the Cobalt region soon showed high levels of toxicity.

Huge amounts of energy were required to run the mines and milling operations. Steam plants relied on wood for power, and so across much of the Cobalt camp the trees were stripped — either to clear space or to feed the mine furnaces for cheap energy. In his environmental history of Cobalt, Douglas Baldwin writes, “What had been a rich, boreal ecosystem was in months reduced to bare, igneous Canadian Shield rock”.

The Cobalt landscape remains deeply marked by the environmental damage of the mining boom. The list of damaged lakes and poisoned waterways in the Cobalt mining camp is enormous: Cobalt Lake, Glen Lake, Peterson Lake, Cart Lake, Cross Lake, Mill Creek, Kerr Lake, Giroux Lake, Kirk Lake, plus numerous waste dumps and toxic sites left across the territory.

These are my notes from “Cobalt: the making of a mining superpower”.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

***

Angus C (2022) Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals. The Making of a Mining Superpower.

The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal’s capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones, and laptops.

Access to reliable supplies of cobalt will be essential if we are to advance into the era of the mass-produced electric vehicle. But cobalt has a much darker side — degradation, child abuse, and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

In 2020, billionaires Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates formed a mining company to seek out new sources of cobalt in northern Canada. They named their company KoBold Metals.

Kobold is a variant of the German word for cobalt, derived from the kobalos, a satyr and shape-shifter in Greek mythology who mocked the work of humans. In the Middle Ages the kobalos became the kobold — a demon living in the mines of Germany. The men who made their way into the perpetual darkness of the metal mines knew the demons were close from a burning sensation on their fingertips as they touched the cobalt-laced rock. And they knew the kobolds were watching them from the telltale sounds of banging and footsteps echoing through the caverns.

In the silver mines of Bolivia, the miners leave offerings for El Tío — the devil spirit. In Cornish mines, there are stories of the Knockers; Welsh miners worked alongside the Coblynau. In some cases, these creatures are condemned spirits, forced to work for eternity for no gain.

For miners in Germany, the kobold held a particular menace. The metal was even denounced from the pulpit by a sixteenth-century Reformation firebrand who called it “the black devil.” Cobalt is elusive because it has no distinctive color in its natural form, which made it hard to spot amid the mixture of nickel and copper ores. But when miners burned rock where cobalt was present, the airborne dust and vapors had the potential to kill or seriously incapacitate them.

As miners dig deeper, the pressure from the millions of tons of earth above them increases. This pressure causes the weight around the underground openings to shift, eliciting a terrible groaning. Sometimes there’s a loud banging — like two boxcars hitting each other in a freight yard.

Other times the pressure is more subtle — like the sharp snap of a twig being stepped on, which evokes the deeply unsettling feeling of being stalked in the blackness.

The cobalt rush has drawn investors back to a little town in Northern Ontario. Something dramatic happened here. You get that sense as soon as you arrive in the town of Cobalt (population 1,500). The wealth of these magnificent rose-silver veins was so valuable that, during the First World War, the British government pleaded with Canadian authorities to avoid a miners’ strike at Cobalt because of the impact it would have had on the war effort.

There are no visible signs of wealth in Cobalt anymore.  What remains is the detritus of a great war against the earth. The hills are deeply scarred with broken rock and blasted-out canyons. Tag alders and poplars have slowly reclaimed the multitude of mining sites that are strewn with rotting timbers, iron pipes, rusted old pails, and the occasional boot. And then there are the arsenic-green beaches where the toxic waste from a hundred mining operations was dumped into the once-clear glacial waters.

Cobalt elevated a new financial elite, who quickly learned that the real riches of the northern mines were not to be found with a pick and shovel but by mastering the financial alchemy of hustling mining plays and manipulating the stock market.

And thus began the quick ascendancy of Toronto from provincial backwater to economic powerhouse. At one time, Toronto was the butt of a joke among American financiers: “Toronto? Ah yes, that’s where you switch the trains to get to Cobalt.” But thanks to lessons learned at Cobalt, Toronto transformed itself into the financial center of a rapidly growing resource industry. This industry was built with a particular tool box of skills that had been developed in Cobalt — financial, regulatory, and industrial. And this tool box has since been exported around the world. Little wonder that the nation’s powerful mining industry refers to Cobalt as the “cradle of Canadian mining.

Numerous conquistador expeditions murdered their way through the Indigenous lands of South America in search of El Dorado. The transformative moment came with the discovery in 1545 of a mountain of silver at Potosí, Bolivia, which had profound consequences for both Indigenous cultures and the development of Europe. The sudden influx of vast quantities of wealth from the silver mines of Bolivia upended the European financial order. Spanish galleons laden with silver bullion created a new upper class, and kick-started the European economy into a new era. As Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (quoting Friedrich Engels) described it, “Latin American silver and gold . . . penetrated like a corrosive acid through all the pores of Europe’s moribund feudal society.” This is why anthropologist Jack Weatherford states that “Potosí was the first city of capitalism, for it supplied the primary ingredient of capitalism — money. Potosí made the money that irrevocably changed the economic complexion of the world.”9 An enormous divide was created between the new haves and the traditional have-nots. And the pressure to replicate this inflationary influx of easy money drove expansion, conquest, and wars carried out by numerous competing powers.

By the early 1600s, Potosí was the fourth-largest city in the world — at its peak, it was larger than London. Yet the impact of this massive mining economy on Indigenous people was devastating. The mines relied on 160,000 Indigenous indentured servants and enslaved Africans who toiled in the mountain tunnels, and the death rate of those workers was astounding. Galeano puts the death toll at a staggering eight million people, adding: “You could build a silver bridge from Potosí to Madrid from what was mined here — and one back with the bones of those that died taking it out.

When the silver wealth was finally stripped from its hills, Potosí was left as an economic backwater. It became a cautionary tale — one of the poorest cities in one of the poorest regions of the Americas.

The story of the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, in 1848 has been told in countless books, but little is said of the fact that John Sutter oversaw the torture, slavery, and sexual subjugation of local Indigenous people. He maintained a harem of kidnapped Indigenous women, including girls as young as ten.

Indigenous people who worked their own claims in the goldfields were quickly pushed out, and campaigns of mass murder were launched to erase them from the land entirely. Historian Benjamin Madley writes that the celebrated forty-niners (gold seekers named for 1849, the peak year for California gold rush immigration) pushed a notorious “exterminationist” program of Indigenous genocide that was called the El Dorado Campaign.

From California, white prospectors became the vanguard pushing into the territories of the Paiute, Shoshone, Navajo, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Crow, and Apache. Prior to 1846, the Apache people had been uneasy allies of the Americans, providing them with safe passage through Apache territory to fight the Mexicans. But then the Apaches began to suffer increasingly violent incursions by miners looking to exploit their lands. In Western lore, the Apaches are portrayed as treacherous killers who targeted peaceful white American settlers. In reality, the Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas and Geronimo fought and lost a long guerrilla war to save their lands as their people were pushed to the very brink of existence.

The survival of numerous other Indigenous nations — from the Nez Perce to the Sioux of the Black Hills — was gravely threatened by mineral rushes. Hollywood has portrayed the West as the land of cowboys, but it was the miners who fueled the relentless settler drive into Indigenous territories.

There was also little mining expertise in central Canada. So it is not surprising that the initial flush of money and know-how was American. The myths of the gold rush portrayed a lone frontiersman panning in the creeks for treasure. But mining was a very industrial business. The prospector needed a mine financier, who could hire the engineers and workers to make the mine run. By the time Cobalt’s silver was discovered, the western U.S. states already had five decades of experience developing, exploiting, and promoting new mining regions. The influence of American financiers on Cobalt can be seen in the names of mines like the Buffalo, the Rochester, the Cleveland, and the 4th of July.

But although the expertise of the metals industry came from the West, the real center of the business was New York City.

The new exchange building had only just opened on Broad Street in Lower Manhattan. The massive, open-concept trading floor with 72-foot-high ceilings and skylights was one of the largest interior spaces in the city. This design, says Mike Wallace in his book Greater Gotham, was chosen with an important but unstated architectural need in mind: ensuring panicked brokers could easily bolt for the exits in times of financial crisis.

The Guggenheim empire was built on a ruthless willingness to use the power of the state against the working class. When the miners went on strike in Leadville, Colorado, in 1896–97, the National Guard was brought in to defend the Guggenheim interests. A few years later, troops were used to fight a violent war with smelter workers at the Guggenheim operations in Colorado. The famous singer and labor activist Joe Hill was murdered by firing squad in Utah on trumped-up charges. The famous folk song says he died taking on the “copper bosses.

Those bosses were the Guggenheims, who were taking control of the copper operations in Utah. This use of state-sanctioned violence was a pattern that helped secure capitalist control over the Western boom towns. It was a pattern they repeated as they moved into Bolivia, Mexico, and Chile in search of further mineral riches.

By 1906, the real Cobalt fever was taking place on Wall Street. The same year that sixteen mines were producing silver in Cobalt, nearly a hundred other companies were established to sell stocks in Cobalt properties that had no credible mineral values whatsoever. These companies came with fanciful names like the JackPot Silver Cobalt Mining Company, the Rothschild Cobalt, and the Last Chance Mining Company. Within a year, there were 263 companies linked to the Cobalt silver fields, with an overall capitalization of $185 million. This soon doubled again, and then again, until there was more than $1 billion of mining stock being promoted to investors (roughly $280 billion in today’s money).10 Market speculation provided a path for quick riches for those unscrupulous enough to “pump” these paper companies with exaggerated claims and rumors.

