Golden dreams - Canadian Geographic Durstling, Hans; Mossman, David J.;09-01-1994
Nova Scotia's only full-time gold miner, Edgar Horne pursues a family quest
A WAY BACK in the woods in Renfrew, N.S., 67-year-old Edgar Horne makes a living doing
something most of us can only dream about. Often single-handedly, Horne mines gold. In fact, he
is something of a one- man institution, for he processes the gold using 19th-century equipment
which he salvaged as rusted derelicts from abandoned Nova Scotia gold fields, restored,
reassembled and put back to work.
The discovery of gold in southeastern Nova Scotia dates back to the 1860s, when one
small-scale gold rush followed another. More than 60 gold mines were in production in the
province at one time or another until World War II. Many of those mines exasperated
professional geologists: the companies, tending to be small and undercapitalized, worked small,
rich leads to recover as much gold as quickly as possible, instead of systematically exploring and
working larger areas which, the geologists felt, held greater long-term promise. Eugene R.
Faribault, the doyen of early Nova Scotia geologists who examined and mapped more than 100
Nova Scotia gold deposits in the early 1900s, frequently lamented the inefficient and unscientific
mining methods. Attempts have been made at modern full-scale gold mining in the province in
recent years and, almost without fail, the launch of each new enterprise has been accompanied
by disparaging comments about the antiquated, wasteful work of the past. If the old-timers could
hear such comments, they might be forgiven a jeer or two, because every attempt at corporate,
scientific mining in the Nova Scotia gold fields has uniformly failed, due to unprofitably low
grades of ore, costly technical hurdles and, in some cases, faulty assays. And they might well
raise a toast of respect to Edgar Horne, whose one-man operation, using their tools and
methods, has been consistently and successfully extracting gold.
In a clearing in the forest, a shed of fieldstone and corrugated sheet metal, built, characteristically,
by Horne himself, houses his historic machinery. The shed rises at the back to a height of some
eight metres to accommodate the two restored stamp mills that thunder inside. Each stamp mill is
a giant, mechanized mortar and pestle, consisting of a series of long iron rods with steel stamps at
the bottom, continually raised and dropped by a camshaft to crush the gold-bearing quartz. First
used for crushing gunpowder mixtures in the late Middle Ages, then adapted to mining, they were
used in California's gold fields in the mid- 1800s and wherever else there was ore to be crushed.
You can still find stamp mills standing idle as restored, static showpieces in mining museums here
and there, but Horne's mills may well be the only ones on the continent still earning a living for
their owner.
And for Horne, that's important. With a deep sense of history, he savours the satisfaction of his
restoration work, but it's clear this is not a museum. These are working machines whose sole
purpose now, as then, is to extract gold, which they've been doing since Horne resurrected them
over several decades. In fact, all recent corporate attempts notwithstanding, Horne with his
turn-of-the-century technology is the only full-time gold miner in Nova Scotia today.
Stocky and barrel-chested, Horne still climbs with vigour 12 metres down into his mining pit and
sledgehammers at the gold-bearing quartz veins with power and enjoyment, his broad hands a
registry of manhandled boulders, of machine parts wiped with oily rags, and of many a hammer
blow struck. With wrinkles of wry humour at the corners of his eyes, his slightly Churchillian
features are reminiscent of a beaming British bulldog. Most of his jokes are at his own expense.
A character, he has a character's sense of style, and he knows about the impact of appearances:
one day he'll be sporting an Australian bush hat, the next a jaunty straw hat and broad red
suspenders framing a half-buttoned faded shirt and his ever-present pendant, a half-ounce ingot
of his own gold on a chain around his neck. He won't say how profitable his operation is, but he
is not conspicuously affluent nor by any means poor.
He will talk for hours about mining and machinery, veins and nuggets and troy ounces per ton,
but hardly ever about himself. Speaking of one of his two salvaged stamp mills, he says with
formidable matter- of-factness, "Oh, I hauled that one in on a flatbed from Molega." It takes
quite a few visits and some attentive listening for incidental details before you can piece together
the fact that the mill itself weighs several tonnes, that Molega (another old Nova Scotia gold rush
site) lies 130 kilometres away in the backwoods in another county, and that he had to dismantle
a three-storey building to get at the mill and its diesel engine.
It's little wonder that gold figures largely within Horne's sense of history. Even as a boy he was
surrounded by adults who kept one eye cocked to the end of the rainbow. His great-uncle,
Edmund H. Horne, was the legendary Canadian prospector who, as a young man, became
infected with glittering gold while working in the mines at nearby Oldham, N.S., and then
launched out on an odyssey that led him to prospect in Colorado, in the California gold fields,
and in the British Columbia bush; to lose hope and look for a "real job" in Manchester, England;
and finally to make a fortune back home in Canada through his discovery of the fabulous Horne
gold-copper mine in northwestern Quebec -- the mine that created the wealth of Noranda, the
colossus of Canadian mining.
