THE OLD

WISCONSIN

GOLD MINE

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Watching the sun setting over the nearby mountains.

A CENTURY AGO THE MERE MENTION OF THE WORD GOLD would electrify a crowd of street loafers and barflies as quickly as it would bankers!

Fragments of abandoned dreams are scattered throughout the Kootenay valleys - the collapsing roof of a one-room miner's shack, wooden derricks guarding empty mines, ghost towns where only the memory of free-flowing tales and alcohol remains.

Each image is a small reminder of the word gold. Ensnaring and luring thousands into the wilderness, the 'fever' both produced and preyed upon greed, ambition and dreams. For most men the desperate search for that most elusive of minerals ended in failure.

For a fortunate few, dreams became reality.

The story of the Wisconsin Mine starts back during the gold rush to the Kootenay region of British Columbia in the early 1800's … one of the most rugged areas in North America, described by David Thompson the famous map maker who explored the area in 1808 as:

"Stupendous and solitary wilds covered with eternal snow where mountain is connected to mountain to immense glaciers."

(David Thompson spent 22 years in the west travelling some 50,000 miles by canoe and horseback in summer, snowshoe and dog team in winter. His exploration covered much of the territory which is now Montana, Idaho and Washington which he took possession of for England. Sadly, however, British politicians attached little value to the region and thus it became part of the United States!)

The old mine is situated high up in the Columbia Mountains, south of Kokanee Glacier (BC's best known beer is named after it!) and the rugged Valhalla Wilderness, with its deep river valleys, sub alpine lakes and jagged granite peaks.

Pioneering in British Columbia largely awaited the arrival of the railway in the 1880’s, but the gold strikes had prepared the way by opening new trails, bringing in settlers, and revealing the region’s other resources.

The old time prospector had little knowledge of geology; his outstanding traits were the ability to travel and live under pioneer conditions, buoyant optimism, dogged perseverance and open-handed hospitality. He was an adventurer willing to undergo hardship for the opportunity to live an independent and roving life and for the chance of, just maybe, striking it rich.

 In the days of the true pioneers there were those who spent their entire lives prospecting - always hoping and believing they would strike another Klondike - that another Dawson City or Barkerville would be named after them.

Returning to civilisation once in a very long while, to scrounge some drinks and tell a tale - exhibiting their glittering samples of rock - they would scrape up a few more bags of flour, beans and bacon, and some cartridges and tobacco, and with canoes loaded down slip off into the unknown, perhaps never to be seen again ...

But maybe they were richer than the rich men of cities. The North Country was theirs. Uncharted lakes and crags, and coves with white beaches and crystal water; dark spruce forests, carpeted with soft moss; rainbow trout and cranberries; blue sky and the scent of the campfire. It was all their own.

Pictures here show some of the equipment hauled up the mountain to the site by packhorse in the mid 1930's - a Gardner Denver compressor and a McCormack Deering diesel engine. The site had its own engineering workshop and forge, the building standing until the mid 1990's when it finally succumbed to the heavy winter snow loads and collapsed. But the length of time it stood is testament to the skills and abilities of the early miners who had very few tools.

In 1985 when SELCO blasted the final 4-miles of road through to the Wisconsin mine - they found an Aladdin's Cave awaiting them. All the original equipment, hauled in so painstakingly half a century earlier, was lying there undisturbed just as the miners had left it some 50-years earlier, in buildings that were still intact - since then some have collapsed.

Much of this was donated to the Britannia Beach mining museum north of Vancouver, and is now on show there to the general public. SELCO/British Petroleum paid for the transportation and other costs, though they never did any mining, only exploratory work.

THE GOLDEN YEARS: In Richfield, the Bank of British Columbia was a wooden shack with many holes through which snow would drift, until the walls were lined with paper. The safe was simply a large box with a single lock, and often so full of gold there was difficulty in closing the lid.

Did the young prospector in the picture here, taken during the goldrush to the Kootenays in the 1880's, with his face so full of hope and enthusiasm, find the riches he so eagerly sought, did he perish in the attempt, or did he give up disillusioned? We'll never know.

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