These shares were sold by aggressive hustlers playing on the public’s desire to get in on the next big thing in the land of silver. The stock market promoters manipulated the craving of many greenhorn amateurs to play their own part in what was sold as the new Wild West — the stock market. The mythology of the West had focused on stories of rugged individualists ready to take risks for a big reward. But the open frontier was now a thing of the past, thanks in part to the rise of men like the Guggenheims. The casual investor was encouraged to believe that gambling on the long-shot odds of a distant mining rush was how the “self-made men” of the Western boom towns had built the Gilded Age capitalist class.

When the Guggenheims made their move into Cobalt in the fall of 1906, they signaled the opening of a new world of opportunity, and silver fever took over the New York Stock Exchange. The Nipissing stock soon jumped to $35 a share. As word spread that the Guggenheims were putting their money into Cobalt, there was a rush on a whole array of Cobalt-related stocks. Suddenly, all those paper companies that were trading in the penny-a-share range took off. For three full days in late 1906, New York police had to be called out to push back investors looking to get a piece of the Cobalt stock bonanza. One of the men observing this spending mania was Jacob Herzig, a con man who had done jail time for forging cheques, racetrack betting, and mail fraud. Putting his prison career behind him, Herzig took the more approachable Anglo-Saxon name George Graham Rice, and moved into more respectable fraud by selling bogus mining claims in Goldfield, Nevada.

Herzig noted that the Guggenheim stock play was a signal to thousands of “waiters, barkeepers, tailors, seamstresses and tenderloin beauties [who] competed with bankers, merchants, professionals on the regular exchanges, and even ministers of the Gospel.” All of them wanted to cash in on the seemingly mystical “instinct for getting rich” that drove the Guggenheim empire. But it all came crashing down on December 1, 1906, when the Guggenheims inexplicably pulled out of the Nipissing deal. The stock price tumbled from $34 a share to $7.

Hammond’s prediction that the Nipissing property sat on a deep ore body was proven false by one of his engineers. This led the Guggenheims to believe they had invested in a mine with no future. Wall Street took a serious hit. The New York Times reported that $24 million in stock value was lost almost overnight.17 Herzig claimed that the losses were much higher, with somewhere between $75 million and $100 million being wiped out in the collapse of the Nipissing bubble. Hammond was forced to resign, and Isaac Guggenheim had a nervous breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. Thousands of other investors who had purchased stock based on the stories being perpetuated by a profusion of “wildcat” stock promoters lost their savings.

It may have been a shallow mine, but the riches from this operation played out in spectacular fashion for decades afterwards. The dubious and often illegal tactics that had burned so many New York investors found a home in the newly opened Toronto exchange. Here’s how it worked: a group of mining promoters would incorporate a company with a glittery name to promote shares in a northern mining property. Even though it had only the slightest chance of becoming a viable mine, the promoters would plant rumors and exaggeration to stir excitement. Once the price of the stock soared, those in the know sold their shares, leaving the unsuspecting gullible investors holding worthless paper

Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, Canadian regulators made little effort to respond to demands to contain these excesses. Any attempt to clean up the murky world of penny stocks was simply considered un-Canadian. By the dawn of the 21^st century, the Canadian regulatory problem had become so notorious that Canada was listed at the bottom of the G20 nations for its failure to ensure proper corporate accountability. The country is a notorious haven for corporate money laundering. In fact, international regulators and criminal investigators have a special name for the “Canadian problem” of turning a blind eye to criminal and corporate money laundering — they call it “snow washing.

Within a few short years, Toronto had been transformed from a provincial town to a very wealthy city.

The riches of Cobalt gave birth to new Canadian mythologies. The first of these was a distinctly Canadian hero — the mine finder. Over the decades, Canada’s financial press has played up the legend of the rough-and-tumble prospector with the relentless drive to find wealth and build a financial empire.

The site of the first public school required a guard, to prevent squatters from building houses on it. There were no streets, and huge rocks and tree stumps made travel through the settlement almost impossible. But the real problem was that more and more people were arriving at the camp all the time, and there was very little access to clean water.

The water in Cobalt Lake was so contaminated with intestinal bacteria that it wasn’t safe to drink — as these bacteria caused chronic typhoid fever. Typhoid is caused by exposure to Salmonella typhi and can be transmitted through feces in water. Symptoms include an outbreak of red spots on the skin, fever, headaches, diarrhea, and vomiting. Without treatment, it has a 25 percent fatality rate. The water was contaminated because settlement was taking place amid haphazard mining operations that were blasting the hard rock hills and ridges of the Canadian Shield. Sewage facilities were little more than shallow pits dug into the unyielding rock behind the settlers’ shacks. The rocky terrain was quickly overwhelmed with human waste, and there was no coordinated plan to deal with the problem. There was one outhouse for about every five houses, and some were so filthy that the waste rose higher than the seat of the makeshift toilet.

About a quarter of the settlement’s human and animal waste flowed directly into Cobalt Lake, while the rest leaked into the narrow valleys between the surrounding hills and flooded underneath the tents and shacks.  Without access to clean drinking water, people collected rainwater and melted snow. Many chanced their luck with whatever access to spring water or creeks could be found.

So why was nothing done to prevent the blatant health threat facing the thousands of incoming settlers? The focus was entirely on making as much money as quickly as possible, which meant that civic life occurred on an industrial battlefield. The earth was hacked and blasted around the settlers, who were scrambling to cut down the remaining trees in order to replace their tents with rough wooden homes.

The geology of the silver fields made civic development especially difficult. The silver veins ran erratically, often little more than a half-inch wide at the surface. This meant that prospectors had to be very thorough in searching the ground, completely stripping away the overburden of soil and trees. If silver was found, it was necessary to dig and blast to determine the vein’s depth. Mining crews dug massive trenches up to twenty feet deep and more than a hundred feet long. With no municipal disposal system in place, people used the abandoned trenches that scarred the town and surrounding hills as dumping grounds for their accumulating garbage.

Exploratory shafts were sunk in the very heart of the town, and businesses and residences were literally crushed beneath tailings piled against their walls by the mining companies that owned the rights to the land.

The exploration was pushed farther into the bush, sparking new mineral rushes at Elk Lake, Gowganda, Silver Center, and Larder Lake. And the deeper the inexperienced men went into the bush, the more dangerous their endeavors became. Prospectors carried their supplies on their backs into increasingly isolated forest locations, which meant that when winter came, these men might be stranded with inadequate supplies to survive. Some prospectors froze or starved to death in their hovels when they were cut off by deep snow. Others died as they attempted to steer overladen canoes through rough river waters.

Some men were accidentally blown up by dynamite, or were suffocated by fumes in the narrow shafts they were digging. Andrew Dunn was working with his prospecting team on a rock seam at Gowganda when he lit a dynamite charge and rushed away for safety. His dog thought they were playing fetch, and ran with the lit charge back to its owner and dropped the dynamite at his feet. Dunn was killed. The dog escaped without injury.

The local paper reported stories of women arriving in Cobalt trying to find husbands who had disappeared in the silver fields. The difficulty in determining what had happened to these men lay in the fact that mining camps were transient places. The trains were packed with adventurers, and nobody kept track of how many men were heading out into the forest. The men stayed in town just long enough to purchase supplies and a miner’s staking license. This was good news for the shopkeepers and bordellos, but bad news for wives looking for lost husbands — and it played havoc with civic development.

The precarity of life in the camp became sorely evident on May 18, 1906, when nearly 20,000 pounds of dynamite that had been stored on a mine property in the center of town accidently exploded, destroying many homes and causing a massive fire. The New York Times was quick to reassure its readers that, despite the colossal destruction, nothing was going to slow the momentum to “strike it rich” for those who were still pouring into the camp.

 

The range of injuries coming from the numerous underground mines of Cobalt made Saunders’s hospital seem more like a field unit in a war zone. Men were blinded in blasts. They had their arms crushed or their backs broken by machinery or falling rocks. They were suffocated by gas and injured by falls down the mine shafts. They lost fingers and hands in the rush to get the mines into production.

 

To cater to the largely transient male population, merchants set up all manner of makeshift operations. The Ukrainian Jewish immigrant Samuel Bucovetsky carried his clothing wares with him into the camp, and then rented a storefront when he had enough money. Restaurant owners served food out of wagons on the street. Other merchants arrived to find that, since many clothing and tool stores were already in operation, it was necessary to find another niche — which is how the rough frontier camp became home to ice cream parlors, a bowling alley, and live theatre.

 

Downtown Cobalt was a Potemkin village, designed to appear brash and confident to reassure investors. It was widely photographed and reproduced on promotional postcards. Rarely photographed was the profusion of shanty neighborhoods that spilled out over the hills. Cobalt was a community where selling an image of wealth and luxury to potential mining investors took precedence over establishing basic hygiene facilities and ensuring the safety of residents.

