Canada is one of the richest countries in the world in its water-power. Engineers calculate that every thousand electric horse-power developed from her waterfalls eventually provides employment for more than two thousand people.

Since their discovery in 1903, the Cobalt mines have yielded silver bullion worth more than $200,000,000. These huge piles of tailings were formerly thrown away as waste. They are now being worked over again at a profit.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SILVER MINES OF NORTHERN ONTARIO

AKE up your map of North America and draw a

T

line from Buffalo to the lowest part of Hudson Bay. Divide it in half, and the middle point will just about strike Cobalt, the centre of the world's rich

est silver deposits. I have come here via North Bay from Toronto, more than three hundred miles to the south, and am now clicking my typewriter over ground that has produced upward of one million dollars an acre in silverbearing ore. For a long time it has turned out a ton of silver bullion every twenty-four hours.

There are said to be only two real silver-mining districts in the world. One is at Guanajuato, Mexico, where the veins are of enormous extent but yield a low grade of ore. The other is here at Cobalt, where the deposits, though comparatively small, are almost pure silver. In practically all the other great silver districts the metal is a byproduct. The Anaconda mine in Montana and the Coeur d'Alene in Idaho are both famous silver producers, but in the former it is a by-product of copper, and in the latter, of lead.

Twenty years ago, when I visited Cobalt shortly after the discovery of its underground wealth, I rode all day on the Ontario government railway through woods as wild as any on the North American continent. The road wound its way in and out among lakes, sloughs, and swamps.

The country was covered with pine and hardwood, and so cut up by water that one could have gone almost all over it in a canoe. Even along the railroad it was so swampy and boggy that the telegraph poles had to be propped up. Outside the swamps it was so rocky that deep holes could not be made, and in such places great piles of rock were built up about the poles to support them.

Some of the country was covered with bogs known as muskeg. This is a bottomless swamp under a thin coating of vegetation, through which one sinks down as though in a quicksand, and, if not speedily rescued, is liable to drown. Hunters in travelling over it have to jump from root to root, making their way by means of the trees that grow here and there. There is said to be still much of this muskeg in the region of Hudson Bay and almost everywhere throughout this northland. Much of it has been drained, leaving a land somewhat like that of northwestern Ohio, which was once known as the Black Swamp.

Reaching Cobalt, I had to rely on the miners for living accommodations. Log cabins and frame buildings were going up in every direction and a three-story hotel was being started, but many of the people were still living in tents or in shacks covered with tar felt. Even the banks hastily established to take care of the rapidly growing wealth of the settlement were in tents, and the bankers slept at night beside their safes with a gun always within reach. Streets were yet to be built, and the wooden and canvas structures of the town straggled along roads winding this way and that through the stumps. In the centre of the settlement was a beautiful little lake that one could cross in a canoe in a few minutes, and the mining properties extended back into the woods in every direction.

To-day, although still possessing many of the characteristics of the typical mining camp, Cobalt is a busy little city of six or seven thousand inhabitants. The tar shacks and tents have been replaced by modern buildings-banks, churches, stores, and homes-many of them erected since the big fire in 1912. There are good schools, including a school of mines, and the muddy roads have long since given way to sidewalks and streets. Even the lake has gone, its waters having been pumped away to allow mining operations, and where it once rippled peacefully some of the richest veins in the district are now being worked. Kerr Lake, a short distance from the town, has also been drained to allow safer underground workings. The place reminds one of the mines of the Bay of Nagasaki, Japan, where coal has been taken out of fifty miles of tunnels under the Pacific Ocean. I have visited those tunnels, and have also ridden by electric car through the coal mines under the ocean off the coast of south Chile.

The discovery of silver at Cobalt marked the first finding in the Dominion of any precious metal in important quantities between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. Two railway contractors, employed in the building of the line northward from the town of North Bay, were idly tossing pebbles into the lake when they found some that they believed to be lead. An analysis showed almost pure silver. Shortly afterward a French blacksmith named La Rose stubbed his toe upon a piece of rock where the railway route had been blasted out, and upon picking it up saw the white metal shining out of the blue stone. He conferred with his friends and sent it down to Toronto to be assayed. The report was that it was very rich in silver. La Rose thereupon filed a mining claim,