Showing posts with label prospecting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prospecting. Show all posts

29 - John Discovers a Uranium Deposit, 1948

The Nisto Find: "By God, That's Uranium!"

From "The Hunt for the Singing Atom," by C. Fred Bodsworth in Macleans, August 15, 1948.

By 1948, John Albrecht was living in Stony Rapids, trapping from a base camp on Selwyn Lake which straddles the Saskatchewan-Northwest Territories border. In June of that year John became the prospecting partner of Leroy (Roy) Tobey (1905-1985), a prospector and former civil service engineer from Meota, Saskatchewan. 

StarPhoenix, Sept. 10, 1948.

"The year 1948 saw the lifting of the veil of secrecy from uranium and prospecting was thrown open to sourdoughs," the Regina Leader-Post reported on February 18, 1950. The United States government's desire to acquire as much uranium as possible from Canada drove the development of uranium mines in northern Saskatchewan. By 1948, Canada had entered into large contracts with the US Atomic Energy Commission. Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited, a federal crown corporation, the only legal purchaser of uranium ore and prior to 1948, had full control over the development of Saskatchewan's uranium deposits.

In March of 1948, Joe Phelps, Minister of Natural Resources for the Government of Saskatchewan announced that 40 individuals would be assisted in carrying out prospecting activities in the province's north. The Prospector's Assistance Plan (PAP) provided prospectors with free mining licenses, free air transportation from La Ronge or Flin Flon, the loan of supplies and equipment for two months in the bush (not including pack sacks and bedroll), cash awards for new finds, and assistance from qualified geologists in the assaying and recording of claims. (Source: Saskatoon StarPhoenix, March 11, 1948; Feb. 25, 1949.) The goal of the PAP was to open up the mineral potential of the north.

Tobey was working under the PAP when he and Albrecht became prospecting partners. In August of 1948, after about three months of fruitless prospecting for uranium - their clothes in rags, their food provisions almost gone - John decided to give up and head back to his cabin to look after his traplines. Before leaving Tobey, John suggested they pick up his bear trap at Black Lake. Within hours after making camp at Black Lake, Tobey's Geiger counter started acting up. The partners eagerly dug into the moss and discovered pitchblende (now known as uraninite), a radioactive, uranium-rich, iron-red rock veined in black.

Geiger counter, no date. Western Development Museum, WDM.-2012-S-28.

"We were [camped] about five miles away from Black River. And so, along the ridge I was going towards home," John recalls in an interview with Berry Richards. (Source: Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, audio recording R-A873. Berry Richards' interview with John Albrecht, La Ronge, Saskatchewan, July 14, 1975.) "So I hear crashing. What the devil, I said, that must be Tobey. Hello! Hollering ,... By god, he got the first kicks [from the Geiger counter], you know. Excited! ... So by god, that's uranium. So, you know, by 11:00 o'clock in the night we had the whole Nisto shoal discovered." ("Nisto" is the Cree word for "three" but it is not clear why it was applied to the Nisto mine.) 

The Nisto find received national media coverage. Ottawa Journal, Feb. 15, 1949.

The twosome traced out a 2,400-foot zone of radioactive activity before splitting up. Tobey, the only one of the two who was working under the PAP, headed to Regina to register their claim. Albrecht headed back up north to check his traps, taking Tobey's Geiger counter with him. 

Tobey took out a concession over a 25-square-mile area for both himself and Albrecht to give their claim some protection. Initially, they received no offers for their claim, but eventually Tobey's and Albrecht's discovery of the Nisto uranium find "set the mining world right back on its heels." [Source: StarPhoenix, March 20, 1951.] It was followed by a rush for the government's adjacent concessions. Trans-Continental Resources (TR) from Toronto recognized the potential of the find and offered Tobey and Albrecht each $15,000 for their claim. Subsequently, TR created Nisto Mines Ltd. for the purpose of developing the property.

John Strikes It Rich

"My god, I was there, you know, in the cabin. I had some fox or something," Albrecht told Berry Richards (1975). "There comes a Hudson's Bay man, sends a wire with and Indian. ... Tobey had the contract already sent out, you know, for me to sign. So, we read with the Hudson's Bay man the contract. Sounded good. $30,000 - $15,000 for me, $15,000 for him. 300,000 shares. $3 million share company firm. $150,000 each. I thought, 'This is the first clear money.' I signed! No other way!"