 

The removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands was the first step to securing control of the North. The settler discovery of silver at Cobalt had awoken the federal government and province of Ontario to the need to ensure legal control over the untapped resource wealth that likely existed even farther north. Through 1905 and 1906, Duncan Campbell Scott, the infamous architect of the residential school system, led a party of treaty negotiators to secure title to the vast region of Northern Ontario through the signing of Treaty 9.1 It transferred some of the richest natural resources in the world to the Canadian state, while pushing the Indigenous communities onto impoverished reserves that were little more than internal displacement camps. The treaty had promised that Indigenous children would be provided with education in exchange. Instead, they were forcibly removed from their homes and families by the state, police, and Church, to suffer abuse in the residential schools.

 

From the beginning, there was enormous tension between the settlers and the political establishment over the rights of those in the colony. This struggle set the template for the resource-based northern communities that were to come in Cobalt’s wake.

 

The primary tool for maintaining colonial control in Cobalt’s early days was the provincially owned Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission. Incoming settlers were forced to purchase property through the commission, which controlled civic development in land-starved Cobalt. The geography of Cobalt limited options for homesteading. Potential settler homes were squeezed onto narrow and disjointed rocky properties, in the shadow of the large mining companies that were setting up along the hills and ridges.

 

The commission sold properties at the highest possible premium. Seen through the colonial lens of the southern government, this policy ensured a profitable return for their investment in claiming the North. However, it had a hugely detrimental effect on settlers, by denying basic land rights to those looking to build amid the competing mine operations.

 

Settlers were forced to buy properties at the maximum possible price, but the legal exceptions that came with these land transfers made their homes virtually worthless. Any house or business could be torn down for whatever reason was deemed necessary by the mining companies. Mine management could force people out of their home if they believed there was mineral potential beneath the ground, or use their homestead as a place to store timber and supplies. The owners used this power to force evictions if the principal breadwinner was known to support the miners’ union. The absolute power of the mine interests was written right into the deed of sale,

 

It was an audacious declaration of the absolute power that mining interests had to tear down homes, sink shafts, run rail lines, and dump rock or garbage on anyone’s homestead.

 

It wasn’t worth any resident’s effort to put more than the most minimal investment into their home. The result was a shantytown where civic improvement was frowned upon by law and corporate authority. Residents lived haphazardly amid the large mining companies and industrial extraction operations that dominated the town. This patchwork of mine fiefdoms prevented municipal roads, drainage, and services from being constructed in any coherent manner.

 

Mining companies began carrying out drilling and exploration work on the growing downtown — even outside the opera house and underneath stores on the main square. The mayor of Cobalt, H. H. Lang, accused the Coniagas Mine owners of trying “to crush the town out of existence.” Indeed, the Jamieson Meat Market had the unfortunate luck of being next door to a new Coniagas mine shaft that was blasted 350 feet deep right in the heart of the town square. The mine informed the owner that they were going to use his property to dump waste rock being blasted and hauled from underground.

 

When the shopkeeper refused to pay for an overhead rail line to the mine site to divert the waste pile and save his business, the mine began dumping rock on the roof of his store until it was crushed under the weight. The settlement of the American West was a vision of manifest destiny focused on the steady march of settlers homesteading on Indigenous land.

 

In northern Canada, the focus was much simpler — establishing outposts to exploit the natural resource wealth. From its earliest days, Cobalt was treated by officials as little more than an industrial worksite

 

In Canada’s North, however, the frontier wasn’t a geographic line but a series of circles. Those circles were the zones of resource exploitation.

 

The merchants were especially angry at the exorbitant fees charged for supplies being brought into the community. The rates charged by the Railway Commission for moving freight had a huge impact on both settlers and industrial development. The merchants were fed up with the total disregard shown by the commission for goods that were damaged or lost.

 

During his campaign, Whitney had accused the Liberals of selling out the birthright of Ontarians through their plan to electrify the province by giving control of the rivers to private corporations. The Liberals were notorious for their backroom connections to the Ottawa Valley lumber barons, and it appeared as if they were going to establish the same relationship with the future hydro barons. Whitney was a champion for publicly owned power development through the establishment of the Hydro-Electric Power Commission. He also pushed for Crown control of the forest resources of the North.

 

When it came to mining, Whitney announced an increase in mining royalties to 3 percent, and insisted on better deals for the province from the sale of Crown land to private mining interests. The Cobalt mine owners were duly outraged, and Reuben Wells Leonard led the charge against the increased royalty rate. Mining minister Frank Cochrane’s response was blunt: “If there is a company that should not object it is that one [the Coniagas]. They got a $5,000,000 mine and the Province got $120 . . . The people of the Province demand that such a tax should be imposed. Nearly every industry is taxed. We take you up there in Pullman cars . . . and you have surely no right to object to a reasonable tax.

 

Given the immense wealth being extracted from Cobalt, there were those who quite rightly saw even a tax rate of 3 percent as a pretty poor deal for the people of Ontario. As the newly elected premier pushed forward his promise of a publicly run hydro system in 1906, questions began to be asked about public control of the mines. Why shouldn’t the people of Ontario own the silver wealth that was generating huge fortunes for American financiers? Even establishment newspapers like the Ottawa Citizen didn’t consider public ownership of the mines of Cobalt to be a radical proposal. Instead they saw it as a “spirit of enterprise” for the people of the province. The benefits of public ownership of the rich mineral wealth appeared to be self-evident.

 

Two provincially owned mines were established, but the Provincial No. 1 and No. 2 mines were failures. The surface showings of silver disappeared, leaving two mine shafts dug into bare rock. The sum total made for the province after expenditures was a mere $34,893. Of all the regions in the silver mining zone, Gilles Limit was one of the least profitable. Assistant deputy mining minister Thomas Gibson dismissed the exercise in public mine ownership, concluding, “So ended with a small profit the first and only attempt at governmental mining in Ontario, leaving to Soviet Russia the monopoly on this form of official activity.” But there was nothing Soviet about the project. It was undertaken by a Conservative government in a province that was moving forward with a vision for public ownership of natural resources. The only reason the project failed was because the government had bet on the wrong plot of land.

 

Stung by the failure of the provincially owned mines, the government fell back on the established policy of selling off public resources to private interests. Cobalt Lake was sold to Toronto financier Henry Pellatt for a flat fee of $1 million. Pellatt drained the lake, leaving a stinking swamp and dead fish in the center of town.

 

The Whitney administration also sold off the rights to neighboring Kerr Lake, for $178,500 in cash plus a 10 percent royalty on all wealth accrued. The lake was drained, and the area around it was mined by four companies: the Kerr Lake, Crown Reserve, Lawson, and Drummond mines. The Kerr Lake and Crown Reserve mines generated more than $10 million in dividends for their investors. They boasted underground silver veins that ran between 8,000 and 12,500 ounces to the ton — richer than any silver veins ever mined. What might have happened if the provincial government had experimented in public mining at Kerr Lake rather than in the wastes of Gilles Limit? The massive riches from those mines could have inspired further public involvement and control of the incredible resource wealth that would be developed in the coming years.

 

But the Kerr Lake wealth went to private investors, and from this point on, government policy focused exclusively on ensuring the maximum exploitation of resource wealth with the barest of encumbrances. This meant low tax regimes, with minimum royalties going to the population. Any other possible model was dismissed as either hopelessly idealistic or dangerously subversive.

 

She was not the first woman in Cobalt. Catherine Legris predated MacEwan by a year, arriving in the region when it was still a railway camp. Legris made her way by paddleboat up the river, and then by foot along the rail line to the camp — where the railway contractor supplied her with a tent and she began the labor of feeding the work crews. When silver was discovered, Legris used the money she had saved to build one of the first office buildings in the camp. She rented one of the offices to a young dentist when business space was at an absolute premium. But a Western mining promoter then showed up and took it over, threatening to kill the dentist if he didn’t quickly vacate the premises. When Legris learned of this, she picked up an axe and hunted the promoter down in the town square. Confronted by a tough woman with an axe, he quickly agreed to end his occupation of the space.

 

Catherine Legris’s story of frontier grit and ingenuity would have fit right in to any of the great gold rush sagas. Yet it was the story of Elizabeth MacEwan, an upstanding Anglo-Protestant wife and schoolteacher, that local historians adopted as the preferred narrative of the first woman — and it was through her story that future historians interpreted life for women in early Cobalt.

 

By the time MacEwan arrived, there were already multiple women living in Cobalt who worked in the local sex trade. Prostitutes were usually the first women to reach the early gold rush sites. James H. Gray supports this claim in Red Lights on the Prairies, writing that a house of prostitution was always one of the “firsts” of settlement in western Canadian towns, being established long before the first church or school. The sex workers were always on the front lines of frontier expansion, arriving in every camp close on the heels of the prospectors. In many mining camps, sex workers outnumbered other women 25 to one.

 

The files of the Attorney General reveal that the sex trade in Cobalt was extensive and was protected by both the police and municipal officials. One of the first bordellos in the region was on the main road connecting Cobalt to neighboring Haileybury; a campaign by local churchmen to have this bordello shut down was ignored by public officials. There were four brothels in Mileage 104 at the edge of town, 10 brothels one kilometer apart along the Montreal River towards the Elk Lake silver camp, 11 and at least two brothels in the small lumber town of neighboring Latchford, thirteen kilometers southwest.

