Greenland Calls - Part 3 The Mine

The Black Angel deposit was lead/zinc, discovered in the early part of the 20th century but not put into production until the 1970's.  Initial mine development was done by JS Redpath, who maintained a presence at the mine over most of its life due to the great work done in the early days to excavate a portal on the side of a sheer rock cliff about 2,000 ft above the ocean.  An ice cap covered the top of the mountain containing the deposit, and permafrost extended deep into the mountain.  Because of this the mine was quite dry and cold.  Air temperature inside the mine was normally around -1C, so normal water would be frozen.  As a result, the mine used salt water for normal mine operations.  Water was constantly hoisted up to the mine in large containers to replace water lost to evaporation or to the ore handling system.  The photo below shows the outline of the Black Angel on the mountain with the camp in the foreground.

In our track drift we used salt water for muckpile washing and for drilling.  Because of its corrosiveness we had special jacklegs made by Joy to resist rusting from the salt.  They were much heavier than normal jacklegs, but they were impressive drills with unequalled power for those days.  The drift itself was 3.2 by 3.5 meters in area, the largest track drift I had ever worked in.  We used an Eimco 25 muck machine to load blasted waste into 10 tonne granby style cars that were hauled to the portal where they would be dumped over the edge of the mountain and into the ocean.  Quite a sight to watch it from the top looking down!  Air and water pipes were galvanized to resist corrosion.  Both pipe and rail were 6 meters long, which was exactly the length of two full rounds.  This meant that if you were on track when you started you would be on track for your entire four month rotation unless someone missed their round....something that never happened.  And if you were on track then your crosshift did the pipe installation, and they stayed on pipe for their entire rotation.



The main mine infrastructure was below the orebody.  Ramps were used to access ore zones, where room and pillar was the main mining method.  Ore was sent through raises to a tram system and hauled to a crusher before being loaded into 50 tonne skips and lowered to a storage bin next to the mill, which was located near the camp.  Concentrate would be stored onsite until spring breakup, when it was shipped to smelters in Europe.  All in all it was a very efficient operation.  Most of the mine employees were Danes, Greenlanders or Swedes.  They were supported by contractors like Redpath for specialized work, such as the drift we were driving and cable tram maintenance.

Located near the portal was a well equipped lunch room/refuge station where everyone received a hot lunch brought up from the camp.  The drift crew often missed lunch due to our location at the extreme opposite end of the mine, but we had a small heated workshop where we would sometimes visit for a quick lunch.  It was manned by a Redpath mechanic who brought up fresh Danish pastry for the drift crews every day.  His name was Bernie Scholtz, (seen below) a German by birth who lived in North Bay and had worked for Redpath for many years.  His main job was to keep us supplied with operating jacklegs, and to maintain our Eimco 25 as needed.

I stayed at the Black Angel for 120 days, arriving March 15, 1975 and leaving July 15th.  (My birthday)  I have a memory of earning about $16,000 over that time, or about $4,000 per month.  That was pretty good money for those times, and with nothing to spend it on it was all in the bank when I returned to Canada.  Over that time we advanced the drift about 2,000 ft.  It had already been driven about the same distance when I arrived, so there was still about 1,000 ft remaining when I left.  I always intended to go back, and I almost went in 1976, but it didn't happen.  I look back on my time there with fondness.  I wish I could go back to visit again but I know it will never happen.

Greenland Calls - Part 2 The Camp

Early Black Angel development (around 1969) was done from a ship anchored to the shore.  The ship, the CD Howe was long gone by the time I arrived.  It had been replaced by three large two story bunkhouses for the single miners and some small apartment like accommodations for married senior staff.  Company employees had single rooms but for the Redpath guys were were two to a room, with a set of bunk beds along one wall and a small desk at the end.  Washing facilities were down the hall, near the middle of the bunkhouse.  The company men used the wash rooms after shift but the Redpath guys used the dry showers.

The kitchen was similar to most camp kitchens, with a number of long tables with chairs facing opposite each other across the tables.  The caterer was a company called DAC (Danish Arctic Contractors) who cleaned the bunkhouses and provided meals.  The food naturally had a strong Scandinavian flavour.  In addition to the usual hot meals there was a large table stocked with all manner of seafood edibles.  At the end of the table was a large bowl of raw hamburger and a bowl of fresh eggs.  The Danes liked to take an ice cream scoop of hamburger and crack an egg over it.  It definitely wasn't fully appreciated by the Redpath miners.  To accommodate both shifts the kitchen was set up for breakfast and dinner at the same time on both shifts.  You could get up in the morning (or evening) and have a full dinner or a full breakfast, whichever you wished.