Albrecht and Tobey signed an agreement with Transcontinental Resources transferring Nisto prospecting rights. Albrecht's partner Roy Tobey on right. Source: Regina Leader-Post, Dec. 2, 1948.

John and his partner Roy Tobey made a considerable amount of money on the Nisto find. However, Nisto Mines Ltd. was not large enough to be profitable. As for John's riches, he later chuckled when he told his friend Bob Lee, "I put most of the money back in the ground!" He was always searching for another mine. 

Hints of Government Scandal

There were allegations made by members of the Liberal opposition that underhanded deals had been made by employees of the Saskatchewan CCF-NDP government in the development of uranium during the early 1950s. For example, it was suggested that Dr. M. C. Schumiatcher, while still serving as the executive assistant to Premier Tommy Douglas as well as legal advisor to the provincial cabinet, profited from the incorporation a company called Search Corporation shortly after Tobey and Albrecht discovered the Nisto find. The Search Corporation received some of the uranium concessions in the Black Lake area adjacent to Nisto before Schumiatcher resigned from government service. 

The leader of the opposition, Walter Tucker, asserted that other former civil servants had taken advantage of their positions in government to obtain mineral claims for themselves. Alex Cameron, Liberal MLA for Maple Creek, called this a "scandalous undertaking" and demanded that the government conduct an investigation. [Source: Hansard, Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, Budget Debate, March 21, 1951.]

On March 13, 1952, Premier Tommy Douglas responded in the Saskatchewan legislature to the accusations about Schumiatcher, stating that Schumiatcher had indeed formed the Search Corporation and taken out uranium concessions in the area where Albrecht and Tobey discovered the Nisto find. "These concessions could have been procured by any other person willing to make application for them," Douglas asserted, not addressing the fact that Schumiatcher - while still employed by the government - had the inside scoop. He went on to say that, because Search Corporation had been unable to do the necessary exploration work, the company was "virtually insolvent." [Source: Hansard, Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, Budget Debate, March 13, 1952.] 

Hubert Staines, a member of the Liberal opposition, declared at a public meeting in Kennedy, Saskatchewan, on May 31, 1952 that Schumiatcher and the Search Corporation "had no intention whatever of developing these concessions but merely obtained them to make a very quick cash profit." Staines went on to say that Schumiatcher had obtained blocks of shares entitling his corporation to further profits once the uranium concessions were developed by other companies. [Source: Regina Leader-Post, May 31, 1952.]

(I still have more research to do on this topic and will add any further findings to this post.).

Uranium in Popular Culture

"The Great Rush for Uranium" -  prospecting for uranium in Saskatchewan. British Pathe, 1952.

 Here's a recording by Warren Smith called "Uranium Rock" (1958). 

"I got a big Geiger counter, it's a pretty good rig                                                                                    When the needle starts clickin' it's where I'm gonna dig                                                                   Money-money honey, the kind you fold                                                                                            Money-money honey, rock 'n' roll                                                                                                          Rake it in, bale it up like hay                                                                                                                 Have a rockin' good time and throw it all away."


Here's another called "Uranium Fever" by Elton Britt (1955):

"Uranium fever has done and got me down                                                                                        Uranium fever is spreadin' all around                                                                                                     With a Geiger counter in my hand                                                                                                            I'm a-goin' out to stake me some government land                                                                          Uranium fever has done and got me down."


 

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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.

20. Nan the Writer - Part 2: "The Woman's Bushed!"

Coming to Life Again

Nan's husband Richard Morenus figures prominently in her first article for Maclean's entitled "Jim Chief," published on October 15, 1946. There is no mention of Richard in her second article for Maclean's published the following year. By that time their marriage was over.

Nan had written "Jim Chief" in the winter of 1945-1946, finishing it in mid- to late April of 1946. I know this because the editor noted at the end of Nan's article that she had completed her article about six weeks after Jim Chief died on March 8. When Richard filed for divorce, he stated that Nan had deserted him on  February 22, 1946.

It is clear that Nan stayed on in northern Ontario throughout 1946 and into 1947. She was hospitalized in Sioux Lookout in late February 1947, likely for her chronic abdominal issues. She then went on a wilderness adventure which she chronicled in her second article published later that summer.


First page of Nan's article in Maclean's, August 15, 1947.
 