 

In the same period that the Cobalt clergy were denouncing the collusion of police and municipal officials in the sex trade, the Attorney General’s office was being inundated with documentation of police corruption and sexual abuse in the Northern Ontario mining town of Kenora. The investigator reported that the local police and magistrate made their money through a shakedown scheme of local sex workers. The district attorney stated that the local police were so busy running the shakedown that they had no time to do police work. Criminality in the brothels included robbing clients who were given excessive amounts of alcohol or were drugged. In other cases, sex workers set the men up in card games where large sums of money were bet and lost. Two men working on the rail line lost between $1,350 and $1,700 over three days at a Kenora brothel. Men who were arrested at the bordellos faced the further threat of being robbed by the police at the station.

 

The report to the Attorney General noted that venereal disease was widespread, found even among the young boys who delivered packages to the bordellos. The investigators also stated that murders had been committed at the brothels, though the reports did not include how many of the victims were women. The Kenora files provide a rare window into the darker world of police corruption in the sex trade on the northern frontier, and challenge the myths of frontier writers who present the story of sex work within the tropes of good-time dance hall girls and harmless fun-loving lads.

 

The women who were the most vulnerable to violence on the frontier were sex workers — and in the frontier sex trade, there were distinct gradations of status and protection. On November 11, 1908, two sex workers named Carrie Russell (also known as Mary Smith) and Ethel Crawford were brutally assaulted by lumberjack Samuel (Saul) Gouin at a squalid bordello in Cobalt. Little more than a shack at the edge of town, the brothel was operated by the two women, both of whom were sick — most likely with advanced tuberculosis. This put them on the margins of the town’s established sex trade. Two sick sex workers outside of the downtown area were easy prey for sexual predators. After spending the night at the shack, Gouin attacked the women with an axe.

 

He elevated the charge from assault to murder. At the trial, Gouin’s defense relied on the fact that his wife and four of his eight children sat dutifully in the court every day. He was portrayed as a hard worker and family man. A large petition in his favor was put together by prominent citizens of his home community of Powassan. Gouin was exonerated by all-male juries at three trials. The Gouin trial took place amid the debate over a much more explosive murder case, involving a Northern Ontario mother named Annie Robinson. It exposed the inequities faced by frontier women in a justice system that was overwhelmingly in favor of men.

 

In American lore, the gunfighter remains a defining symbol of the nation’s sense of self. The Canadian narrative, however, prefers stories of plucky and polite settlers who put their faith in social solidarity and the rule of law. Canada, we tell ourselves, was the land of the gunless frontier. This is one of the cornerstone beliefs promoted in the national story. But references to guns and violence appear often in reports on the early days of the Cobalt mining boom.

 

The tendency to airbrush out the rougher elements of frontier history isn’t particular to Cobalt but speaks to the mid-twentieth-century nationalist effort to portray a distinctly Canadian frontier experience that countered the dominant American narrative popularized by Hollywood.

 

Mounties were portrayed as a nineteenth-century mix of “civil servants and social workers” whom the Indigenous peoples, who were in the process of being colonized, referred to as “father.” This presented an image of Canada’s settlement of the frontier as a non-violent and consensual process. The historical record, however, tells a different story. The North-West Mounted Police, which became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was explicitly created to control Indigenous people and their lands. Yet somehow the symbol of the upstanding police officer has served to justify Canada’s claim to those lands, while underlining a supposed sense of national decency.

 

Historian Albert Tucker referred to Caldbick as Cobalt’s “sheriff,” “who exhibited basic Canadian common sense by seizing the handguns of Western mining men as they came off the trains.” Yet similar policies existed in many American Western towns. In fact, Wyatt and Morgan Earp had outlawed handguns in the infamous silver mining town of Tombstone, Arizona.

 

The killing of American prospector Oliver Kline in a northern saloon casts further doubt on the proposition of the peaceful Canadian frontier.

 

New Liskeard was a study in contrasts. It was called the Holy City because of the fervid temperance beliefs preached from the pulpit of its many Protestant churches. Yet its downtown was home to a flourishing liquor trade that had arisen out of the government decision to ban alcohol sales in nearby Cobalt.

 

Even in dry Cobalt it was possible to drink, but the options to do so without harassment were often based on class and ethnicity. Workers, particularly the immigrant miners, did their drinking in illegal backroom establishments known as “blind pigs.” The blind pigs were the domain of miners who would not have been welcome in the neighboring towns, which meant that they were always susceptible to arrest. Meanwhile, members of the Anglophone business class were able to drink at several hotels that the police rarely bothered with.

 

The illicit liquor trade was made possible by bribes and payoffs to the local police.

 

The laws governing the mining industry gave maximum protection to the mine owners and investors in their exploitation of the wealth of the earth. Miners who were found taking any ore from the ground for themselves faced serious legal sanctions. The crime was known as “high-grading,” and the widespread illegal trade in stolen silver was considered a serious threat to corporate control of mineral deposits. There was an enticing incentive for the low-paid mine workers to steal silver from the mines to sell on the well-established black market in illegal metals. To many Cobalt workers and residents, high-grading was a way to level an unfair playing field.

 

The benefits of the enormous wealth coming from the mines were completely inaccessible to the miners, who worked under very dangerous conditions to make this wealth possible.

 

It was estimated that the mines were losing 30,000 ounces of silver a month to high-grading theft, yet there were few arrests. The local people were not willing to turn in someone who was taking a small cut of the immense wealth being shipped out to build the investment portfolios of men living in luxury.

 

The working-class population of miners considered high-graders to be dashing characters. This was particularly true in the gold mines of the 1920s through to the ’50s, when union organization was badly smashed by owners and the state. The gangster high-graders were seen as Robin Hoods — a symbol of grassroots resistance to absolute corporate control over the wealth of the land. This social acceptance of theft from the mines remained strong in the mining towns of the North until widespread unionization in the late 1950s through the ’70s, which resulted in wage increases and safer working conditions.

 

Miners who fought for health and safety or better wages faced blacklisting, evictions, intimidation — and, at times, organized state violence. Some of those miners concluded that the only solution was to resist, organize, and ultimately overthrow an unjust system of exploitation. This vision of a class war arrived on the train when Cobalt was little more than a few tents on the hills.

 

This radical movement was spearheaded by the organizers of the Western Federation of Miners (wfm). The mine owners demonized the wfm as anarchist revolutionaries, but they were the very prospectors and “packsack” miners who were essential in getting the mines into production. These were men of fire and spirit. They sang defiant songs, taunting the bosses and promising revolution. In fact, the famous Little Red Songbook of revolutionary worker anthems was partly influenced by the songs of the Cobalt miners.

 

The Western miners mixed with a large pool of workers from the Ottawa Valley, the Maritimes, and Europe. Many of the Ukrainian and Finnish miners brought their own socialist and radical traditions to the camp, but the Canadian workers tended to be politically unaware by comparison. Bob Carlin arrived in Cobalt as a fifteen-year-old Catholic boy from the Ottawa Valley. His only education had been at the little red schoolhouse where his mother was the teacher. He worked six days a week, and on Sunday went to Mass in the morning and the reading of the psalms at Vespers in the evening. Carlin’s lack of political awareness was typical of the farming communities of central Canada at the time; they were insular, religious, and non-political. But working in Cobalt radicalized him — first because of the harsh conditions workers faced, and second because of the political influences coming in from the western United States.

 

Although rarely mentioned in the histories of the gold rush, class struggle was an integral part of the Western boom towns. The dime novelists promoted the gunfights that took place in saloons when, in fact, some of the more dramatic gun action took place in the showdowns between union men and company goons. This wasn’t the stuff of old Western legends. It was the reality that many miners experienced first-hand.

 

In the summer of 1905, Haywood had arrived in Chicago for the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the Wobblies). The delegates who gathered for that first meeting of the iww represented a veritable who’s who of the revolutionary American left. The iww believed that the only solution to the huge power disparity between the super rich and the working class lay in creating a single, all-encompassing union that included all workers — skilled and unskilled, white and Black, male and female. Their focus was organizing workers who had been left out of the existing union structure, and this meant crossing the hard racial, gender, and ethnic lines that had kept the working class divided.

 

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things in life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the earth.

 

By the time Roadhouse arrived in the North, the radical roots of class resistance had been firmly planted. It had begun in the mine bunkhouses where men worked, ate, and slept in very rough conditions. In the mornings, men would leave the bunkhouses in the darkness and descend into the earth with nothing but a candle to light their way. They spent the day shoveling or drilling the hard rock, while water poured continuously on them from cracks above. It was always cold. In the shallow silver mines, the earth held the winter’s coldness all year round. It was often so cold that a miner had to thaw out dynamite by heating it over a flame in a metal box. The other option was to stuff the dynamite down his pants or warm it up under his armpits. But the body often absorbed the toxic nitroglycerine, which caused massive headaches or vomiting.

 

At the end of their ten- or twelve-hour shift, the tired, dirty miners returned to the surface in the darkness of a northern night, and went back to a bunkhouse with few comforts waiting. They slept in shifts amid dirty clothes, lacking access to proper facilities to clean the grime from their bodies. Bob Carlin said the men slept in “cold, dark, lousy, bedbug-ridden hovels.” Meanwhile, management lived on the same property but “slept and dined in the staff house — clean sheets, clean mattresses and a clean room and no sweat-soaked underwear.