There was a small bar in a building adjacent to the kitchen.  It also operated on two shifts, so you could have your meal after night shift and go for a few beers if you wished.  Bar hours were limited to only a couple of hours per day, but it was enough time if you really wanted to get drunk.  Carlsberg and Tuberg were the local beers but I never developed a taste for them.  One day a ship whose last port of call was Halifax arrived so all the Canadians traded cases of Carlsberg for Schooner beer and both groups were happy.  One night one of my drift partners got so drunk that when the bar closed he fell off a walkway and hit his head on the rocks below, causing a large gash and a concussion.  He had to be flown out for medical treatment.  He eventually went back to Canada to recover.  On another occasion we had an arm wrestling contest that was finally won by one of the Greenlanders.  He was a tall skinny fellow with arms of steel. 

The Greenlanders were tough people, which I guess goes without saying in a land where 99% of it is covered with ice.  The tall skinny guy was named Ule, and he had an older brother Jonas, who was an elected member of the Greenland assembly.  Jonas had relatives on Baffin Island, so one winter he travelled 300 miles over the ice to see his cousins and then returned to Greenland.  I don't think he had to clear customs.  

One day the mine decided to hold a dogsled race, with a shotgun for first prize.  About 24 hours before race day the teams began to arrive from all around.  By race time there were several dozen teams of ten or twelve dogs per team.  The dogs were hungry and would kill and eat each other if given a chance.  But when the race started they were all business, as a couple of dozen teams took off across the ice towards the open ocean.  Eventually they returned and the winner claimed his prize.  Then they all went back home.

The Dry and cable hoist (up to the mine) building were located near sea level.  The dry was typical of Canadian mine drys, but the cable hoist (actually there were two...one for men and one for ore)  was an experience for those of us used to travelling down into the mine on a cage.  This one went up and over a large fjord to a point about 600 meters above sea level.  The ride up took about 10 or 15 minutes, and in daylight hours provided some spectacular scenery, with sheer cliff walls, glaciers calving into the fjord and ships coming and going up and down the coast.  Trips to and from the mine were restricted by wind speed.  If the wind was more than 50 km/hr the conveyances were shut down and people in the mine would be stranded until winds died down.  I think the longest wait was around 48 hours.

One of my favourite pastimes on the trip to the mine was to steal measuring sticks (H.I. sticks) out of the surveyors' pockets on the ride up.  One day, frustrated by their losses they tied the bottom of their sticks to their pants, so that when I tried to pull one out of their pocket it wouldn't come out, and I was caught in the act.  They gave me a certificate for being the best hijacker in camp, which I still have in my papers somewhere.  Decades later I discovered a Facebook site for former mine workers and I found the surveyor who I had tried to steal from.  He remembered me and we both had a good laugh again.

Communication with the outside world was difficult.  The mine had a radio telephone but the cost was prohibitive.  Internet didn't exist back then.  Some people had AM radios but they often didn't work well due to polar interference.  (Northern lights)  Newspapers arrived by helicopter two or three times per week but they were for the most part Danish and did not have Canadian news.  (I had to wait until July of that year to find out who had won the Stanley Cup.)  Occasionally a new worker would arrive from Canada with updates on national affairs. 

Greenland Calls - Part 1

In 1975 I was working in Manitouwadge at Willroy Mine, driving track drift with a friend named George Ouellette.  George heard about a job in Greenland with Canadian mining contractor JS Redpath, and decided to try it out.  He left for Greenland in January.  I contacted Redpath as well, and arranged to follow George, but a serious case of the flu interrupted my plans.  After recovering I went to another Redpath job in New Brunswick to wait until another opportunity to go to Greenland arose.  It didn't take long, and about a month later I was on my way.

At that time Greenland was a Danish possession operating more or less independently except for international relationships.  Travel was to Copenhagen and then back to Greenland via regular jet flights into an American air force base at Sondrestrom Fjiord.  From Sondrestrom one took a helicopter North to minesite at Marmorilik.  (Helicopters were used for all flights in Greenland due to lack of airfields.)

