Dateline- Toronto Read online

  Albert of Belgium and his wife everyone knows.

  John II of Liechtenstein is a ruler who has had little publicity. Prince John has ruled over the Principality of Liechtenstein since 1858. He is eighty-three years old this year.

  I have always thought of Liechtenstein as a manager of prize-fighters that used to live in Chicago, but it seems there is a very prosperous country of that name ruled over by John the Second. John the First was his father. They’ve kept the country very much in the family for over a hundred years. Liechtenstein is all of sixty-five square miles and lies on the border between Switzerland and Austria. It had been a dependency of Austria but announced its independence on November 7, 1918. Two years ago the gallant Liechtensteiners made a treaty with the Swiss to run their post and telegraph system for them. All of the 10,876 inhabitants were doing well at the last report except Prince John, who is having a little trouble with his teeth.

  So far I have only mentioned the European kings who are still holding down their jobs. Ex-kings would take an article in themselves. I have never seen the kaiser nor Harry K. Thaw nor Landru. A good many of my best friends, though, have climbed up the wall of the garden at Doorn or attempted to gain admission disguised as bales of hay, cases of lager beer or Bavarian diplomats. Even when they have seen the kaiser, however, they report the result as unsatisfactory.

  Search for Sudbury Coal

  The Toronto Daily Star

  September 25, 1923

  SUDBURY, ONTARIO.—Is there coal in the Sudbury district?

  This is no new question. For twenty-six years competent geologists have admitted that there was something very like coal in the Sudbury basin, but that the quantity was small and the coaly matter was so mixed with impurities that it made a very poor grade of fuel. The geologists decided to call the coaly stuff anthraxolite.

  Last year, C. W. Knight, associate provincial geologist, said that if a great amount of the pure anthraxolite, giving an output of say six million tons, was ever found, it would be an event of great importance. But after examining the field he made an official report that he believed there were at most only a few thousand tons of coaly material in sight. He said, however, that the occurrence of the anthraxolite was more widespread than originally supposed.

  The British Colonial Coal Mines, Limited, of Toronto, are drilling for coal in the Sudbury basin, a short distance from Larchwood, Ontario. They have sunk four diamond drill holes. According to Stewart Hood, president of the company, they hope and expect to find a great bed of coal. “But,” said Mr. Hood, “it is a gamble. The only way we can get anywhere is by drilling to find the coal. All the people interested in the company have been told it is a gamble or speculation. But we hope and expect to find a great coal bed that will free Ontario from the necessity of depending on the United States for its anthracite coal.”

  I arrived in Sudbury at night. In the dark it was impossible to tell much about the town except there were plenty of red-brick buildings, plenty of streetlights, plenty of Chinese restaurants, and many girls on the streets. There was a movie showing Ben Turpin, French Canadian spoken in the bars, and real beer being sold on draft. I saw only three men drunk. In Cobalt there had been two men drunk at one bar before eleven o’clock in the morning.

  In the morning the streets of Sudbury looked very much like the night before except there were no streetlights, no girls, and nobody loafing around.

  In the office of the Ontario Diamond Drilling Company here, I found Mr. T. H. Hale, the secretary-treasurer, and Mr. Frank Pickard, who was in town from the diamond-drilling job the Ontario company was doing for the Toronto company, which has been drilling for coal near the Larchwood outcropping.

  Mr. Pickard was going back to the job out near Larchwood, and we started out together in a car, with a fat French-Canadian chauffeur, who almost completely filled the front seat. Going west up and out of Sudbury, the road runs through the weirdest country I have ever seen. It is a jumble of great rolling hills—of absolutely bald purple black rock, sulphur-stained, and looking like a lava-scorched volcanic slope immediately after an eruption. Occasionally, thin, black-charred stumps stood in a dip in the bare burnt rock hills. But mostly there was no sign of vegetation.