 

Hardrock miners were aware that the brutal conditions they faced were unjust, and they knew their rights and worth as workers. This class awareness resulted in rebellions and work stoppages in protest. Some men were fired and marched off the mine property, but progress was made. As Carlin remembered it: “For all its germ and bug-ridden stinkiness, some of the most self-disciplined, tightly-knit groups and most militant union units in the history of the miners’ union in Canada or the United States were established in the bunkhouse

 

The Cobalt Miners’ Union immediately began pushing for an increase in wages, shorter working hours, and safer conditions. In response, the mine owners followed the pattern of the Western gold rush camps by establishing the Temiskaming Mine Managers Association. The role of the tmma was to ensure that no mine agreed to meet with the union on any issue. The owners fired workers who were known to support the union.

 

the most militantly anti-union of the owners was Canadian Reuben Wells Leonard of the Coniagas Mine. Leonard was not only deeply opposed to workers’ rights; he also fought hard against the push for old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.17 And he shrouded this mercenary capitalism in a defense of fundamental British Christian values.

 

Confrontation between the miners and the owners in Cobalt came on July 2, 1907, when union organizer Big Jim McGuire went to the Nipissing Mine property and told the men that the time had come for them to stand up to the company.20 One by one, the workers put down their tools and walked out of the mine. The strike spread and, soon there were more than three thousand men on strike across the Cobalt mining camp. This represented roughly half the total population of the community. The mines were forced to bring in scab labor to keep running. The problem was that the only way into town was by rail. The union established pickets to prevent replacement workers from getting off the trains.

 

One group of thirty-seven Cape Breton coal miners landed in Cobalt, only to change their minds and decide they would not cross the lines of strikers at the train station. The union paid their fare home.

worker solidarity became more difficult to sustain, as the men had no wages to feed their families and the owners began evicting the families of striking miners. At the Nipissing Mine, 300 out of 380 miners went on strike, but as the strike wore on and financial resources dwindled, half of them returned to work. The mines that continued operations with scab labor were beset by accidents.

 

wfm workers’ hall became the meeting place for the working class in each of those camps. This is where men gathered after long shifts in the mines, to participate in debating societies and educational workshops. Men who were treated by the mining companies as expendable parts in an industrial machine were invited to the union halls to take lessons in history, economics, and philosophy.

 

The high point of the class war came on April 28, 1914, when the Cobalt Miners’ Union helped force the passage of the Ontario Workmen’s Compensation Act — the first Canadian statute designed to provide benefits, medical care, and rehabilitation services to individuals who suffered workplace injuries or contracted occupational diseases. April 28 is a date commemorated all over the country as the Workers’ Mourning Day, yet few people remember its connection to the miners at Cobalt.

 

They were interested in exploiting the enormous pulp wood and hydro potential of the region 150 to 200 kilometers north of Cobalt, but there was nothing easy about driving a railway through this land. As the work bogged down and willing workers became hard to find, harsher steps became necessary. At the time, the Cobalt railway station was a no-go zone because of the general strike. This was good news for the railway construction contractors, who were always losing potential navvies to the lure of the silver rush. Men signed on with the railway to pay their passage north, and many jumped from the windows as the train came through Cobalt. Railway contractors had to post armed guards on the train and sometimes even handcuffed the workers.

 

The government continued to relentlessly push the railway into the region to secure access to the rivers and woodlands. True to the Empire Ontario vision of creating zones of economic exploitation, the provincial government turned over resource control of the river and forest allocations to the Abitibi Pulp and Paper Company, which was setting up its mill operation in the new community of Iroquois Falls. It became the world’s largest supplier of newsprint, dominating the pulp and paper industry for much of the twentieth century. The Abitibi model defined Ontario’s northern vision, wherein public assets such as timber allocations and the hydro potential of northern rivers remained nominally under provincial control, but were, in reality, given over to corporate interests. The exploitation of these public assets paid steady dividends to shareholders, and allowed many operations to expand and diversify their assets.

 

The benefit to the province came in the form of stumpage fees for the massive number of trees taken and the growth of a series of northern mill towns. The fundamental question for every mineral rush camp was how long the riches would last. Mining camps in the West were born and died rapidly, as the veins played out and the investment dollars moved on to the next big find. The Klondike, which was still very fresh in the public’s mind, had peaked and faded within three years.

 

Mining promoters had hoped that Cobalt would be a Canadian version of Butte, Montana, which had become the undisputed mining capital of the American West. Like Cobalt, the Butte mining rush began with prospectors going after narrow silver veins, but those seams had led to rich and complex copper ore bodies that plunged thousands of feet into the earth. Butte was transformed from a silver rush boom town into an industrial heavyweight. In fact, all the tonnages mined in Cobalt in a year were matched by a mere two days’ worth of mining at Butte.

 

Cobalt’s huge profit margin was a major incentive in driving the revolutionary changes in mine exploration and development that took place there. In 1904, Cobalt’s mineral deposits were exploited by pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. Miners focused on veins of silver that were almost pure. Just five years later, the nineteenth-century prospecting model had been replaced by staff geologists, mine engineers, draftsmen, and specialty mining crews. Mining exploration was transformed by diamond drills that allowed companies to map out underground mineral structures. These drills punched a series of holes into the earth from which ore samples were extracted. Geologists logged the results and charted maps of how ore flowed underneath the ground. This process mapped not only the elusive high-grade veins, but also blocks of mineable lower-grade metals that had previously been overlooked. By 1909, there were seventeen diamond drills working at the various Cobalt mining properties, producing six thousand feet of core samples a month.

 

The mine owners realized the enormous potential of the lower-grade ores, which included elements of silver, cobalt, copper, and nickel. But shipping out large quantities of such ore to distant refineries was financially daunting, so milling and separating operations were established within the camp.

 

Crushing, sorting, and refining operations soon proliferated over the hills.

 

Boxing Day 1908, Jack Johnson shocked the world when he was crowned the first Black heavyweight world champion after defeating Canadian Tommy Burns. No other athletic moment has been so racially explosive.  Immediately after the fight, there were outbreaks of anti-Black violence across the USA.

 

As Johnson biographer Theresa Runstedtler writes, “By Johnson’s day the physical fitness of the white male body had become an integral part of the prevailing myths of Western social and political superiority . . . Boxing promoters capitalized on widespread white anxieties about physical degeneration and racial instability to advertise events and products and to maximize profits. Charles A. Dana of the New York Sun warned, “We are in the midst of a growing menace. The black man is rapidly forging to the front ranks in athletics, especially in the field of fisticuffs. We are in the midst of a black rise against white supremacy. In the end, the fight was hosted by a rival promotion team in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910. As Munroe predicted, the deal for the movie rights made the Johnson–Jeffries showdown a truly twentieth-century spectacle. The fight wasn’t even close: Johnson left the Great White Hope lying on the canvas. Black fans didn’t dare show their jubilation publicly, but white mobs felt free to launch anti-Black violence across nearly fifty cities in the United States.

 

People would even gamble on mine properties based on whether a local stray known as Cobalt the Dog was seen to favor one mine crew over another. The dog’s exploits were covered in the media, particularly his habit of hopping the train to Toronto. What the dog did in the big city was a mystery, but he always found his way back home to Cobalt.

 

Hardrock mining has always been driven by a devil-may-care bravado — a feature of a way of life where men don’t know whether they’re going to come home at the end of their shift. And mining families understand that their very lives depend on the vagaries of geological forces set in motion billions of years ago. Yet mining culture thrives on irrational optimism that the mining gods can be placated by grand public gestures of excess, defiance, and recklessness. Cobalt was a town where the workers fought for a living wage and safe conditions, but were willing to gamble recklessly on extravagant sporting events.

 

Vaudeville theatre played a leading role in the cultural life of Cobalt. The ramshackle streets were home to eight theatres, running a dizzying array of entertainment acts six nights of the week.6 The mixture of entertainment on offer was extraordinary — from England’s dramatic thespian Herbert Beerbohm Tree and “America’s Sweetheart” Mary Pickford to the Cherniavsky Trio performing their classical repertoire. The upscale Empire Theatre on Lang Street boasted a full orchestra and presented shows from New York and Toronto.

 

In February 1911, Poiret caused an enormous scandal in France when he introduced a provocative new piece of clothing, inspired by the East: harem pants. Until that moment, the socially accepted attire for Western women was floor-length dresses and pants were the strict domain of men. But Poiret had designed an outfit with billowy pants that narrowed at the ankles. He promoted these harem pants at a high society soiree, where those who refused to dress in the controversial style were not admitted. The response was as he expected: the North American press denounced his creation as brazen and indecent, and covered his spring line as an example of the rise of “extreme” fashion. Women who wore the garment were subjected to assault, harassment, arrest, and even murder.8 In some places, the pants were outlawed, and shops that displayed them had their windows smashed.9 Even the Pope waded into the controversy, condemning the outfit as an attack on the distinction between the sexes.

 

Stevens was determined to cash in on Poiret’s controversial garment to promote his vaudeville theatre. He was banking on the belief that Cobalt would relish the opportunity to replicate the Parisian fashion revolution on its streets. To build drama, Stevens announced in advance the exact hour that his wife, vaudeville actress Daisy Primrose, would walk down the town’s main street in the notorious pants. As Stevens and Primrose set out on a promenade from the Princess Theatre to the office of the Daily Nugget, downtown Cobalt was packed with people eager to catch a glimpse of the young actress.