The flight to Copenhagen was uneventful, or at least I don't remember any details from that leg.  Once in Copenhagen I took a taxi to the Hotel Dan, near the airport to stay until my next flight the following day.  This was my first time outside of Canada other than a couple of forays into the USA, and it was an eye opener for a young man used to a steady diet of world affairs from the Canadian perspective.  There was no TV in my room, so to watch TV I went to the lobby where a group of visitors were gathered in a lounge area watching of all things...a hockey game!  I tried to watch but jet lag got the better of me so I went back to my room and went to bed.  It was a nice bed, single sized but without blankets.  Instead it had a large down filled comforter that quickly warmed to my body temperature as I fell asleep.  The following morning I awoke and went to the dining lounge for some breakfast.  It was continental style, but they also offered North American style, so I had bacon and eggs with toast.  After breakfast I checked out and went to find a cab back to the airport.

Outside the hotel I met two British businessmen also heading to the airport and asked them if I could go with them.  They agreed and we all got into a taxi for what we believed would be a short ride.  One of the Brits said "airport" to the driver and off we went.  It quickly became obvious to all of us that the driver wasn't taking us back along the route we had followed the previous day when we went the opposite way.  One of the Brits began commenting on how the driver we really taking us for a ride, but it had no apparent effect on the driver.  After about a half hour of driving on busy streets we arrived at the train station instead of the airport.  The driver looked at us to pay the fare, but we told him (in Engish) we wanted to go to the AIRPORT.  "Ahh!"  he said..."Lufthaven!"  "Yes!" we said...and off we went back the way we came.  Eventually we arrived at the airport where we paid the fare to the train station, but not the amount required to get us back to the airport.

The flight to Greenland was almost as long as the flight to Copenhagen.  We left at mid morning for Sondrestrom Airbase, now known as Kangerlussuaq but arrived around lunch time due to time zone changes.  It was an uneventful flight.  The plane was only half full so there were plenty of seats to stretch out and snooze if desired.  Upon arrival I checked into the only hotel with a very small room that held a shower, toilet and bed.  Once again I had a down filled comforter instead of blankets...this must have been typical Danish bedclothes back then.  The photo below shows the hotel concierge.

There was no entertainment at the hotel, but the American air base was across the runway and the NCO club accepted visitors if you could find someone to sign you in.  I did, and I spent an evening talking to American servicemen who taught me some essential rules to follow in Greenland.  The main one was to avoid calling the natives Eskimos, which is what we called them in Canada.  They preferred to be called Greenlanders because the term Eskimo was pejorative to them.  So Greenlander it was, and still is when I talk about my time there.  One of the servicemen had received his orders to return to the USA to a place he called Salt Ste Mary, of which he knew nothing.  He really meant Sault Ste Marie, so I proceeded to tell him what I knew about the border city that was about to become his new home.  After a few drinks and some entertainment from the band I headed back to my hotel.

Flights in Greenland are almost entirely by helicopter and back then at least, only when visibility was good.  Our flight was in a Sikorski SY58, a large twenty something passenger chopper loaded with mail and men for the trip to the mine.  We waited one day in Sondrestrom for weather to clear, which was a normal waiting period.  Some trips were delayed for as much as a week, with little to do to pass time, but those were the rules.  We took off at daylight.  The mine was 450 km, which was beyond the range of a helicopter, so we had to refuel at a place called Jakobshavn, also known as Ilulissat, well known to tourists as the home of the Ilulissat Glacier, one of the most spectacular calving glaciers in all the world.  City sized icebergs regularly calve off into the ocean in chilling demonstrations of raw power.  But my stop here was just for refuelling, so no chance to see the glacier in action.  After about an hour on the ground we took off again heading North along the coast to our destination, flying barely above the sheer 2,000 ft high cliffs rising out of the ocean.  Finally we arrived at the mine where men and mail were quickly unloaded and the helicopter was refuelled for the return trip.

In Part 2 I will describe what it was like to work at the Black Angel.

The Hemlo Court Case

I worked at the Williams Mine near Marathon Ontario from 1984 to 1991 and was lucky observe the Lac/Corona court case from the inside.  If you've ever driven Highway 17 North of Lake Superior you would have seen the Williams Headframe near the Manitouwadge turnoff.  It's still there, 40 years after David Bell first discovered gold veins in the highway rock cuts.

