GRANDFATHER AND THE GREAT BEAR

This paper which tells the story of the early days of Uranium mining in Canada was presented by H J M Spence at the Fourteenth International Symposium held by the Uranium Institute in London, September 1989. This particular symposium had as its theme the bicentenary of the discovery of Uranium by the German chemist Professor Klaproth in September 1789.

For almost a quarter of a century, the early history of the mining of uraniferous ores in Canada was essentially coincident with the history of a single company. That firm still exists, until very recently identifying itself with various names embracing the evocative Spanish sobriquet 'Eldorado'.

This paper will not attempt to do even a modicum of justice to Eldorado's fascinating story: for that, readers are urged to enjoy Robert Bothwell's 1984 book Eldorado ¹, which certainly deserves a place in the composite annals of Canada's history. However, I would like to address from a special, personal perspective certain events in the first half of this century which, whether connected with Eldorado or not, make up the Canadian uranium saga.

Why me?

Given that I am not at all an expert in Canadian history, and my relative youth, I may seem a presumptuous raconteur for things which transpired up to a hundred years ago. But as fate would have it, I have a unique qualification which prompted me to collect a few anecdotes on the occasion of the uranium bicentenary: for three consecutive generations my family has been associated with, and certainly you could say has profited from, uranium. This must be carefully qualified by adding the important descriptor 'in Canada', as there was also an unprofitable fourth generation involvement in England, which takes us back to the last century.

It seems that my great-grandfather, Herbert de Schmid (the family name was changed to Spence in 1916), was the victim of an uranium mine stock swindle in England in 1891. In January 1890 he purchased 50 shares in a year old company called The Uranium Mines Limited at 17 shillings and 6 pence each, only to have the company collapse in disgrace a year later. Described as a 'wretched concern' and 'an unfortunate wreck' by the curiously subjective business journal The Financial Critic, the mining firm had apparently duped investors with a bogus prospectus and by postdating the actual discovery of uranium at its Cornwall property, formerly a tin mine.² Apart from losing his investment of ?43 15s, it must have been somewhat embarrassing for great-grandfather - at the time he was a senior officer in the Devon Constabulary.

As for myself, I joined Canada's nuclear regulatory authority, the Atomic Energy Control Board (AECB), exactly 13 years ago. It was a time when the earlier misuse of by-products from radium and uranium processing had officials scratching their heads as to whether or not to move the top ten feet of the refinery town of Port Hope, Ontario, by road to a remote site 400 kilometres away. Public concern about radiation had even led to a specially marked vehicle being driven up and down the town's streets to show that the regulatory body was actually on the job.

As head of the Public Information Office, I weathered Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, as well as crises closer to home like the inconvenient dropping-in of the uranium powered Soviet satellite Cosmos 954 in the winter of 1978. It is a minor historical coincidence that this spacecraft came down not far from where uranium mining started in Canada, and where promising exploration for the element is even now underway.

My father, Neville Spence, a metallurgical engineer, retired as head of the Nuclear and Powder Metallurgy Section of Canada's Department of Energy, Mines and Resources in 1976. There, he worked on various projects involving such things as depleted uranium. From 1953 to 1956, he was employed as a metallurgist at the Chalk River Nuclear Laboratories where the concept and technology for the natural uranium fuelled Candu reactor were born. I fondly recall my three years as a pre-teenager in Deep River, the bedroom community for Chalk River, but despite a nascent interest in science I never got to see my father's place of work since at that time it still retained much of its wartime mantle of secrecy.

From a historical perspective, the key person in my family's uranium connection is my grandfather, Hugh Swaine Spence, a graduate of the Royal Saxon School of Mines (K?liche S?sische Bergakademie), who in 1910 left his home in Devon, England, to join the Canadian government's Mines Branch.

Grandfather Spence was truly a product of the 'old school' where learning by practical experience and first-hand observation was the norm. One anecdote vividly illustrates this: when I joined the AECB in 1976, the president of the Board was a mineralogist and experimental petrologist of considerable reputation, Dr Alan Prince. Early in his career he had worked for my grandfather in the Mines Branch labs. He recounted his youthful pride in reporting one day to grandfather his successful results after many hours of painstaking analysis on a previously unidentified mineral sample, only to have the older gentleman correctly name the specimen and describe where it came from after just a few moments of examining it in his hand.³

Hence, when an enterprising prospector named Gilbert Labine forwarded a few handfuls of a curious black ore to the Mines Branch for assay in 1930, grandfather was easily able to compare it to the pitchblende he'd seen as a student at the ancient Joachimstal (J?ymov) digs, not far from his alma mater in Freiburg (now in the German Democratic Republic).