 

The story of hopelessly poor actors peddling a stage show about millionaire excess seemed like the perfect way to describe life in Cobalt. But it wasn’t simply a story of the false promises of Cobalt; it reflected the dark reality of the vaudeville circuit. Every night in dingy theatres across North America, actors presented themselves as the epitome of glamour, wealth, and adventure, but the working conditions were unforgiving and the pay was terrible. In fighting for better conditions, they faced firings and blacklisting — not unlike the miners risking their lives to unearth enormous wealth for distant investors and shareholders without seeing the benefit themselves.

 

The Cobalt silver boom mirrored the rise, peak, and collapse of vaudeville. The industry was at its height in the first decade of the twentieth century, but by 1915–16 vaudeville. One of these technological innovations was the “silver screen.” People often think that the name comes from the glamorous connection to Hollywood. In fact, the screen was named for the presence of silver halides that allowed for a more reflective surface for showing films in theatres. That silver came from Cobalt.

 

In the summer of 1909, Cobalt was at the peak of its boom.  Despite the wealth being generated in the region, the town remained impoverished. The cash-strapped municipality was fighting a losing battle with the mining interests and the province to help with the huge investments required to provide proper water, fire, and sewage services.

 

In the thermodynamics of an intense fire, a point is reached where the flames begin pulling oxygen and energy into the vortex. In Cobalt, desperate residents tried to slow the surge by dynamiting houses to create breaks in the tightly packed streets, but this only added to the chaos. The fire chief tried to stop them, but an even bigger problem was that the fire crews couldn’t get past the hordes of people hauling everything out of the buildings — from pianos to billiard tables. The biggest problem, however, was that the fire hoses had no pressure because of the insufficient water supplies.

 

Then the looting began, when illegal supplies of alcohol were pulled out onto the street, causing widespread drunkenness and pillaging. “Doors were smashed in and the entire contents of the store stolen by raiders who boldly marched up the main street with their swag. Dry goods stores, general stores, saloons, every place of business where the proprietor was not on guard was entered and the contents stolen and carried away. . . .

 

The Foreign Quarter had been wiped out, leaving 2,000 people homeless. As they gathered in the town square, rain began to pour down on them. Mayor Lang convened an emergency meeting at the Opera House, where he announced that he had wired both the premier and the prime minister asking for help and blankets and tents. Without any place to house people, the local vaudeville theatres and roller rink opened their doors as emergency shelters. The worst impact of the fire was that it exposed just how fragile the interracial relations in Cobalt’s emerging society were. Before the fire, life in Cobalt had represented a multicultural and multiracial frontier that existed outside the social norms of established central Canada at the time. After the fire, the local newspaper warned readers against helping “foreigners” who had “fat bank accounts” and were engaging in “trickery” to get food and bedding.13 The editorialist opined that the people who really needed the aid were too proud and self-reliant to ask for it.  In the days following the fire, the local newspaper even recast local white settlers who were seen looting shops as concerned citizens attempting to help beleaguered store owners get their supplies out of harm’s way. The only perpetrators charged by the police were either Black or immigrant. The real targets of the backlash, however, were Cobalt’s Chinese residents, who were blamed for starting the fire.

 

The trauma of the 1909 fire had left two thousand people homeless and, in many cases, destitute. Yet the drive to maximize production in the mines continued without pause. Men whose families were left with only the clothes on their backs were expected to report to work the day after the fire. The homeless found space on the floors of already overcrowded houses or in the growing tent city that had replaced the tightly knit streets of the Foreign Quarter. People living in the tents did not have access to any clean water. Fresh water was sold from a water wagon that charged an exorbitant fifty cents a gallon. Another cost was charged for the horse and wagon that hauled a large slop box to remove the human waste from the outdoor toilets. Unwilling or unable to pay these fees, many of the displaced families took their chances with pails of water from local streams and creeks. The typhoid bacterium was ever-present in both Cobalt and Haileybury, but in the dog days of summer, with thousands living in makeshift tents, the typhoid threat metastasized into a major crisis.

 

By late July, Annie Saunders’s hospital was filling up with typhoid patients; it was soon overcrowded, and a tent was added to the property. This too filled in no time, and more tents were added. In one three-day period, twenty-three new cases of fever were admitted. The hospital’s patient list continued to rise from fifty to seventy to eighty to one hundred cases. The nurses were overworked and started to fall sick themselves.  And then people began to die.  Yet even as people were dying in disturbing numbers, the town remained focused on peddling the myth of Cobalt as an excellent place for investment. For the first month of the outbreak, coverage of the epidemic was kept off the front page of the newspaper in favour of sporting schemes, mining ventures, and vaudeville extravaganzas. When health officials put up posters warning people of the dangers of typhoid and the steps required to limit its spread, town officials went through the town tearing them down.

 

The town council turned down an offer of clean water and hospital support from neighboring New Liskeard, and publicly attacked a local minister who called on the community to seek outside help.

At the mines, the managers refused to put toilet facilities on site because they didn’t want the workers leaving their posts. As a result, miners regularly defecated in the tunnels, where the feces mixed with water that seeped through the cracks in the rock. The men then drank the contaminated water, thus spreading the sickness among an otherwise young and healthy working population.

 

The decision to deny non-miners, women, and children hospital access further exacerbated the health catastrophe unfolding in the community. Seriously ill family members were often unable to obtain proper medical services. The number of sick continued to spiral, with more than six hundred residents falling ill by mid-September. The town responded by hiring nurses from across Ontario — seven at first, but this number soon grew to twenty-five. By September 20, 1909, the town was working on a plan to bring one hundred nurses to Cobalt.

 

She warned the authorities that these people needed access to hospital treatment. Meanwhile, Miss Heron had discovered a young mother with her newborn, both suffering from typhoid. She wanted them both moved to the hospital, but this wasn’t allowed. The women told the local media that the situation in Cobalt was “nothing short of manslaughter. Many of the nurses became sick from overwork. The local paper noted that a plea for help from the Victorian Order of Nurses from Ottawa was turned down because the von had no nurses to spare. This may have had to do with the town refusing to pay the nurses proper wages. The image of nurses being cheated out of wages in a land of immense silver wealth resulted in accusations that the town was “too mean to live.” The nurse who’d spoken to the paper asserted, “The truth is that Cobalt is just plain greedy. It wanted the rest of Ontario to bear the expenses of cleaning up the town and now it wants to half-pay the brave nurses who helped it out of a hole.

 

Ben Wallace Hughes, the editor of the Daily Nugget, chose to respond to these charges, but he did not point out that this unprecedented medical crisis was taking place in a community that had been victimized by the unfair policies of the provincial government and the mine owners. Instead, he opted to dismiss the credibility of the nurse as the “hysterical wail of a disgruntled female.

 

The battle to defeat the epidemic was led by the front-line nurses and the provincial health inspectors who arrived in the community in early September 1909. They found themselves in a serious fight with local businessmen, politicians, and even doctors who did not want the clean-up of the town to impede the mining boom that had been moving like a juggernaut.

 

Mine owners continued to fight with the town over the sewage and mine effluent pouring into downtown. The Coniagas insisted that if a sewage drain was installed, the company retain the right to blow it up if it interfered with operations.

 

Provincial health inspector Dr. R. W. Bell was appalled that families who lived in the shacks on mine properties were dumping their human and household waste in abandoned mine pits because there was no proper municipal infrastructure. He shut down more than thirty-two contaminated wells, and a polluted spring that was the sole source of drinking water for more than six hundred people. Dr. Bell noted a similar disregard for public safety in the local beer parlors, where dirty glasses were washed with lake water, a known major source of bacteria that was also badly polluted with cyanide, arsenic, and other chemicals.

 

Despite his drive to contain the epidemic, Dr. Bell continued to face serious resistance. The local newspaper noted that Bell “bitterly complains of the passive indifference of the local health board who have done nothing so far to aid in the immediate task of cleaning up the town.” He threatened the health board with criminal charges to get them to take responsibility for ensuring local health codes were followed. Bell also issued a public threat that the town doctors would be charged with criminal negligence if they did not begin to report on the number of sick cases and the possible origins of polluted water sources.

 

The Daily Nugget stated that more than 800 people left the Cobalt region to get treatment in hospitals in Southern Ontario. The hierarchy is clear: Those with money were able to obtain treatment at proper hospitals outside the region. Those who worked for the mines were provided with the best treatment that was available in a rough-and-ready frontier camp. Women, children, immigrants, and the poor were left to suffer in houses or tents lacking the most basic sanitation. And while the sickness of Anglo settlers and workers was covered in the newspaper, the deaths of immigrants usually weren’t. No tally was ever made of the many Indigenous people from the neighboring reserves who died from typhoid,

 

In Cobalt, news of the outbreak of the war was greeted with a great deal more ambivalence. Only 19% of the population in the town was of British descent, and this number would drop to 14 percent by the war’s end. The community’s large Francophone population was not nearly as enthusiastic about the coming war. Moreover, there were many immigrant workers from Eastern and Central Europe who had deep reservations about a war in which they would be classified as “enemies.