I won't get too deeply into the technical details of the case, but in brief, Corona sued Lac Minerals for using confidential information gained during a site visit to Corona's exploration project.  (I should note that when a junior company like Corona is looking for financing they will promote site visits where they disclose a lot of information not available to investors.)  Lac's misbehaviour was to purchase the Williams claims, adjacent to Corona's project after examining drill core and knowing that Corona was actively attempting to acquire those claims.  (Lac's behaviour was about as close to claim jumping as damn is to hell.) The case went all the way to the Supreme Court where the court decided 3/2 that Lac was in the wrong and had to return the property to Corona for the cost Lac had incurred to that point, which was about $210 million dollars.

The initial decision was handed down in 1986, on a Friday, after markets closed.  It caused pandemonium within Lac's Toronto headquarters (and at the mine) where the executive team were expecting vindication at best and loss of a portion of the mine at worst.  But it was worse than they expected..worse than their worst nightmares.  Judge Holland awarded the mine in total to Corona as compensation for Lac's misdemeanour.  Site personnel were stunned, wondering what would happen to us?  Did we still have jobs?  Would Corona show up and boot us out?  Our questions were answered by Harry Rutetzki, Lac's VP of Operations, who came to site the following Monday and met with everyone to calm the waters and provide what little information he could on the path forward in the near future.  Naturally he said Lac planned to appeal.  He offered reassurance that we would all remain in our jobs in the short term, which was reassuring for most of us who had purchased homes in Marathon and had bills to pay.  Eventually we learned that the mine would continue under Lac's management but that a trust would be set up with a  managing trio consisting of one Lac representative, one Corona and one independent to oversee and approve mine operations until the litigation was finally over.  I've forgotten who the Lac and Corona reps were but the independent person was Graham Farquarson, a highly respected mining engineer from Toronto who would eventually be involved in and expose the Bre Ex scam.  The "three wise men" as they became known to us would come to site every few months for a tour and an update, but otherwise they supported us, stayed out of local decisions and let us run the operation as best we could.

At the time of the first court decision the mine had been in production for roughly a year with ore coming from the open pit and from the "A" Zone underground.  I was responsible for "A" zone production.  The mill was processing about half its ultimate 6,000 tpd throughput with full production planned for 1988.  In the meantime a shaft was completed and off shaft development was occurring at high rates in order to begin production from the main "B" Zone orebody.  To support this we needed to spend large amounts of capital dollars for equipment and underground development.  It was up to the three wise men to approve our expenditures.  Lac had decided no further Lac treasury dollars would be spent, so we were forced to self finance from operating revenues.  Luckily the price of gold was good enough to fund the expansion but full production was delayed until late 1989.

In the interim all of the new owners wanted to visit their new property so we had plenty of visitors.  Since Teck had done the deal with Corona that Lac could have done when they first visited Corona, we saw a number of their executives.  Gordon Keevil (Teck) came with his beautiful wife.  Peter Steen, from Corona visited several times.  Peter eventually became the president of Lac shortly before it was consumed by Barrick but that was long after the court case.  Gil Leathley was manager at the Golden Giant mine but he left to work for Corona and was a frequent visitor.  Gil was a stand up guy who eventually wound up in San Francisco with Homestake.

In 1988 the Ontario Appeals Court upheld Judge Holland's original decision and we all thought the case was over.  Lac asked leave to appeal to the Supreme Court and to everyone's surprise they agreed to hear the case.  We still held out hope that Lac would prevail but the Supreme Court ruled 5/0 in Corona's favour on the issue of confidential information and 3/2 in favour of the remedy of returning the mine to Corona.  No one from Lac head office visited us to say good-bye.  Peter Allen, Lac President used the money from the court decision to buy Bond Gold, a purchase that attracted the attention of Peggy Witte, of Royal Oak, who made an offer to buy Lac.  But Barrick made a better offer, integrating Lac's operations into their own.  And Lac was no more.

By this time we knew that Teck/Corona had confidence in the mine staff and there were no plans to replace anyone except the General Manager, Paul Donaldson.  He was a long term Lac employee with retirement on his mind.  He stuck around long enough for his replacement to show up.  The replacement in the short term was Mike Lipkewich, Teck's VP of Operations.  Mike was a great guy to work with as I would learn during his months at the mine.  But he had other mines to take care of and eventually he hired Peter Rowlandson as our GM.