Edgar Horne's uncle, Ed D. Horne, likewise combined a career in local business with mining and
milling gold. Thus, by the age of 12, Edgar had been steeped in stories of seams and veins,
stringers and nuggets, of rich ore shots that suddenly disappeared. He had worked at his
relatives' stamp mills, panned, and seen how gold was concentrated.
He had also seen its impact on human judgment, as was clear from the story he told as we
bumped along the dirt trail leading to the mine and mill in his canvas-top 1967 army jeep, another
object of his mechanical affections.
"Edmund H., now," Horne began, keeping up a dry and matter-of-fact manner despite the
background roar of unmuffled exhaust and gnashing gear teeth, "Edmund H., when he came back
from Noranda, he came back in 1924, and he bought some big farms and went into the cattle
business, cattle and show cattle. Well, he did that for about 10 years, and then he got back to
being interested in the mining. So then he came back into Renfrew here and spent half a million
dollars looking for where the Jubilee and Thompson had cut off. That was the name for a very
rich structure, one of the richest in Renfrew. One of the richest in Nova Scotia. Well, that vein
had faulted, and the old miners, they couldn't find where it continued. So he spent half a million
dollars looking for it, in the '30s. He found good gold-bearing ore and he set up two stamp mills
to process it, but. . .," Horne paused reflectively, and with just a hint of a smile to suggest that this
might be a story with a moral to it, continued, ". . . no, he never found the particular area he was
looking for. No. He never did find that."
In that exchange, the Jubilee and Thompson came out the winner, having swallowed considerably
more money than it yielded. Yet there was good reason for the quest, beyond a born
prospector's urge to relieve the boredom of gentleman farming: Renfrew was one of the most
promising gold districts in the province.
The story of Nova Scotia gold begins more than 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian and
Ordovician periods. Over the eons, continental drift brought early forms of Nova Scotia and
North Africa together until they collided. Shale from Africa's continental shelf -- where sediments
containing gold particles had been deposited in layer after layer -- crumpled and folded while
heat and pressure caused metamorphic changes, transforming the shale into slate and quartz and
concentrating the gold. The continents drifted apart during the Triassic Period, 200 million years
ago, but pieces from Africa were left behind in eastern North America. One such piece is the
Meguma Group, as Nova Scotia's gold-bearing rocks are known.
The continental drift further re-shaped these layers of rock. It was like pushing at a telephone
book lying flat on the table: the pages arrange themselves into wavy folds with gaps in between.
In geological terms, the folds that form a trough are called synclines, and those that form a crest
are called anticlines. In the Meguma Group, the gold is most often found in quartz veins that filled
the gaps between rock layers at the apex of the anticlines.
As settlement advanced into southeastern Nova Scotia, people began turning up bits and pieces
of loose quartz containing visible specks of gold. In 1861, gold was discovered at Tangier, on
the eastern shore, and also at The Ovens, near Lunenburg, which today is a nature park where
people still pan on the beach each summer. The first hints of gold at Renfrew were reported in
that same year and, by 1868, Nova Scotia was in the grip of a full-fledged gold fever. Thirteen
gold districts had been proclaimed by the provincial government and had already yielded 98,000
troy ounces (3,048 kilograms) of gold.
Of these, 10,000 troy ounces came from Renfrew. That put Renfrew in fourth place among the
districts, but production was rising rapidly. In 1868, the usually sceptical and occasionally caustic
Alexander Heatherington, an American expatriate based in Halifax who wrote frequent reports
about the Nova Scotia gold industry, called Renfrew the most valuable gold district in the
province.
A mining town of 700 souls sprang up, complete with hotels, post office and four-horse
stagecoach service. Companies with names straight from mythology (like the Ophir Mining
Company, the major operator at Renfrew) worked equally magical-sounding ore veins -- the
Paper Collar Vein, the Bonanza, the Kontiki, the Free Claim, and the one Horne had just spoken
about from the driver's seat of the jeep, the fabulous Jubilee and Thompson Vein, which in
1900-1901 yielded an astonishing 5,470 troy ounces (170 kilograms) from only 450 tons of ore
before it was cut off by a geological fault and vanished, never to be found again, not even by the
celebrated great-uncle Edmund H.