"The Woman's Bushed"

Nan's second article "The Woman's Bushed!," published in Maclean's on August 15, 1947, likely started as diary entries that were rewritten and then submitted to the magazine in a hurry. Nan's circumstances were not great. Her marriage to Richard was over and she was (perhaps) alone in Sioux Lookout. 

This article is another example of Nan's evocative writing skills. It provides an account of her canoe expedition north of Sioux Lookout with a bushman-prospector named Joe in search of "a rich vein of high grade." (I asked Dorothy Maskerine if she knew who Joe was. "Everyone knew Joe," she replied in our phone conversation of June 18, 2021. "He just kind of turned up in Sioux Lookout and hung out at the Hudson's Bay Company store with his dog." Dorothy is going to try and find out Joe's last name for me.)

The trek involved 240 kilometres (150 miles) of rapids and at least 20 portages. When Nan asked Joe, a man she said she had known for years, if she could join him on the trip., he exclaimed, “The woman’s bushed!” A week out of the hospital where she was lyin’ for months an' already she wants to go chippin’ rocks.” (By dropping letters with apostrophes, Nan was giving Joe's voice a regional accent or dialect. Was he from a specific area or race or social group? Because she never provides any background about Joe, it seems disrespectful.)

After a long illness in hospital, Nan saw this journey as a “celebration at being alive and back in the bush once more.” After a month of convalescing (“It took me all that time to get my legs moving one before the other again”), Nan and Joe shoved off from the lodge on Abram Lake. It was a hot July day.  “The memory of the months of fever, pain and the smothering confinement of sickness would be swallowed up in the stringent demands of the bush. I was coming to life again.”

 

The map above is my rather crude attempt to chart the route taken by Nan and Joe from Abram Lake to Spirit Lake and back in the summer of 1947.

Nan’s account reveals her strong descriptive writing skills. For example, here’s her description of running some rapids in a canoe:

“You have felt yourself slipping in the bathtub. That satiny slide beneath your feet. That flying contorted feeling in your limbs as you grip desperately at nothingness. It lasts for only a moment. Our rapids lasted much longer but the bathtub sensation endured. … A broad flat rock just beneath the surface. No time, no room to avoid it. Over it we slid. I felt the canoe’s agonized groan, felt the vibration as the flooring grated and the ribs contracted inward. There is that sickening pity for tortured live things. I felt it now for the canoe . . . that bush possession above all others that endears itself like a personality, a brave and eager partner.”

"Canoe in Rapids." Painting by Winslow Homer. Source

One interesting observation Nan and Joe make during their trek was that northern Ontario was becoming the "land of the vanishing portage." Several times as they travelled through the bush country they discovered that the places where portages were clearly indicated on their map were overgrown and unrecognizable. Much time was lost scouting the shoreline on foot looking for a usable trail, often uncleared and choked with windfall. "Nowadays most fellows go in by plane," Joe says. "Looks like no one wants the hard work anymore."

Nan and Joe never did find the rumoured high-grade vein. As they left behind the final and 27th portage of their trip and headed back to Abram Lake, Nan writes that it was somehow a letdown. “A world had closed behind us.” She had “caught a severe case of prospecting fever” and wanted someday to return, “come hell, higher water or more beavers.”

Nan was good to her word, although it wouldn’t be Ontario that she returned to. She had heard about uranium discoveries in northern Saskatchewan, and within two years she was back prospecting – and writing – this time with trapper and prospector John Albrecht by her side.

A Writer to the End

Nan never gave up writing, however. She took her typewriter with her to Saskatchewan, planning to write about prospecting in the North. Floyd Glass, a northern pilot based in Prince Albert, wrote in his contribution to the book Gold and Other Stories (1986) that the few times he dropped into Nan and John’s camp, she gave him some stories she had written for magazines to take down in the mail. Glass recalled that she sold a couple of stories but if she did, I haven’t located them yet. [Source: Gold and Other Stories as told to Berry Richards, W. O. Kupsch and S. D. Hanson, eds. Regina, SK: Saskatchewan Mining Association, 1986.]  

On August 18, 1950, Nan’s occupation, as recorded on her infant son's birth certificate, was writer. After she died 15 days later from complications of childbirth, her obituary states that Nan was a writer.

That would have been her wish. Now it is my wish to locate more of Nan’s writing.

 

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©Joan Champ, 2021. All rights reserved.