Looking back on that time I am grateful to have been able to work for three very different companies at the same mine.  It was a great learning experience.  When Teck/Corona took over we had about $150 million in our trust account and were up to design throughput of 6,000 tpd.  The best production year I can recall was 1990 when we produced just shy of 600,000 oz of gold.  Shortly after that, in 1991 I left Williams to begin working for Lac again at another operation.

One final story about Mike Lipkewich.  William's standard policy was for gate security to do random searches on vehicles exiting the mine.  In the Lac days this meant everyone, including the manager.  One evening, shortly after assuming command Mike was stopped at the gate by security who demanded to search his vehicle.  The next morning he related the incident to senior staff.  "What were they going to do if they found something.  Report me to the manager?" he quipped.  We all chuckled when he said the search policy no longer applied to the mine manager.

My First Mining Job - Part 3

Thompson back in 1969 was a pretty wild town.  There were two hotels...The Thompson Inn and the Burntwood Inn.  Only the Thompson Inn had a bar, and it didn't matter what day of the week it was, you had to line up outside and wait til someone left before the bouncer would let you enter.  He was a huge guy with a short fuse.  If you crossed him you would almost certainly be thrown out through the main doors, using your head to open them.  I saw him do it to one poor lad.  The Burntwood had no bar but they had a licensed restaurant where we would go once a month or so.  They advertised a 72 ounce steak dinner with all the trimmings.  If you could eat it all you got it for free.  Otherwise you paid $24, which was a huge price for a meal back then.  I know several people who tried but none who got a freebie.

The nearest town to Thompson was The Pas, about 4 hours by road, so once you were in Thompson you stayed in Thompson.  Other than work there was little to do.  Some friends and I once went north about 50 miles to a place called Rat Portage.  It was an Indian reservation in the process of moving to higher ground as Manitoba Hydro built large dams and flooded their hunting and fishing territory.  We drove around for a while and then went back to Thompson.  A few years later there was a road from Thompson to Leaf Rapids, about 100 miles further north.  I worked there briefly in 1974, but that story will have to wait til later.

I mentioned before that I was hired as a labourer at a rate of $2.97/hr.  This was considerably more than I had earned in my previous job as a warehouse worker for $2.09/hr.  The prospect for a raise in the near future loomed large thanks to union negotiations for a new contract.  Additionally, there was the rule that anyone who worked in a higher job classification for 5 straight days would get that rate permanently.  The next higher rate was $3.20/hr, paid to drillers, timbermen and motormen.

The only way to get a job permanently was to bid on it, but due to our level being a new one all the high seniority employees were attracted to it.  This meant that no permanent job on my level could be filled by someone at the bottom of the seniority list, but a temporary replacement while a regular employee was away could result in a rate increase that would be effective regardless of what job one was doing.  That's what happened next.

My first week was spent cleaning ditches with a hand shovel into a 5 ton car.  During my second week the motorman went on vacation, his switchman moved up and I became the temporary switchman.  The switchman job consisted of walking in front of the train (regardless of direction of travel) and warning people to "Watch the train."  The switchman also operated the dump wheel to empty cars, using a whistle to signal the motorman.  I still have my whistle...a shiny metal one and a plastic one as a spare.  It rests in my fishing tackle box in case I get lost on a fishing trip, but I don't think I've blown it since I left Thompson.

My next rate increase came with a newly negotiated contract where my rate went up to $3.65 per hour.  It stayed there for the rest of my 8 or 9 months with INCO as I went through pretty much every job on the level, but none were permanent.  I became a spare driller in the stopes, where I learned how to run a jackleg and stoper.  Most of the time I was rockbolting but occasionally I would be drilling to load and blast.  On one occasion, after drilling our drift round I was sent for powder.  While carrying a box of stick powder across a newly filled section of the stope I slipped on the fill surface.  The case of power flew up in the air and I was certain it was going to explode when it landed.  This was the end I thought.  But nothing happened and I picked everything up and continued on my way back to the workplace.

I spent a lot of time scaling loose rock in the stope.  It was an arm tiring exercise to hold a 10 lb bar over your head and poke at cracks in the rock for hours on end.  There was technique to learn in order to avoid injury.  One of our crew was holding a bar improperly, with the tip between his legs.  When he scaled a piece of loose it fell on the other end and drove the bar downwards towards the miner's crotch, where it nipped the end of his tallywhacker!  He went to the lunchroom to report the injury, and the story I heard was that the shift boss had him take his pants off the view the injury, and just as he was examining it another miner entered the lunchroom and saw the shift boss bending over this guy's privates.  He quickly turned and exited the lunchroom, leaving the shift boss with a problem of how to explain what he was actually doing.