 

Prior to August 1914, little thought was given to the national origins of the men who did the hard grunt labor underground. The mine owners needed men willing to shovel heavy rock in the cramped, cold, and wet darkness of a blasted-out silver stope. However, few Canadian miners were willing to put up with the abusive conditions, so the owners preferred hiring men from villages in Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. It made for a diverse workforce, but the mine captains weren’t interested in the differences in language, culture, or politics — the men were lumped together as “bohunks,” “ukes,” or “dagoes. But after war was declared, the only thing that mattered was whether these workers came from homelands that were under the control of Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These men became enemy aliens, targeted for arrest, violence, or firing.

 

Zealously patriotic members of the Anglo-Protestant community demanded the mass firings of all “enemy” workers from the mines. In response, the mines began to lay off foreign workers. The situation was complicated by the fact that there was a multitude of ethnic minorities who had no political allegiance to the Central powers. The Galicians, Ruthenians, Czechs, and Ukrainians had little in common with the aims of the Austrian aristocracy. Syrians who escaped the repression of the Ottoman Empire were now being identified as enemy Turks.

 

In Cobalt, the town kept a list of the four hundred foreign-born men who were unable to work as a result of the blacklists. They feared that the numbers would dramatically rise as more firings took place. Foreign workers faced further restrictions when the federal government issued an order making it illegal for them to have access to dynamite. The use of such blasting materials was essential for underground miners. Some of the mines chose to ignore the rule, despite the threat of a $500 fine. But when the Daily Nugget called out mine management demanding to know why these wartime regulations were being disregarded, more waves of firings resulted. The unemployed foreign workers faced eviction from their boarding houses and were unable to buy food.

 

By fall, the loss of so many workers to the war and to mass firings created serious economic problems for the mines and lumber camps. In September, there were only five workers left out of eight-five at the Keeley Mine, which was forced to close.  Members of foreign-born communities attempted to prove their loyalty. Local Jewish and Syrian families raised money for the war effort. Polish workers formed patriotic drill groups to prove their opposition to the German authorities that controlled their homeland; however, this only made them seem more suspect as people thought they were practicing for a potential armed uprising. Even Polish workers who tried to sign up for the war were rejected, because they were seen as a foreign threat.

 

To Reverend Byrnes, the cultural conflict on the home front was part of the Great War for civilization being fought in Europe. He described the influx of Francophone Catholics as if they were enemy Germans storming the trenches of British Canada: “That the French of Quebec have come over the parapet into New Ontario and the West everyone knows. That they are endeavoring to take our fortifications of educational and religious liberty.

 

Arrests of foreign men had begun in 1914, but by 1915 a national policy was in place to deal with those considered politically or socially problematic. Nearly 9,000 people, including some women and children, were interned in prison camps across the country. Another 88,000 were forced to register as declared enemy “aliens,” a status that subjected them to arbitrary arrest or harassment. The vast majority were Ukrainian, Polish, or Romanian.

 

The “enemy aliens” in Northern Ontario were incarcerated in a prison camp outside Kapuskasing (360 kilometers north of Cobalt). This camp was notable for the contingent of Syrian-born men from Cobalt who were interned with the large population of Eastern European inmates. The conditions were brutal, and the location was no accident. The war allowed the government to imprison the same demographic of workers that had been badly mistreated in the railway camps that pushed Ontario’s claim on the land farther northwards, to continue the work of establishing the settler state in the black spruce forests near Kapuskasing. The 1,200 men held in the camp were forced to do grueling manual labor clearing an isolated section of bush for a government farm.

 

The imprisonment and abuse of foreign workers who came from countries controlled by the Central Powers was in stark contrast to the treatment of capitalist mining companies that had widespread industrial connections to Germany. In the days immediately prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the Coniagas Mine management was pushing hard to secure sales in Munich for cobalt and nickel products that were essential for steel production in the German war economy.

 

The neighboring nickel-mining region of Sudbury had amassed huge contracts with Germany, as nickel was an essential element in the production of shells, battleships, and other steel weaponry.

 

In 1916, it was publicly reported that shiploads of Canadian nickel were being transported to help the German war effort through International Nickel’s New Jersey operation, which was loading the nickel onto the German submarine Deutschland. There was a huge outcry in Canada when the country learned that the massive casualties it was suffering were caused by shells made with Canadian nickel. The revelation that these Canadian resources were controlled by a U.S. monopoly aiding the German war effort led for calls to expropriate the Sudbury mines. Yet the Canadian government instead chose to accept a grudging offer from International Nickel to build a refinery in Canada, and when the United States entered the war Inco suspended their sales to Germany.

 

Although foreign-born workers were demonized and imprisoned, no corporate leaders received similar treatment for aiding the German war effort.

 

Meanwhile, rampant inflation made it very difficult for the families of the North. A bag of potatoes that had cost seventy-five cents was now eight dollars, yet at the same time, the mine owners were making record profits.

 

In 1916, the Cobalt Miners’ Union announced their intention to go on strike. The British Treasury was so alarmed that a representative of the British government wrote to the Canadian High Commissioner asking for the immediate intervention of Prime Minister Robert Borden

 

The need for silver coin to pay the soldiers was as real for the British government as it had been for the Roman Empire. They were facing enormous pressure to be able to cover the costs of having millions in uniform.

 

Although no one knew it at the time, the 1916 Labor Day event represented the last flicker of the adventurous spirit that had defined the prewar Cobalt silver rush. Things would never be the same. The push to maximize wartime profits — along with the shortage of workers and supplies — created a simple equation for the mine owners. As a result, they focused on stripping the mines of the easily accessible high-grade veins, and abandoned the costlier work of exploring and developing the lower-grade ores.

 

The war ended, and millions of soldiers were demobilized to war-weary nations around the world. Soldiers returned to countries that had profoundly changed while they had been away. And the men had changed as well. Long gone were the idealistic young citizen soldiers of 1914–15. The survivors were hardened and ready to demand what was rightfully theirs. Across the globe, 1919 was a fever year of strikes, revolution, and violence.

 

On May 15, 1919, over 30,000 workers in Winnipeg walked out of the factories, shops, and public services, in a general strike that shut the city down. The strike electrified the labor movement across the country, and sympathy strikes broke out in Calgary, Edmonton, and among the miners in the Crowsnest Pass. Many returned soldiers and local clergy members participated in the general strike, but the establishment portrayed the movement as a “Bolshevik” attack on British values. Police who refused to attack strikers were fired.

 

Winnipeg was the watershed moment for Canadian labor radicalism, but it was also the beginning of a huge backlash. The presence of numerous foreign-born strikers fed the paranoia of the times, and there was widespread suspicion of the multicultural reality that was taking root in many parts of the country. Foreign-born workers were seen as a threat politically, culturally, and racially. The Canadian establishment was determined that postwar Canada was going to be militantly Anglo-Saxon and anti-immigrant, and it fanned the flames of race hatred.

 

The Borden government responded to the call for the deportation of foreign “radicals” with arrests, incarcerations, and deportations of immigrant workers attempting to organize in the country’s industrial outposts. They also transformed the wartime internment camp at Kapuskasing into a holding center for political dissidents.

 

Cobalt miners attended rallies and raised money for the imprisoned Eastern European leaders of the Winnipeg general strike. This class and ethnic solidarity is striking because, by 1919, the presence of any mine workers who were not from Canada or the British Isles was portrayed as a direct attack on the sacrifice of the veterans. The Northern Miner put it bluntly: “You haven’t done your duty until you have rid every alien of his job if a Canadian applies for it. Fire the Reds! Keep the north white!

 

Against this backdrop of ethnic strife and economic uncertainty, the Cobalt Miners’ Union began preparing for a showdown with the silver bosses. The miners were not only demanding better wages; they were also fed up with long-standing predatory policies by which the owners maintained control over their very lives. The region had just come through two waves of a devastating influenza pandemic, and the miners blamed the policy of denying sick women and children access to the hospital for the unnecessary deaths of many in the community. They had been pleading for years for the hospital to establish some emergency beds for children.

 

The mine owners refused to meet the government representatives who were sent in to find a solution. Attempts by the town council to bring the mine owners to the table were also unsuccessful.7 In language that played into the political paranoia of the time, the mine owners claimed that the union was a front for radical subversives with a record of “intimidation, incendiarism and murder.

 

As it prepared for a confrontation with the owners, the miners’ union faced serious internal conflicts. Without a mandatory system for collecting union dues from the workers, the union organizers were forced to collect weekly voluntary dues from their members. But the union’s traditional strong foundation of worker solidarity had been deeply shaken by the war and the subsequent waves of influenza. “A Mine Local that could claim a membership of 2,000 in spring of 1916 had less than 500 members in the spring of 1919 as the Local girded for what would be its final battle with the Cobalt silver barons,

 

The union was also struggling to rebuild a sense of class consciousness among the returning soldiers. Many were former members of the Cobalt Miners’ Union, but their class solidarity had been reshaped by their experiences in the trenches. They now expressed their identity through their membership in the Great War Veterans’ Association (gwva), which played a key role as a reactionary force in labor battles across the country. The big question in Cobalt was whether the veterans would support the working class or the mine owners.

 

To maintain solidarity, the union passed a motion outlawing the use of derogatory ethnic terms by any union member. At a fiery meeting, organizer Jim McGuire made it clear to his disgruntled membership that he was willing to defend the principle of respect for immigrant workers with his fists if necessary.

