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Canada: BRITISH COLUMBIA: Moose Pasture

3 minute read
TIME

A 35-year-old prospector named Ernest Johnson started it all. In two years of experience with radioactive ores around the Eldorado mine on Great Bear Lake, he had noticed that where there was uranium there were also cobalt and nickel. Figuring that the converse should be true, he packed a Geiger counter and pushed up the Roxey Creek valley, 120 miles north of Vancouver, where fallen rock bearing cobalt “bloom” lay in the creek bed.

Ernie Johnson tracked this float ore to its source, high on the mountain face, where there was an abandoned gold mine, hopefully named Jewel.

“I got better & better kicks as I climbed,” says Ernie. “In the mine, they became a roar.” He sent samples of ore to Ottawa and staked some claims. That Johnson had found uranium was officially confirmed, but the quality and quantity were secret and unknown. It would take a year or two, and tens of thousands of dollars, to prove the ore body.

Like a Brick. As soon as the news got back to Gold Bridge, a tiny town on the Bridge River, prospectors for miles around got the itch. Some were gnarled veterans of the Gold Rush. Some were tenderfeet. Only one had a Geiger counter, and none knew anything about radioactive ores. That did not stop them.

All night long they banged at the door of Mrs. Emerald McNeil, a deputy recorder, for prospectors’ licenses and numbered aluminum tags to nail on their stake posts. For two days she did a land-office business, then ran out of tags. By then the first prospectors were back trying to get their claims registered.

Stocky, blond Edwin Phillips, 44, who gave up prospecting and struck it richer in the vegetable-trucking business, caught the new fever. He drove his truck as far into the mountains as he could, then abandoned it and hiked into the uranium area. “It hit him like a brick,” said his wife.

Like a Board. A lean French Canadian taxi driver, John Lecomte, 36, joined up with his brother-in-law, Einer Frykberg. They left Frykberg’s hardware store to his wife, drove Lecomte’s taxi in as far as they could, and headed into the bush. Bartender John York hiked 15 miles in & out, then found that he had forgotten to note the numbers of his claim tags. He had to go through it all again.

Above Roxey Creek the claim stakes ran for miles like an overpegged cribbage board. Said one oldtimer: “All they’re doing is staking moose pasture.” The provincial Deputy Mines Minister, J. F. Walker, warned ill-equipped amateur prospectors that they were risking their lives.

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