Pitchblende, found and lost

The first discovery of pitchblende in Canada is credited to Captain Benjamin Stannard, skipper of a schooner that worked the fur trade on Lake Superior in the 1840s. Strangely for a discovery by a ship's captain, the location of the find was never precisely stated, and efforts to find the 'lost' Stannard occurrence led indirectly to discoveries in the Blind River (Elliot Lake) area some 100 years later.⁴

Various uraniferous deposits were identified in Canada in the first quarter of this century, but none were developed. The extensive uranium deposits in the Wilberforce-Bancroft area of Ontario were discovered by my grandfather in 1922.⁵ (In recognition of his contributions to mineralogy, a newly discovered rare-earth borosilicate he collected in the same area in 1934 was given the name Spencite in 1961.⁶ )

What was later to intrigue the world in two incarnations - initially as a source of radium, and then of uranium - was first scientifically observed in Canada on a cold and snowy Friday, 24 August 1900. During what he described as a nearly disastrous field trip, Charles Camsell of the Geological Survey of Canada noted 'evidences of iron, copper, uranium and cobalt' in Echo Bay off McTavish Arm on Great Bear Lake.¹

But 30 years were to pass before technology and circumstance would allow the promise of this discovery to be pursued. Even in 1912, samples from the Great Bear of pure silver and copper, and 'a peculiar black substance that looked like dull-coloured coal tar', brought back by an English adventurer, Jack Hornby, had to be treated as mere curiosities. In a reflective interview in 1932, Colonel James K Cornwall, a former Member of Parliament who had chipped in $500 for Hornby's grubstake 20 years before, explained that, 'We all looked at the samples and agreed they were wonderful. But so was the aurora borealis; we couldn't do much with either.'⁷

Great Bear Lake is the largest lake completely within Canada, and the fourth largest in North America. Situated in a vast, inhospitable land astride the Arctic Circle, its waters are just above freezing at the best of times, and they develop a two-metre-thick coating of ice in the dead of winter, which lasts from about September to June. Darkness pervades December and January as the sun remains below the horizon, while for most of June and July the sun never sets. Flies and mosquitoes are the prevalent form of summer life, sufficiently maddening at times to drive some people to leave the territory.⁷ In the early days the only way to get there in winter was to walk, and to canoe in summer - an arduous trek via lakes, rivers and portages that took at least a month. Sustenance in the form of fresh meat was a seasonal thing, depending on the migration patterns of the caribou.¹

The area's remoteness and climate called for a major technological development before its mineral riches could be tapped. The answer was the aeroplane, which considerably improved in the years after the First World War. They were flown by the justifiably famous 'bush pilots', many of whom had acquired their initial skills as young men at war. In the 1920s and 1930s, while the airmen of other countries were wing-walking, barnstorming and offering short rides at autumn fairs, or pursuing speed for its own sake in Schneider Cup races, Canadian flyers were pioneering commercial aviation.⁸

Spotted from the air

Gilbert Labine, a partner with his brother and others in a relatively flush but young and momentarily mineless mining firm called Eldorado Gold Mines Limited, spotted the site of what was to become Canada's first uranium mine from the air in 1929. Following up on a tip from a fur trapper and other rumours, characteristic of the times, he was looking mainly for silver, and was attracted by cobalt bloom and other coloured stains, which were easily visible from the aircraft while overflying the Great Bear area.¹

He returned by air in the spring of 1930 with a partner and 730 kilograms of supplies, including a canvas sectional canoe. They proceeded to drag this immense load over the ice for 80 kilometres or more, sometimes in water up to their knees, prospecting along the way.⁹ The sled they had fashioned was equipped with a sail so that at times the wind became a third partner.¹⁰

On 16 May 1930, a day when his partner remained in their base camp on Echo Bay to recover from snowblindness, Labine discovered pitchblende, as well as the silver he was seeking, at what was to become Port Radium on Labine Point.¹⁰ He and his partner were joined that summer by another Eldorado party that made the trip to the Great Bear by boat.

Initial confirmation of what Labine had found - ore containing up to 53 per cent uranium oxide - came by radio in August following analysis in Toronto of hand-picked samples flown out from the site by a rival firm. The message was in code, which was common in the mining industry of the day, but which could not disguise the word 'uranium'.⁸ The use of a common radio service by prospectors in the area meant it was not long before others also became very interested in the potential of the Great Bear.