  Pickard said it had formerly been a timber country, but all vegetation had been destroyed by the sulphur smoke from the roasting beds. In these roasting beds the nickel ore was spread on beds of logs and chunk wood. Coal oil was poured over these huge beds of ore and wood, and the whole thing set on fire. After a while the ore burned of itself in the heat until all the sulphur was out of it. During the process the rolling clouds of sulphur smoke killed everything within miles right down through the grass roots to the bare rock.

  Driving through it was like going through some desolate early illustration of Pilgrim’s Progress. I thought I might see a lion on the way almost anywhere. Then we came up out of the valley, passed the big gray buildings of the Murray Mine on our right, and the tall stacks of smelters way off on our left and dipped down a hill into an open, flat, green farming country. It was the Sudbury basin, a clear tract of farming country, flat as Illinois or Holland, and held in by a horseshoe of blue mountains, the Nickel Range, that bound it in a dull, gray, irregular line all around the horizon.

  Where the farming country began to bunch into foothills again toward the far side of the basin, the motorcar stopped at the bunkhouse and office of the drillers. Just down the road was the Larchwood station of the C.P.R. [Canadian Pacific Railway] and across the fields to the left the log farmhouse of Mrs. Davey, where I found Thomas Watson. Thomas Watson is a tall Scotsman with a yellow mustache, a slight stoop, and a low country burr in his talk. He is in charge of operations in the field for the British Colonial Coal Mines, Limited.

  Thomas Watson was sitting down settling his dinner for a little while, and when the dinner was settled we got into the car and drove back down the road, and turned down a grass road toward where the drill was working on the company’s hole number four.

  At the end of a green slope of field stood the tripod with a plume of steam rising from the boiler shed. A diamond drill works like this. There is a steam-run sort of super brace and bit that whirls round and round a piece of steel pipe that has diamonds set in the end. This diamond-studded pipe end bores slowly into the rocks. Water is running into the drill and around it to hold down the temperature. The drill eats into the rock and everything it eats goes straight up inside it as a core. When the ten-foot segment of the pipe just back of the drill, called the core bottle, is full of the solid rock, the operator stops the drill whirring, hauls up the lengths of pipe. He stacks them in sheafs ready to go down again, and empties out the core bottle.

  The core that comes out of the pipe is knocked out by whacking the pipe with a wooden block and is then placed in the grooves of a core box. This is a sort of narrow five-foot coffin for the cores which lie in it like leads for giant Eversharp pencils. The cores are all kept in stacks of core boxes, and these boxes numbered so that the man in charge of operations knows just what piece of core came from what hole, and just what depth.

  After watching the drill work, and seeing a core of pure slate knocked out and packed away, we walked about three-quarters of a mile through a low-lying patch of bush to the outcropping of coal—anthracite, anthraxolite or whatever you want to call it.

  This outcropping lies in a gash in the slate rocks at the top of a ridge. It looks to a non-geologist like a pocket of much-broken-up coal mixed with a foreign substance lying in a zigzag cleft in the rocks. It looks, feels and has every appearance of coal, but it is mixed with all sorts of quartz, iron pyrites, and other minerals. We climbed to the top of the ridge, and looked out over the low country where white surveyors’ rods show the direct line the three holes have been bored in.

  Then we went down and inspected a shaft that had been driven sixty feet into the base of the ridge below the outcropping of coal. Thomas Watson went ahead with a candle, and I followed him walking on boards ove
r a waterhole to the end of the shaft, where was found the same sort of coal as had appeared in the outcropping. It looked like the same bed.

  Farther down the ridge beside the original diamond-drill hole reported on in 1896 by Dr. A. P. Coleman, Mr. Watson had supervised the sinking of a diamond drill. “At 342 feet we struck eighteen inches of slate, and four and a half feet of coal,” Mr. Watson said. “We went on down to 398 feet but there was no more coal except streaks in the rock at 378 feet.”

  The coal cores from the hole number one had been sent away to Toronto to the directors and officers, Mr. Watson said, except one box. I examined this and found some chunks of core that looked like very pure coal, then would come a streak of quartz, and silicate with chunks of iron pyrites and slate.