Being tired of working on a level with no permanent job, and already being two thirds of the way up a 1,500 man seniority list I decided to bid on a driller job at Soab.  But I didn't get the job so I decided to leave Thompson and return home to Saskatoon.   Cominco Potash, near Vanscoy was hiring.  I applied for a job underground and was accepted in early May/1971.

My First Mining Job - Part 2

The late '60's were a time of change for mining in Canada as companies began a search for higher productivity and lower costs.  Mechanization was the main change agent, but few, if any mines of the day were designed to be mechanized.  The 1,200 level of T3 was a good example of an old mining method combined with new equipment.  The mining method was timber cut and fill with primary and secondary (pillar) stopes.  The fill was sand fill cycloned from mill tails and transported underground through a series of pipes as a slurry that would drain for days after being placed in a stope.  Primary stopes were mined upwards and pillars were mined downwards.  Drilling was all done with hand held machines...jacklegs and stopers.  Blasting was done mainly with anfo loaded with small bex loaders.  Tape fuse was the most common detonator, combined with thermolite cord for hole timing.  Mucking was done with air or electric slushers into mill holes, although 1,200 level had two scooptrams...one for each end of the level.  Ground support was extensive, consisting mostly of 8 foot rockbolts with wire mesh screen.  In some areas 21 foot extension bolts were installed to hold suspected unstable ground.  Haulage was done with battery locos on the main level from mill holes to a central ore pass connected to the 1,400 level trolley system.

As mentioned above, 1,200 level had two scooptrams.  One was a Wagner ST2 and the other was an ST3.  The scooptrams were located at opposite ends of the level, and once mining had proceeded upwards past the level the scooptrams became captive to their respective stopes.  Utilization was therefore very low, but cycle productivity received a boost from the larger and faster scooptrams compared to slushers.  Scooptrams also introduced new problems, including diesel particulate to the workplace, new procedures for handling and storage of volatiles and much more time and attention spent on ventilation.  Nowadays, after 50 years mines are moving to battery power in an attempt to clean the air and reduce CO2 emissions.

INCO took employee safety very seriously, even back then.  Each mine had a safety officer who would visit levels unannounced to review how employees were working and whether infractions of the rules had occurred.  Violators were disciplined...usually with suspension or occasionally with termination.  Accidents were tracked on a large 52 week board on surface where each supervisor had an icon shaped like a horse in a race with other supervisors' horses.  A lost time would set the horse back to the start.  A medical aid would hold the horse in place for a week.

Occupational health however was not as great a priority.  Ear protection was seldom available.  Employees were aware of how noise would affect their hearing so many, including me would use rolled up tissue paper soaked in spit and jammed into our ears to protect hearing.  Several employees had begun using ear muffs but they were not common and were viewed by most miners as being a "sissy" thing to wear.  Sanitary facilities were good.  We had a two hole chemical toilet on our level.  Unfortunately it was located near the lunch room, where frequent traffic would be able to observe who was using the facility and for how long.

There was a lunchroom, located about 200 feet from the shaft station.  Everyone was required to go there at shift start, lunch time and shift end.  The supervisor used the front section as his office and line up area.  Farther back were two rows of benches where miners sat and waited their turn for instructions.  Seniority was used to determine who sat nearest the front and woe be to the man who sat in someone else's spot.  Lunchrooms also served as refuge stations for emergencies.  Stench warning tests were conducted at least annually.

Attendance was normally 5 days per week on alternating day and afternoon shifts.  Dayshift Saturday was an additional optional shift at overtime rates for anyone who decided to attend.  INCO had an interesting absentee policy...if you missed a shift without acceptable reason you were not allowed to work on Saturday.  You could miss up to 9 consecutive shifts each quarter and remain on the payroll.  If you returned after 9 missed shifts you still had a job but you could not work that Saturday.  One man on our crew, named Art was prone to taking 9 shifts to return home somewhere in Saskatchewan for R&R.  Once, upon his return the supervisor told him if he missed again within the next three months he would be given 5 days off without pay.  Art quipped that was fine with him, as he would just go home for a week, but the supervisor quipped back that he would get every WEDNESDAY off for 5 consecutive weeks.  Art lost out on that one!

