Book Review–Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower

As work continues to create a greener, cleaner future for the planet, the rush to find critical minerals that will spearhead the transition away from fossil-fueled energy has taken on a greater urgency. Explorers and developers are actively seeking out new sources of nickel, copper and lithium throughout the globe. And then there’s cobalt, a metal whose ability to store energy has already made it crucial for everything from laptops to smartphones, and gives it an even more important role in the green revolution. This has led to a renewed interest in securing sources of the metal across Canada, including around the namesake community of Cobalt, in northern Ontario.

Motivated by the return of companies and investors to the area, author Charlie Angus has written a new book that looks at what he calls the “miracle ingredient of the digital age.” With Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower (released by House of Anansi Press on February 1), he has taken a deep dive into the fascinating history of the town and its impact on the Canadian mining industry as we know it today.

A musician, journalist and author, Angus knows northern Ontario well, having been born and raised in Timmins. Since 2004, he has also been the Member of Parliament for the riding of Timmins-James Bay. Speaking to The Northern Miner, Angus says that it wasn’t long after first moving to Cobalt while in his 20s that he began hearing stories about a mineral discovery at the dawn of the twentieth century.

“The events that took place here more than a century ago set Canada on its path to becoming the world’s preeminent resource extraction superpower,” he says, which is why he firmly believes that the town of Cobalt should be considered the cradle of the Canadian mining industry.

His reasoning for calling it the cradle of Canadian mining stems from a discovery in Cobalt in 1903, one that unleashed a frenzy of prospecting, exploration, exploitation, high finance and production unlike anything seen before. Yet it was not cobalt that propelled this bonanza, as that mineral was of little value a century ago. Instead, it was silver. A lot of silver.

As Angus chronicles, the Cobalt silver rush set a pattern for decades to follow in Canada, and around the world, with fortunes made – and lost – virtually overnight. And he reminds us that the riches extracted from the Cobalt silver camp dwarfed those of the Klondike gold rush, though the true history is little remembered outside the mining sector.

In the book, Angus relates the oft-told discovery myth about the Cobalt rush, in which a local blacksmith threw a hammer at a pesky fox lingering outside his forge, with the hammer uncovering a lode of pure silver. Though not true, Angus says the hammer and fox tale set a tone for the mythology that continues to imbue mining, including myths like the plucky prospector working doggedly alone in the harsh northern bush, finding a lode and then heading to Toronto’s Royal York Hotel or the King Edward to strike a deal and make it rich.

Mythologies and superstitions have always surrounded mining, perhaps created as individuals headed into the mysterious darkness underground. For instance, Angus tells us that cobalt’s name derives from the kobalos, a satyr and shapeshifter in Greek mythology, as well as the kobold, a demon supposed to have lived in the mines of Germany in the Middle Ages. With no distinctive colour in its natural form, cobalt was hard to spot, but when miners burned rocks where it was present the vapours and dust had the potential to kill them. For this reason, Angus calls cobalt a demon metal.

Another myth, that of quickly making it rich from the resources lying just beneath our feet, has been an enduring part of the mining sector since before the Cobalt silver rush, but that bonanza ratcheted things up considerably. By 1906, barely three years after the initial discovery, investors were buying area properties and shares in area properties sight unseen. Angus tells us that on Wall Street “nearly a hundred other companies were established to sell stocks in Cobalt properties that had no credible mineral values whatsoever.” That number would double within a year as even more investors rushed to get a piece of the action, though they might have wanted to remember a warning from Mark Twain: “A mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar.”

Nevertheless, silver bonanza fever raged like a wildfire and Angus shows that more than a few succeeded in making money from the precious metal dug from the ground in northern Ontario. In April 1909, the town’s Daily Nugget newspaper claimed “that the rough streets of Cobalt had produced thirty-eight millionaires”, including the likes of brothers Noah and Henry Timmins, after whom the northern Ontario city is named, and Toronto lawyer David Fasken, whose legal firm is still a major presence in Canadian mining. (Another enduring presence in the industry is this very publication, which began covering mining news from the Royal Exchange Building in Cobalt in 1915.)