  “We drilled hole number two here,” Mr. Watson said. “At 1,398 feet we found seventeen inches of coal similar to the outcrop, but cleaner. Altogether we put the drill down 1,431½ feet.”

  We walked back through the bush toward the ridge, and stopped at a tramped-down piece with a large muddy area with a mud cone in the center. “Here we drilled number three hole,” Mr. Watson pointed. “It has a total depth of 1,236 feet and at 1,141 feet we hit eighteen inches of coal. At from 248 to 258 feet there was a coal position. The coal at 1,141 feet was too soft for the drill, and the water washed it away and we have only the sludge. But it was coal all right.”

  “How about number four hole?” I asked.

  “We had better wait till we get over there, and we’ll look at the core boxes then,” Mr. Watson said.

  Of the cores from the first three holes, I had examined about sixteen inches of the first core, which I have described. The second was sludged, that is, the coal was too soft for the drill, and all there was to show for the coal core was a mixture of ground coal, shale and water. Of the core of number three hole, I saw several long rods. It was very black, and hard looking, streaked with quartz, shining iron pyrites, and slate.

  We hiked back through the woods to where the drill was working on hole number four. On our way we crossed MacKenzie Creek, where there was a small outcropping of the same coal I had seen in the big outcropping on the ridge. We watched the drill a little while, and then went into a log shack, where the core boxes were stacked.

  “I sent away some of this to Toronto, the other day,” Mr. Watson said. “I’d best unscrew these two boxes.”

  I sat on the floor of the cabin with my notes and a pencil, and Thomas Watson worked over the boxes with a screwdriver. “Now give me the figures on this hole, Mr. Watson,” I suggested. “At 148 feet to 168 feet, the position is twenty feet. I’d say roughly there is perhaps ten feet of coal core shown. Here—you look at it.”

  I looked at the black core. It had a coaly sheen and was mixed with quartz, and a new pure white quartz I had not seen before. There were also thick streaks of slate, and a good deal of iron pyrites. The coaly material was broken up and looked very hard, with a peculiar, slippery shine.

  We were sitting on the floor of the cabin with the open core boxes before us, and Thomas Watson was lighting his pipe. Outside the drill was whirring and chunking. Coming over through the bush we had been talking about Mr. Lloyd George and the “standard of murrallity” in different countries, and from that to honor among newspapermen.

  “Has this been analyzed?” I asked.

  “I told them to get it analyzed. It looks like coal to me. But the eyes can be deceived. That’s their business. I’m here on the practical side,” Thomas Watson was saying. He leaned over the box.

  “Mr. Watson, tell me is that stuff really coal?” I asked.

  Thomas Watson said: “It’s no coal. They write me that people that know all about it say it’s coal. But it’s no coal, I know. The outcropping is coal. What we hit in number one and number two holes is coal. I’d stake my life on it. But this ten feet in number three and this twenty feet is no coal.”

  “But how do you know it’s not coal?” I said.

  “How do I know, man? How do I know anything about coal mining? I’ve been doing it for forty years. The stuff here in the ten feet number three and the twenty feet in number four is exactly what we had in Newlands Colliery; it was called ‘humph’ coal. It was of absolutely no value.”

  “Where did you say the mine was?” I asked.

  “Newlands Mine, ten miles out of Glasgow and roughly two miles north. It looked like coal, too, but it was of no value whatsoever, but there were two seams of good coal right alongside of it.”

  “But the first, the good coal. You think the vein runs down from the outcropping to where you picked it up at number one and number two holes at those depths?” I said.

  “Surely, and I know there’s coal there. But I won’t say this other is coal, because it isn’t.”

  Which settles the matter as far as Thomas Watson, British certified mining engineer, is concerned.

  A prominent Ontario geologist who himself has examined the Larchwood coal beds told the Star that the anthraxolite occurs in veins, rather than in beds. According to this geologist, the out-cropping near Larchwood is simply a niche in the rock filled with coaly matter.