My First Mining Job - Part 1

My first mining job was with INCO in Thompson, Manitoba back in 1969.  In those days INCO was chronically short of workers.  They advertised regularly in all the major western newspapers.  In August I answered an ad in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix for labourers and was interviewed and accepted pending a medical in The Pas prior to reporting for work.

Shortly after the interview I took a passenger train from Saskatoon to The Pas, (Yes, we still had passenger trains back then.)  known as the gateway to Northern Manitoba.  There, I met up with two other INCO hires and we found a hotel room at...what else...the Gateway Hotel.  It was an older well known watering hole for locals, and a popular stopover for miners heading out of Thompson on R&R.  It was SO popular that many miners never made it any farther...blowing their savings in the hotel before returning to work until the next "vacation" at the Gateway.  As an aside...I heard the Gateway burned down a few years ago.  The fire took a lot of history with it.

We stopped in the Gateway bar for a late afternoon beer.  I ordered two glasses of draft.  They arrived and I was impressed by how dark the beer was.  I took a drink out of one glass and the darkness was still there, and that's when I realized it was on the outside of the glass and not in the beer itself.  All of us quickly switched to bottles!  

As we sat there sipping our beer a woman came rushing into the bar.  She was cursing and swearing, saying "Where is he?  Where is he?  You tell that co**sucker if I catch him I'm going to cut his balls off!"  The bartender quickly poured a glass and took it and her into the back.  We never found out who the unfortunate guy was.

After a quiet dinner and a walk around town we retired to our hotel rooms for an early bedtime.  Our rooms were on an upper floor facing the back alley, where we had a superb view of all the drunken fist fights after the bar closed.  The next morning when we awoke there were still several bodies laying in the alley amidst the mud and the blood, but no one seemed to be concerned about this.  After breakfast the three of us headed to a medical clinic where we received our pre-employment medicals along with a chit for a room in Thompson and were told to report to HR at the main office the following morning for orientation.  One of my new friends had a vehicle, a 1959 Ford and offered a ride to Thompson, which was gratefully accepted.  After buying a case of beer from the hotel off sale we headed out on the highway to Thompson, about 250 miles distant.

The road to Thompson was mainly muddy gravel, except for the final 40 or so miles, which were paved, and which were also built over frost filled muskeg.  These miles were constantly being rebuilt and repaved as they slowly sank into the watery soup upon which they were built, making for a great roller coaster ride for the final bit of travelling.  When we finally arrived at our destination we went looking for our room at one of the Polaris bunkhouses.  These were two or three story residences with single rooms for $33 per week and doubles for $28 per week.  For this princely sum you got a hot breakfast, sack lunch and hot supper each day, along with maid service to keep the rooms clean and beds made.

The following morning we trekked to INCO's main office.  It was Saturday, but they were open and ready to accept 26 new employees.  (I wondered how many they would have hired if it had been a weekday.)  While waiting for my job assignment I noticed a seniority list posted on a wall.  Top seniority was about 10 years, and of course I would join the list at the bottom.  When I left Thompson some eight months later I was already about two thirds of the way up the list thanks to the extremely high turnover.

INCO had several mines in operation, including T1, T3, Birchtree and Pipe open pit.  There were additional development projects at Soab North and Soab South, but in 1969 neither were in production and neither had any company employees.  I was assigned to T3, and told to report there the following Monday. 

T3 employed several hundred miners working three shifts, five days per week.  Day and afternoon shifts were production shifts.  Graveyard shift had a skeleton crew to to move materials from surface and replenish level supplies.  There were five active levels, 600, 800, 1,000, 1,200 and 1,400.  1,400 level was strictly a tramming level, where an electric trolley carried T3 ore over to T1 for hoisting to surface.  The lowest and newest production level was 1,200, where Wayne Lapierre was one of two production supervisors.  I was assigned to his crew and was taken underground on a four hour orientation that ended with lunch, where I was handed a shovel and shown a ditch to clean.

Our crew consisted of two stope leaders, a half dozen miners, a half dozen timbermen, a tram crew and several labourers, including me.  My wage was $2.97 per hour, which seemed like a fortune to me back then compared to my previous jobs.  Miners earned $3.23 per hour and leaders were $3.45.  The rules said anyone who worked in a job for five consecutive shifts would automatically go to the rate for that job.  After a week or so of cleaning ditches I was assigned to the tram crew, where my rate increased to $3.23 per hour.  I was in financial heaven!

Part 2 to come.