Porcupine Gold Rush - Discovery

Discovery

By 1909 the north was being inundated by prospectors travelling up the new railway and hunting down any hint of riches. As the stories of the Porcupine gold started to filter back to the larger supporting towns along the line, more and more teams headed out for Porcupine. During the summer of 1909 there were several parties in the area; it was only a matter of time before the main veins were discovered.

George Bannerman from Haileybury overheard two fur trappers talking about finding gold in the Porcupine area. He set out with a partner, Tom Geddes, and started prospecting in the area north of Porcupine Lake. They found an excellent surface sample, staked several claims, and started their return trip to Haileybury to register them. When they arrived they were mobbed by a crowd who formed to see the samples. They received backing from a group in Scotland to develop the plots, forming the Scottish-Ontario Mine. The name later changed to Canusa (Canada-USA) and finally to Banner Porcupine over the years. The mine proved to have excellent surface gold veins, but stopped shortly underground and was never very productive.

In early June, Jack Wilson, backed by two Chicago businessmen, led a party of four prospectors and three native guides into Tisdale Township. On June 9 then came across a dome of quartz sticking out of the ground and decided to trench around it. As Wilson later noted;

As I was examining the seams in the quartz, about twelve feet ahead of me I saw a piece of yellow glisten as the sun struck it. It proved to be a very spectacular piece of gold in a thin sean of schist... when the boys came back we got out the drills and hammers, and that night had about 132 pounds of very spectacular specimens.

Following the vein they found it to be several hundred feet long and about 150 wide, running down the side of the hill. The vein later became known as the "Golden Stairway", and the dome of rock gave its name to the Dome Mine, which would become one of the "Big Three" mines in the area.

Following right behind them was the smaller team of Benny Hollinger, a young barber from Haileybury, and his partner, Alex Gillies. Arriving in October they met Wilson's Dome group, who told them that most of the good sites were already staked as far as six miles (10 km) to the west. They decided to skip those six miles, and moved westward where they came across one of D'Aigle's test pits, the one with the abandoned tools. Gillies' report of the find shows just how unlucky D'Aigle had been:

... Benny was pulling moss off the rocks a few feet away, when suddenly he let a roar out of him and threw his hat to me. At first I thought that he was crazy but when I came over to where he was it was not hard to find the reason. The quartz where he had taken off the moss looked as though someone had dripped a candle along it, but instead of wax it was gold.

The team later found the bootprint of one of the D'Aigle team-members pressed directly into a vein of gold.

They staked twelve claims near their discovery and then, because different sponsors had staked them food money, they flipped a coin to determine how to divide the claims. Hollinger won the toss and chose the six claims on the west. Noah A. Timmins, a former storekeeper in Mattawa and the owner of the LaRose silver mine in Cobalt, purchased Benny Hollinger's claims and opened the Hollinger Mine, one of the greatest gold-producers in the western hemisphere. Noah's nephew, Alphonse Paré, described it: “It was as if a giant cauldron had splattered the gold nuggets over a bed of pure white quartz crystals as a setting for some magnificent crown jewels of inestimable value.” On the strength of his nephew’s information, Noah paid $330,000 for the mine. Alphonse Paré, a Royal Military College of Canada trained mining engineer, continued working for the family company exploring stakes and mining operations all over the world.

The third great discovery was made by Sandy McIntyre (née Oliphant) an adventurous Scotsman who, years before, gave up his factory job as to become a prospector. He teamed up with Hans Buttner, a young Dutchman who worked as a waiter, and together they staked four claims north of Hollinger's. Continuing to prospect on his own, McIntyre uncovered a quartz "stringer" showing visible gold. His findings formed the basis of what eventually became McIntyre Mines. Although his name made millions, Sandy McIntyre himself had serious drinking problems, and sold his claims to various buyers for a pittance.

The Hollinger was the first of the three mines to go into production. In 1935 Timmins wrote that he set out with a mining party in December 1909, following an old logging road that had fallen into disuse, cutting a new trail where needed. They arrived at the mine site on New Year's Day, and within weeks began mining gold. In 1910, Dome Mines began operations by sinking four shafts, the deepest being seventy-five feet. McIntyre was the last of the three to go into operation; McIntyre's partners were constantly quitting due to his behaviour, and it was not until 1915 that any real production started.