 

The lessons of 1919 were certainly not forgotten in the immigrant neighborhoods of the new mining towns that emerged in the following years. The First World War had taught an especially hard lesson to the Ukrainian Canadians, who learned to downplay their ethnic affiliations and identity. Both the Ukrainian and Finnish communities in the northern mining towns faced regular waves of political repression and firings. Prejudices against Eastern Europeans remained so strong that newly arrived immigrants were sometimes told by compatriots to go to the local graveyard to assume an English name, to improve their chances of getting hired.

 

By providing housing so that men could bring their families into the community, Hollinger Mine changed the fundamental social dynamic of what had so recently been raw frontier. The Hollinger town site was a deliberate experiment in social control. Every fifth house was home to a shift boss, which allowed the company to maintain a presence within the lives of its workers, both on and off the job.6 Kerry Abel writes that the hierarchical divisions of the industrial mine operation were replicated within the social life of the community, and served as a subtle bulwark against worker-based social organizing: “Company housing became in part a divisive force. ‘Properties’ located in proximity to the plant meant that people lived and worked in the same circle . . . Your ‘community’ was first and foremost the group with whom you, your husband, or your father worked and who lived around you. . . . Even the recreational patterns encouraged you to play in the neighborhood or to cheer on the company team (and to see the opponents from just down the road as the ‘other’).

 

The companies invested in basic services to maintain social peace, and in return the government offered them extremely low taxation rates. Government tax policy came in two key forms: The first was a low tax regime with multiple write-offs that made the mining regions of the North home to some of the lowest tax rates in the world.9 The second was the government decision to deny mining towns the right to tax any of the non-renewable wealth coming from the ground.

 

The effect on northern development was immense. From the days of Cobalt until today, mining communities have generated enormous wealth but have suffered from chronically underfunded infrastructure. Social development has long lagged behind other parts of the country. Lacking the ability to establish a fair taxation system has made it difficult for resource-based towns to create diversified economies. They were established as company towns, and government tax policies ensured they remain in that subordinate position.

 

The northern regions of provinces have been rendered into internal colonies, their resources deemed to be available primarily for the benefit of non-Natives in the South, and with comparatively little thought given to the long-term prospects of northern society. The hinterland is littered with towns like Cobalt — communities that were built to serve an enormously profitable mine or mill, and then suffered the shocks of shutdown when the resource wealth moved elsewhere.

 

Today, a hardrock miner is a high-paid professional protected by some of the best health and safety standards in the world. Yet in the twenty-first century, northern mayors often sound as frustrated as the first municipal leaders of Cobalt did. One reason is that, a century later, the mining industry continues to be taxed at a much lower rate than other industries. The mining lobby has successfully argued that, since the odds against finding a productive mine are so high, tax breaks are required to ensure the ongoing development of new mine assets. But hidden behind the marginal tax rates that average between 10 and 12 percent across the provinces are an enormous trove of write-offs, flow-through calculations, capital depreciations, and the ability to carry forward losses for upwards of twenty years. This gives corporate miners an extraordinary tax advantage.

 

Even more extraordinary is the fact that in twenty-first-century Canada, the royalty rate paid by mining companies for the exploitation of valuable minerals remains a veritable state secret.

 

Celli estimated that, after tax write-offs, mining companies in Ontario pay as little as 1.5 percent to the province for the billions they take from the ground.17 Other investigations suggest that the mining industry pays even less. An investigation by The Narwhal reported that in 2017 Detour Gold paid just 0.5 percent on the value of the gold taken from its Northern Ontario operation.

 

This seal of secrecy over royalties is unique to the hardrock mining sector. Provincial governments have clear and straightforward pricing on royalty rates for aggregate, salt, and quarry mining. The stumpage fee for trees cut on Crown lands is a matter of public record. But the secrecy around hardrock mining shields corporations from what many would see as a reasonable level of public scrutiny over the exploitation of public resources.

 

For their part, the industry will point out that companies like De Beers create a massive economic boost for northern communities. This is certainly true. The mines pay high wages and procure enormous quantities of resources — including building supplies, steel, electrical, catering, and other provisions — for their fly-in camp operations. But the amount of money the people of Canada receive in exchange for exploiting finite and non-renewable public resources is surprisingly small.

 

between 2009 and 2014, Ontario’s main nickel, copper, and gold producers paid mine royalties equivalent to parking fines collected by the City of Toronto. The province received millions in royalties, but when the numerous tax breaks and corporate refunds were factored in, the actual amount shrunk to little more than $90,000. Toronto’s parking fees, by contrast, came it at just over $88,000.

 

While a low tax regime hampered development in the northern hinterland, its positive impact on the financial heartland was extraordinary. Throughout the twentieth century, company towns fed the growing number of office towers along Toronto’s King and Bay streets. In the 1970s and ’80s, many of these corporations shifted their investments to the international mining scene.

 

The other clear trajectory has been the increasingly dominant role of Toronto. What began as deals in the lobby of the King Edward Hotel has morphed into a massive global presence. When it comes to the financing of new resource projects, all roads lead to Toronto,

 

Every spring, mining delegations from around the world descend on the city for the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (pdac) conference, the largest event of its kind in the world. The convention began in the 1930s in the ballroom of the King Edward Hotel. Today, it is a global event featuring a seemingly endless array of booths selling everything from mining boots and helicopter services to jungle properties in Asia, Africa, and South America. But it’s in the hospitality suites, amid the free drinks and high-quality cuisine, that the serious schmoozing is done to sell the next El Dorado.

 

The success of Toronto and the Canadian industry is rooted in regulatory protections that were first developed in the Cobalt stock boom, and then were updated and expanded. So effective are those incentives that Canada has become the favoured location for the head offices of international mining enterprises. Resource companies registered in Canada control 7,800 mining properties in almost one hundred countries around the world with assets worth more than $260 billion.

 

In Imperial Canada Inc., Alain Deneault and William Sacher write that the Canadian mining advantage is directly related to an industry that was built from a colonial model of land exploitation: “What is specifically Canadian is the fact that practices related to the development of the mining industry, which took place under colonial conditions in Canada, have been exported abroad. . . . Now they [Canadian mining companies] claim for themselves, wherever they go — in Africa, Asia, Latin America, or elsewhere — the same extralegal status from which they profited so outrageously in their original domestic colonial environment.

 

The government is looking to not only export the immense skills of the resource sector, but also promote the regulatory tool box that has made it such an immensely profitable industry in Canada. Multiple government agencies are tasked with the job of supporting the country’s natural resource sector to promote this model abroad. This international outreach includes the departments of Natural Resources Canada, Global Affairs Canada, the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (dfatd), the Canadian International Development Agency (cida), and Export Development Canada. Little wonder that, with this kind of political muscle, Canada has become a superpower in the world of international resource extraction.

 

Canadian resource companies have found themselves embroiled in some of the most politically destabilized, impoverished, and corrupt regions in the world. Canadian operations in numerous jurisdictions have been accused of a staggeringly long list of crimes in the pursuit of resource profits, including violence, intimidation, and environmental devastation. The social conflict that existed in the early days of Cobalt has been magnified a thousandfold

 

The practice of rape as a corporate tool used to break Indigenous resistance on the land has a long and dark history in the “settlement” of frontier. In The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (mmiwg), released in June 2019, an entire chapter was dedicated to the problem of sexual violence connected to industrial mining and oil and gas operations in northern Canada. The commissioners of the report quoted Melina Laboucan-Massimo of the Lubicon Cree, on the relationship between the rape of natural resources and the rape of Indigenous women: “The industrial system of resource extraction in Canada is predicated on . . . the raping and pillaging of Mother Earth as well as violence against women. The two are inextricably linked. With the expansion of extractive industries, not only do we see desecration of the land, we see an increase in violence against women. Rampant sexual violence against women and a variety of social ills result from the influx of transient workers in and around workers’ camps.

The fight of some nations to get a fair share of their resource revenue has meant that there are Canadian resource companies that pay much higher taxes abroad than they do in Canada. The Narwhal reports that Barrick pays $503 in royalties for every ounce of gold it mines in the Dominican Republic, but only $73 per ounce in Canada. Chevron pays seven times the tax on oil projects in Indonesia as they do in Canada. Analysis by The Guardian explains this disparity as indicative of the “tax haven” Canada offers to resource giants.

It’s been more than a hundred years since the Cobalt silver boom. The town was largely forgotten for most of that century. This time the prospectors are not looking for silver, but for the ever-elusive metal cobalt. This isn’t the first time the mining crews have come back to Cobalt. From the 1950s through to the ’80s, local mines were reopened to exploit interest in the previously overlooked cobalt deposits. In those years, cobalt had many industrial uses, but it was promoted as the miracle metal because of its role in Cobalt-60 radiation therapy, a technology that revolutionized cancer treatment in the 1950s. The media dubbed this technology the Cobalt “bomb,” which was highly ironic because the miracle metal revealed a much darker side during the nuclear arms race. Scientists realized that if they “salted” a nuclear bomb with cobalt, it would create a doomsday device.

Those who studied the proposal concluded that the effects of a radioactive cobalt bomb would be so overwhelming for the planet that the bomb was never developed. Elon Musk has stated his desire to rid his Tesla batteries of cobalt. However, this is a difficult goal to reach. Batteries that contain less cobalt remain at risk of overheating and causing combustion.