The Cobalt silver rush

Native silver found in a railway cut, which then bankrolled northern Canada

In 1903 the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway was pushing north from North Bay toward Haileybury and New Liskeard when two men supplying it with ties, Ernest Darragh and James McKinley, found silver near a small lake known as Long Lake. Later that year Tom Hébert struck a rich vein on its east shore. The ore from both was consistently high-grade, and it came laced with cobalt, a metal the geologist W. E. Logan had already found nearby in 1884. Long Lake became Cobalt Lake. In 1904, at railway Mile 104, Willet Miller, with the brothers Noah and Henry Timmins, named the place Cobalt.

The rush that followed built one of the great silver camps of the world. The McKinley-Darragh, La Rose, Nipissing and O'Brien mines opened, the Timmins brothers bought out Fred La Rose's remaining claims, and speculation in Cobalt mining stocks grew so wild on Wall Street that mounted police had to control the crowds. The town was incorporated in 1906, and by 1909 some 10,000 people lived there. In 1911, the peak year, its 34 mines produced more than 30 million ounces of silver. Because the ore lay close to the surface, men with little experience could prospect, start mining and learn as the shafts went deeper, working with wheelbarrows, pickaxes, hand steel and dynamite. Cobalt became known as the birthplace of hard rock mining in Canada, and the miners it trained moved on to find the gold of Kirkland Lake and Timmins.

Boomtown life was hard. A typhoid outbreak in 1909 killed 111 people, and later that year a fire that started in a café raced through the rubbish-choked alleys, destroying 150 buildings and leaving 3,000 homeless; firefighters had to dynamite buildings to stop it. Another fire on Victoria Day in 1977 burned 140 more. The camp's own hockey team, the Cobalt Silver Kings, played in the first NHA season in 1910.

Mining dwindled by the 1930s, revived in the 1950s and ended in the 1980s, after some 405 to 420 million ounces of silver. The town was named Ontario's Most Historic Town in 2001, and in 2002 the Cobalt Mining District became a National Historic Site of Canada. The Cobalt Mining Museum holds what it calls the world's largest display of native silver ore. The old byproduct is now the prize: with cobalt in demand for the batteries of phones and electric cars, exploration companies were back in the camp by 2017. The mines left a legacy, too, of arsenic-laced tailings in the lakes and old workings fenced off for fear of collapse.