  There is no doubt but what the rocks are too old in the Sudbury basin to have a real coal bed, this geologist told the Star. The anthraxolite in its present form is so impure that it would have to be crushed, washed to get the impurities out, then in the form of a powder it would have to be briquetted. To be of real commercial value there would need to be millions of tons. However, no one really knows how much of this anthraxolite exists, and if people want to put their money into hunting for it in commercial quantities, it is a good way for them to gamble. The big question is, how much of the anthraxolite is there? If there is enough, it is, of course, really important.

  The Star checked Mr. Watson’s figures over with Mr. Stewart Hood and Mr. J. H. Henderson, who is also connected with the British Colonial Coal Mines, Limited.

  “We have every confidence in Mr. Watson and in his reports,” Mr. Hood said.

  “Just how would you define a coal position, Mr. Henderson?” the Star asked.

  “Well, you’ve asked a layman,” Mr. Henderson answered. He hesitated for some time. “I have had it explained to me several times—” Mr. Hood demonstrated with two pieces of paper. “You go through certain formations and locate coal, then you find other formations, and strike off into another set entirely. When you get to the same formation, you leave off and you know you have the same position.”

  Mr. Henderson suggested that it was very hard for a layman to use geological or engineering terms.

  The reporter asked Mr. Hood if the coal from number three and number four holes had been analyzed.

  “No,” said Mr. Hood.

  “It has been burnt,” Mr. Henderson said.

  Mr. Hood said he had not been out to the field since the drill was started on number two hole. Consequently he had not seen either number three hole or number four hole. The company only has the drill logs for number one and number two holes, he said. “But,” said Mr. Hood, “we have Mr. Thomas Watson’s report and we are drilling, trying to trace the main seam back into the basin where we believe it lies.”

  Professor A. P. Coleman, spoken of with respect and affection as “The Old Man” by generations of Canadian geologists that have been uncovering the mineral wealth of the north country, read a proof of the Star’s investigation trip to the Sudbury “coal fields,” presented herewith, in his office in the Royal Ontario Museum today.

  “Everything reported here bears out our information and reports that there are small seams of anthraxolite near Larchwood, Ontario,” Professor Coleman said, “but the thing to remember is that coal always occurs as beds. Anthraxolite is never found in beds. It is found in fissures.”

  Dr. Coleman examined specimens from two different outcroppings on the British Colonial Coal Mines, Limited, property brought to Toronto by a reporter for the Star.

  “Yes. That is the same anthraxolite,” he said.

/>   The reporter showed him a piece of the “coal” from the drill hole of the company’s number one hole. “We have a good many purer specimens of anthraxolite than that in the university,” Professor Coleman said. “That is mixed with slate and other minerals.”

  “This is the great difference,” Professor Coleman continued. “Coal is due to plant growth and always lies in distinctive beds. Anthraxolite always lies in a fissure. Anthraxolite was originally bitumen. It was a bituminous substance that could flow and occupy the fissures. It has a totally different origin than coal.

  “The bitumen has lost its volatile constituents and the fixed carbon is left. That is why you get more carbon than in anthracite.”

  Professor Coleman paused. “The report is very vivid and seems to me to be very accurate,” he said. “I would use the word silicon rather than silicates. That is the only thing I see to change. I see nothing in the drilling operations to indicate that conditions are in any way changed since we made our report in 1896. The three drill holes have all picked up the same fissure of anthraxolite that runs down from the outcropping. The only new thing is that there are more outcroppings. But these were bound to be found as the country was opened up.”

  “What is the significance of these new outcrops?” asked the reporter.

  “These have no new significance,” Professor Coleman said. “For the way in which it occurs proves it is not coal. As it is not coal, the whole series of inferences that you make for a coal bed disappears.”

  “Just what would you call a coal position, Dr. Coleman?” asked the reporter.

  “In coal beds,” Dr. Coleman explained, “if you know the stripe and the dip of the coal, you can work out roughly the amount. But when you have irregular fissures, such as anthraxolite, you can’t predict what you’ll find. Anthraxolite occurs in a very irregular crack or fissure that is constantly varying and full of big masses of rocks.”