Chapter II: Fever of the Copper Ore  (continued)

Shortly after Christmas of 1874, thirty Germans from Ellershause landed in Betts Cove and joined seventy Newfoundlanders in erecting the mine's surface facilities. The men began mining in the spring of 1875 and by September had exported 6000 tons of copper ore to Swansea.

The mine site had six shafts. The ore removal or 'outcast' shaft sat near Betts Head, where copper was first discovered. Steam engines forced compressed air down pipes in the 'ventilation' shafts to relieve the stale subterranean atmosphere. Miners descended the 'travelling' shafts by stairs and vertical ladders that gradually reached 150 feet below the surface of the earth. According to Reverend Moses Harvey, who visited Betts Cove in August 1878, navigating underground was a challenge:

"I went down the mine in company with Mr. Ellershausen, who knows every nook and corner of it as well as a housewife knows the rooms and closets of her house...I followed him in his rapid course up and down ladders, along winding galleries, over planks were a false step would be instantly fatal, and by the edge of yawning chasms..."⁽⁹⁾

Harvey did not mention that Ellershausen himself had narrowly escaped death four months earlier when a ladder collapsed beneath him during an inspection tour. Ellershausen strode through his mine twice daily and often startled nightshift workers by appearing among them, wraith-like, at 2 o'clock in the morning.

The main excavations occupied a level between 100 and 150 feet below the surface and formed a shimmering rabbit warren of candle-lit caverns alternating with copper-rich pillars left behind to support the roof. Men working under mine manager Adolph Guzman blasted the rock loose and removed it with pickaxes and crowbars into wagons. These rolled along a tramway to the bottom of the outcast shaft, where a steam engine hauled material to the surface. There, on a huge roofed copper floor, men and boys cobbed larger pieces of ore, leaving smaller fragments to be jigged through sieves that separated the heavy copper-rich portions from the lighter rock.

The Betts Cove Mining Company installed Newfoundland's first ore smelters in 1876. The six cupola blast furnaces sat on the west side of the cove and smelted ore down to a regulus of 20 to 30 per cent copper over fires of Welsh coal. The coal arrived as ballast aboard the same vessels used to carry ore and regulus to Swansea. When an ore ship appeared in Betts Cove, the whole community turned out to witness or help with the loading. Two-ton cars full of ore crept the first 500 feet from the mine site by horse-power and then coasted a mile down a tramway to the pier. Between 1875 and 1878, more than 75,000 tons of ore left Betts Cove for Swansea.

Engraving of Betts Cove c. 1878, printed on reverse side of Betts Cove Mining Company bills. Swansea cars and ore smelters are in foreground. (II/2.) (37Kb)

The population of Betts Cove peaked in 1878 at about 2000 individuals, half of whom were miners from Newfoundland, Germany, Nova Scotia, Cornwall, California, France and Australia. Men received 4 to 10 shillings per day in custom-made Betts Cove Mining Company bills that ranged in value from 6 pence to 5 pounds and that were redeemable for merchandise at local stores.⁽¹⁰⁾ Engraved on the bill face was a picture of the Betts Cove smelters.

Betts Cove facilities included three churches, a hospital, school, foundry, telegraph office, mineral assay laboratory and sundry stores. Liquor was forbidden in town, apparently to the good of the community, as there was a singular lack of the usual rowdiness of mining towns. Reverend Harvey noted with satisfaction: "No dissipations or midnight revelries disturb the repose of Betts Cove."⁽¹¹⁾ Not surprisingly, the two resident policemen spent most of their time preventing illicit distillation of alcohol.