The prize, of course, was radium, a gram of which was then valued at more than 50 times the average Canadian's annual income. This miracle substance had captured the fancy of the world for its proven use in the battle against cancer. We shudder today in the knowledge that it was also touted for use in treating such things as birthmarks, eczema, ringworm, psoriasis, acne, warts and neuralgia, and was even claimed 'to cause the menopause to be prompt and not distressing'.⁹

There followed a blitz of blanket claim-staking in the area, in what one commentator called the world's first big airplane mining rush. It was a rich man's rush due to the high cost of flight.⁷

Grandfather visited the site in August and September 1931 and was much impressed, actually finding a pitchblende vein himself.¹¹ As he was a government official, his reports on Labine's find legitimized the discovery and led to worldwide publicity about Canada's great good fortune.¹² One must recall that in Canada in the early 1930s there was considerable speculation in mining accompanied by highly exaggerated claims intended to attract investors. The Toronto Mining Exchange (a stock market) was considered 'routinely, almost preposterously crooked'.¹ But the pitchblende occurrences at Great Bear Lake were believed by grandfather to be the most extensive and important deposits of the mineral then known.¹³ (There is a delightful irony in the fact that he played a significant role in assuring mining investors they would not be duped like his own father had been.)

Flying wheelbarrows

Probably the most significant difficulty to be overcome in developing the mine on Great Bear Lake was distance - it was 2300 kilometres by a tortuous water route to the mine site from the nearest railhead, and of course this access was frozen over and unusable during the very long winter. Furthermore, the river and lake trip took four weeks of the two month open water season.⁵ Thus it was that the aeroplane became a flying wheelbarrow for personnel, equipment and supplies going into the mine site, and for ore and concentrates coming out.

In those days, maps of the remote areas of northern Canada contained little detail and there were areas regarded as almost totally unexplored. There were no navigational aids like radar and radio beams, and the pioneer pilots were said to fly by the seat of their pants, depending on a combination of skill and chance to bring them down safely on some river or lake - either liquid or solid depending on the time of year.⁴

In many areas around Great Bear Lake, large magnetite deposits make the magnetic compass next to useless.¹¹ The bush pilots overcame this by navigating along soon-familiar rivers and lakes on the way. This had the added benefit of making an emergency landing on water or ice possible over the entire eight-hour flight.¹⁴

In the summer of 1931 there were 13 planes servicing the area, many of them flying 24 hours a day, which was encouraged by the frenetic activity and permitted by the absence of night. 7 By 1936, air travel in this remote region had grown to such an extent that it was carrying more freight than all the United States airlines combined.¹⁵

Another major difficulty at Great Bear Lake proved to be the ground itself. As the Port Radium mine moved from simple surface trenches to underground mining, the battle began with permafrost - perpetually frozen ground. For the first 90 metres or so, there were minor problems due to water freezing on surfaces and in pipes, but the permafrost kept the workings dry. Beneath that level the water poured in, requiring extensive grouting to counter pressures up to 70 kg/cm 2 .⁴ Throughout its lifetime, the mine at Labine Point had a reputation as a wet mine, and extraction pumps were as vital as ventilation.¹⁶

Port Radium grows

Despite the difficulties, the mine at Port Radium prospered. It acquired a mill to produce cheaper-to-ship concentrates, and a townsite to house workers, some with families. Grandfather visited the site again in 1938 along with a female reporter who was astonished to find it a 'homelike place'. Later, after hearing an account of the original discovery from Gilbert Labine himself, including the trek across the ice with the jury-rigged sled, she was delighted to note that the canvas covered canoe he'd carried with him was still in service on the Port Radium waterfront.¹⁷

The Port Radium facility was to be the only radium-uranium mine in Canada until 1953, but it sparked considerable prospecting activity in its vicinity. One occurrence about 100 miles south is said to have been discovered by smell in 1934. The story goes that Indians, who had camped at Labine Point long before it was thus named, claimed to have noticed a peculiar odour there. They reported that they had noticed a similar smell at the southern location, and offered to show a prospector the place. This was done, but as it was midwinter and the ground was blanketed with snow, no outcrops were visible. The Indians insisted that it was the spot, however, and sure enough, when the snow cleared a vein of pitchblende was found.¹⁸

Smell was not the only aid to finding uraniferous ores in the days before the geiger counter and portable scintillation counter. It was apparently the habit of some prospectors in the Great Bear Lake area to leave a roll of film on the ground in a likely looking spot. The radioactivity of a rich pitchblende deposit would take its own picture on the film, right through the protective wrapping.⁷