But gold, alas, is rather like love -- the hopes it engenders are often exaggerated and not
infrequently brief. In most of the gold districts, complex geology and irregular folding of the strata
caused small, rich pockets to occur unpredictably within large tracts of barren quartz. Nor did it
help that many of the 19th-century companies, as their bombastic names almost suggest, were
formed more to make money from market manipulations than from mining. Built on such flimsy
frameworks of hope and speculation, the moment they ran into difficulties, they also ran out of
money to deal with them. Thus, even before the turn of the century, many companies had
stopped mining on their own and had leased their properties to "tributers," a sort of mining
equivalent of moral bankruptcy. The tributers were the gave robbers of the mining world,
individual operators out to make maximum money for minimum work. They were notorious for
cleaning out only the richest pockets, known as "picking the eyes out of the mine," for doing no
development work, for keeping no records, for letting mine shafts flood, and for rarely troubling
to fill in trenches. They were the despair of the provincial department of mines, and their trenches
the undoing of numerous cattle.
By the Depression, commercial mining had virtually ceased, leaving the Nova Scotia back
country dotted with derelict installations and heaps of waste rock that today are explored by
mineral collectors, gold aficionados and industrial history buffs.
One of the longest surviving districts was Renfrew, where, thanks to co-operative geology and
the persistence of Horne's relatives, sporadic production continued as late as 1958. Overall, in its
96- year production history, the Renfrew district yielded a total of 51, 595 troy ounces (1,605
kilograms), placing it 11th among Nova Scotia gold producers. At the old fixed price of $35
U.S. a troy ounce, that added up to $1.8 million; at today's price of about $360 per troy ounce,
it comes to $18.6 million. It's a substantial rate of return at either price, considering that no costly
deep mining was ever done at Renfrew, where the deepest shaft only went down 140 metres.
Renfrew's geology continues to benefit Horne today. Here the strata are in the form of a large
dome, between whose layers the gold-bearing quartz veins lie more or less regularly and
predictably, easy to trace conveniently near the surface, and with few of the distortions that
bedevil gold mining elsewhere.
Horne's lack of formal training in geology or mine engineering may be another helpful factor in his
success. Undoubtedly a handicap for a less judicious person, for Horne it has worked the other
way around, by forcing him to size up each situation on its own merits (will it work or won't it?)
rather than relying on theoretical preconceptions of how things ought to be done.
Consider, for example, Horne's use of the salvaged stamp mills. Having more or less grown up
with them, he knew that they were obsolete and that modern ball mills could crush vastly greater
amounts of rock. But ball mills also cost vastly more, and in view of the small amounts of quartz
his near-surface work could supply, their large capacity was not of much use. Stamp mills,
though, are robust, reliable and virtually indestructible. Moreover, there were derelict stamp mills
waiting to be salvaged at next to no cost. So, obsolete or not, the stamp milks ideally matched
Horne's needs.
After a 20-minute jeep ride from Horne's home in Enfield, we came to a stop at a clearing closed
off by a wire gate. A sign on the gate said, "Danger, Blasting Area." A bright blue backhoe, a
bulldozer, an air compressor and an aging yellow boom crane stood beside mounds of slate.
Here, Horne trenches out the quartz veins. "No, the old- timers, they didn't have them," he said,
gesturing toward the backhoe. "That'll go as deep as 22 feet (6.7 metres), and it'll take a lot of
quartz out. I've got about $150,000 of equipment here," he continued, "all paid for by gold."
Once loosened by minor blasting, the barren shale is scraped out by backhoe to expose the
quartz vein still stuck to the rock wall like a layer of ham on a sloping sandwich, rarely more than
two or three inches thick, and easy to pry off with a crowbar, chisel and, if need be, air hammer.
The quartz goes into a bucket to be taken to the stamp mills. Sometimes you can see nuggets of
gold inside, particularly in the vein Horne was just then working, and which he calls the "Double
Nugget Vein" for its abundance of visible gold.
As he talks about the Double Nugget, Horne grows visibly more intense. Relaxed and
contemplative before, he now leans forward into the conversation while his features mirror a mix
of enjoyment of the challenge and contemplation of its possible outcome. This, he eagerly
explains, is definitely his most ambitious and possibly his most promising excavation. With the
help of a grandson and one of his two sons, he had dug the Double Nugget to the limit of the
back-hoe's reach, and it still looked good. So he hired a professional miner to help him stabilize
the pit walls and, once they'd been safety inspected, went on down to 12 metres. Plastic buckets
full of gold-flecked quartz chunks in his basement testify that the vein is still producing. Now that
he is down to 12 metres, he is driving horizontal shafts along the vein in true underground mining.
Leaving the Double Nugget diggings, we headed for the stamp mills. En route, Horne stopped
briefly at a small clearing to point out a tumbled pyramid of bleached shingles and mouldering
woodwork lying in a bramble patch. "There's a piece of mining history," he said, "the old