But for every success story coming from the bonanza there were countless failures, and it wasn’t just the naïve investors who got caught up in silver fever. In 1906, the mighty American Guggenheim family sent the foremost mining expert in the U.S., John Hays Hammond, to investigate a property in the heart of the camp. Hammond arrived in a “private Pullman car with a chef, a valet, and a personal wine steward” and deemed the asset worthwhile.

This assessment led the Guggenheims to invest some US$2.5 million (in 1906 dollars) in the company that controlled the property, setting off stock run in New York that required city police to control crowds of would-be investors. Yet when the Guggenheims found out the ore body was not workable, they pulled out of the deal. This led to chaos on Wall Street, with the New York Times reporting that “$24 million in stock value was lost almost overnight.” That’s almost US$750 million in today’s valuation, and Angus says some think the true loss was three or four times higher.

Angus also reveals how the silver rush in Cobalt helped transform the mining sector in North America, which had until then been dominated by Americans. The first prospectors and miners who arrived in the Cobalt camp came from the western United States, from places like Montana, Colorado, Idaho and California. They brought with them the 19th century methods of mining in which Cobalt’s initial silver deposits were exploited by pick, shovel and wheelbarrow, as they focused “on veins of silver that were almost pure.”

But the second wave who flooded into the area would soon transform this antiquated model of mining into a one more befitting the new millennium. By 1909, the Cobalt camp was transformed: teams of engineers, geologists, draftsmen and specialty mining crews were working to pinpoint and access new deposits. Seventeen diamond drills were turning, “producing six thousand feet of core samples a month.”

Angus reminds us that to be a miner in Cobalt in the early 20th century was hard. He writes at lengths about the atrocious working conditions in the silver mines, and the even worse living conditions in the community. The mine owners offered little in the way of safety precautions or benefits, and health care was virtually non-existent. Life underground was perilous at best and the environment topside was strewn with toxic waste and a landscape ravaged by mining operations. Explosions regularly shook the town as shafts were sunk, sometimes on the main streets of Cobalt.

But it wasn’t always a grim existence in the Cobalt camp. Angus peppers his book with vivid tales of what life in the midst of the silver boom was like, and one of the most fascinating stories he brings to life is how the mine owners decided to establish a hockey league to keep their employees amused.

In December 1909 they created the National Hockey Association (NHA) made up of the Cobalt Silver Kings, Haileybury Comets, Renfrew Millionaires and Montreal Wanderers. All were predominately Anglo-Canadian teams, but as Cobalt had a large French-speaking population the mine owners decided to add a second team to their league: the Montreal Canadiens. Les Canadiens played their first professional game against the Cobalt Silver Kings in January 1910, beating Cobalt 7-6 in overtime. The NHA was soon absorbed into a new league, which became the National Hockey League (NHL) of today, though only the Canadiens endured as a part of the new league.

Angus also details perhaps the darkest part of the Cobalt bonanza: the treatment of Indigenous people who had been mining silver in the area for millennia. Though silver from the region had been traded across eastern North America for more than a thousand years before Europeans arrived on the continent, Indigenous miners were little prepared for the onslaught that would push them aside, as an influx of southerners sought to make those riches their own.

Yet Angus ends his book on a positive note writing, “Cobalt is a place where lessons can still be learned. New understandings of environment, industry, and relations between settlers and Indigenous nations are still being worked out. Perhaps this knowledge can be exported to other jurisdictions, to help offset the darker lessons learned in Cobalt more than a century ago.”

For those who loving mining, Angus’ book will have an obvious appeal. Yet with its dramatic stories, larger-than-life characters, and insights into a forgotten moment in Canadian history, the book will also appeal to a wider audience outside the industry.