The outbreak of the Second World War had a disastrous effect on the world market for radium, and the by-then 300 metre deep Port Radium mine with its 6.5 kilometres of workings was closed down in 1940 and allowed to flood. Equipment, supplies and ore were left in storage or on the docks, and all the staff were evacuated.¹⁹

There are conflicting reports on the value of uranium to Labine's company before the war. While my grandfather described a thriving business in exporting uranium salts for colouring glazes and glass - nearly 27 tonnes was produced up to the end of 1934, with the company claiming a ready market for all it could produce 14 - another source claims the oxide material piled up, unsold and unsaleable, and was given away to anyone who had a good use for it.¹⁹ One curious note is that enough Great Bear uranium was sold to Germany in 1938 to attract the attention of the British embassy in Berlin.¹⁹

In any case, it was the demand for uranium for weapons development that revived the Port Radium mine in 1942. 1 The project was given government priority for men and materials, and it took just four months to recommission the workings. The immediate, urgent requirement for uranium was met by collecting the bagged ore and concentrates which had been abandoned at the mine and various points along its access waterway in 1940.¹⁹

After a year and a half of intrigue and manoeuvering, on 28 January 1944 the government announced in the House of Commons that Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited, and its Port Radium mine, had been nationalized 'in the interests of military secrecy',¹ which must have caused distress amongst the Allies' security and intelligence communities. It is well known that, at the urging of the United States, security surrounding the uranium bomb project was extraordinary. As a consequence, mistrust strained the relations between friendly nations, and those involved with the work were kept on a short leash - to the extent that one of the small band of US Army scientific experts with the Manhattan project was followed on a visit to his Canadian fianc?by what could only have been a security agent.²⁰

The activities at Great Bear Lake retreated into shadow for some three years, while the world sorted out the good guys from the bad.

The war's end saw the lifting of security restrictions and a new focus on Port Radium as bug-eyed journalists flocked in to tour the little community of 225 souls 'where the back of Japan was broken',²¹ which was 'the home of the atomic bomb', and where there was 'enough uranium to destroy the world'.²² Life magazine found many ex-servicemen on the staff - the isolated mine was described as a good place to make money without spending much.¹⁶ It was revealed that Lord Haw-Haw had broadcast a shortwave threat from Berlin in 1943 that 'the Japanese would soon blast Port Radium ... off the map', which doesn't say much for the security regime in Canada at the time.²³

Boom-bust-boom

Following the war, uranium mining in Canada was characterized by a boom-bust-boom cycle reflecting the effects of politics and technological developments on the world marketplace. Amateur prospecting really took off in 1948 when the government lifted a partial ban on private involvement in uranium exploration and replaced it with a guaranteed minimum price for acceptable uranium ores.²⁴ The advent of the Cold War meant there was a market for as much uranium as Canada could produce.²⁵

There were many promising uranium discoveries in the decade after the war, one of the most significant being that at Beaverlodge on the north shore of Saskatchewan's Lake Athabasca. Occurrences first reported in 1934 were pursued in 1944, and underground development began in 1949. The discovery of uranium deposits in northern Saskatchewan was the beginning of a major expansion of the uranium mining industry in Canada, including the establishment of the first open-pit and the first private enterprise uranium mine in the post war period, the Gunnar mine, which was discovered in July 1952. The Bancroft area occurrences first picked over by grandfather Spence in 1922 were tapped for development beginning in 1949.⁴

In the early 1950s there were more prospectors seeking uranium in Canada than any other metal.²⁴ A popular American magazine said of the 'Great Canadian Uranium Rush' in 1953 that there was 'so much uproar you (could) hardly hear the ticking of the geiger counters'. Where there had only been half a dozen mining stocks with uranium interests on the official exchange the year before, by midsummer 1953 there were 60, with another 60 or so being traded over the counter, and many more in the offing. In the Beaverlodge area, more than 150 companies were drilling or were about to start digging. From coast to coast, in backyards and bush, both amateurs and professionals feverishly pursued a find that might mean untold wealth.²⁶

Some strange things happened. For instance, misleading news of a rich uranium find near North Bay, Ontario, created pandemonium, with claims being staked by excited prospectors in the city dump, at a church and in the grounds of a Roman Catholic school.²⁶ Townsfolk who did not have mining licences hurriedly bought them and staked claims in the business district and in outlying residential areas. One man went to the other side of town and placed claim stakes around the house and lawns of a friend who was away, only to return home to find a party of hopeful prospectors busy staking out his own back yard.²⁷

One find after another was reported, each claiming to be the richest, and when production reached its peak in 1959 - the value of uranium produced in Canada in 1958 and 1959 exceeded that of any other metal - there were 26 mines in operation.⁴ Because of his involvement in several of the richest operations, the man who started it all, Gilbert Labine, had become known as Mr Uranium.²⁶

It is said that no worthwhile discovery was ever made by the swarms of amateurs who descended like locusts on any area where news broke of a uranium find.⁴ It took expertise, organization, manpower and money to tip the odds in one's favour. The best example of this is the Algoma (Elliot Lake) discoveries in 1953, chronicled by journalist Leslie Roberts. Once again aircraft played a pivotal role. 'In mid May 1953 a mysterious expedition took off from South Porcupine in northern Ontario. Its members were a dozen geologists and mining engineers, eighty prospectors and, of all people, several young lawyers. The planes carried more than fifty tents, as many geiger counters, a hundred axes and other bush gear, and several tons of food. 'The planes took off at irregular intervals and headed north - a touch of cloak and dagger designed to confuse the curious... As soon as settled areas were left behind, they turned southwest on compass bearings that carried them two hundred and fifty miles into the Algoma country, midway between Sault Ste Marie and Sudbury, just north of Lake Huron. Some of the parties landed on lakes within an outfielder's throw of the CPR (railway) Soo Line and the hard surfaced Trans-Canada highway. 'But if anyone spotted low flying aircraft coming in from the north he paid them no heed. They might be carrying timber cruisers or the sportsman owner of a fishing camp in the back country on his first spring visit. So far as any local resident knew, all the mining people had given up on Algoma years before. 'This was just the attitude the newcomers wanted to assure. Had they come in by regular channels - over the CPR or the Trans-Canada - the area would have been buzzing with rumour within twenty-four hours. 'So began the fabulous Algoma staking rush, led by Franc Joubin, a scholarly, bespectacled geologist of about forty, who looks as if he would be more at home on the campus than in the bush. Joubin, though never in the limelight, had been a respected consultant for many years. 'Each evening the stakers sat down with the lawyers they'd brought along and assigned to their principals the claims staked that day. This was a timesaving wrinkle that no one had though of before. It eliminated days of legal paperwork back in Toronto after the job in the bush finished. 'In four weeks, more than sixteen hundred mining claims were staked, some within half a mile of the highway and railroad, the most remote no more than twenty-five miles to the north. Yet nobody in the towns and villages of Algoma, nor in the mining fraternity outside, tumbled to what was afoot. 'On the morning of 11 July the lawyers appeared at recording offices in various parts of Ontario as widely separated as Sudbury, Sault Ste Marie, Timmins and Toronto. The bundles of papers they dropped on the mining recorders' desks jammed the works as they had never been jammed before. The news touched off a chain reaction that topped such famous stampedes as Rouyn in the 1920s. By the end of August more than eight thousand claims had been staked in Algoma by people who hadn't been in on the original expedition. '...what happened in Algoma has had repercussions clear around the globe. It is giving Canada - and possibly the world - its greatest uranium field and the largest mines on earth whose primary product is the raw material of atomic energy.'²⁷

The weaponry-driven uranium boom came to a crashing halt in 1959 when the United States ceased to be Canada's main customer. It took another 15 years or so for developments in nuclear power to put a relatively stable platform under the Canadian uranium mining industry. 24 Canada is now the world's leading producer and exporter of uranium.²⁸

A health hazard you say?

Grandfather retired from the Mines Branch in 1949 after 39 years service. His final contribution to the Canadian uranium mining industry was a guide for uranium and thorium prospectors.²⁹ For nearly 30 years, until he died of natural causes in March 1978, he lived in quiet retirement in his large, three storey house in the centre of Ottawa, whose musty, spooky basement I explored as a child, marvelling at the hundreds of heavy, grey canvas sample bags piled hither and thither. His private mineral collection, including samples from Great Bear Lake and everywhere else he'd been, was described as priceless, albeit by a kind old friend.³⁰

One can imagine his puzzlement in 1976 when, at the start of Canada's radioactive contamination remedial programme, an Atomic Energy Control Board health physicist tracked him down to advise over the telephone in terribly serious mien that he possessed a rock collection whose radon emissions posed a significant long-term risk to his health. I suspect he just lit another cigarette and topped up his glass of hard stuff, two vices he pursued with vigour in later years.

A phlegmatic, even cavalier reaction? For Canada's expert on radium and uranium ores, veteran of the Great Bear, and one of the last of the classical mineralogists, perhaps being 91 years old had something to do with it.

References
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