Chapter V: Isle of Iron, Men of Steel  (continued)

Brothers James, John and Esau Butler, sons of the acclaimed 'discoverer' of the Bell Island iron ore deposits. (V/1.) (23Kb)

Some years later, one of Jabez's sons, Esau, moved to Montreal. Esau occasionally pondered the affair with the assayer and finally asked his father to send some of the rock to Montreal. There he had it analyzed. So impressive were the test results that he telegraphed his family to stake the source at once; and on 4 August 1892 Jabez Butler, his brother John, his three sons-Esau, John and Jabez-and James Miller applied for a mineral license to three claims on the north side of Bell Island.⁽⁶⁾

The Butlers, being primarily farmers and fishermen, lacked the money to develop their claims and reluctantly approached a St. John's merchant, Joseph Pippy, for financial aid. Pippy presented them with a contract proposal that confirmed their worst suspicions of merchants. He and a partner, Alexander Shirran, agreed to sell or lease the claims for the Butlers in exchange for 20 per cent of any resulting profits; a further 10 per cent was to be reserved for expenses incurred in connection with the mine. Jabez sent the document to his son John, then living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John showed it to a mining consultant who declared: "Messers. Shirran and Pippy are offering to do for twenty per cent what a real estate agent can do for two."⁽⁷⁾ However, for lack of an alternative, the Butlers accepted the merchants' terms and in May 1893 signed the indenture.

Shirran and Pippy were greedy but competent promoters and within one month had an interested party: the New Glasgow Iron, Coal and Rail Company of Nova Scotia. The company's chief engineer, Robert Chambers, visited Bell Island in June with the Butlers, who first plied him with a meal of fresh lobsters and flatfish and then showed him their claims. As Chambers recalled: "It could be seen at a glance that the property was valuable."⁽⁸⁾ He told the Butlers to obtain a mining lease for the land while he negotiated with Shirran and Pippy. On 3 September 1894 the deal was made. The company leased the three claims from the Butlers for $1000 and a royalty of 5 cents per ton on all shipped ore, and had the option to purchase the claims for $120,000.

Bell Islanders' first reaction to news of the deal was a concern that only Nova Scotians would receive jobs with the company. Chambers calmed their fears in the spring of 1895 by hiring some local men to lay a tramway from the claims on the north shore of the island to the more sheltered south shore; he had other locals build an open-trestle pier at the tramway's southern end. Still more men were set to work with the iron ore itself.

The first ore mined on Bell Island was quarried from surface exposures of the lowermost of the three iron-rich beds, the Lower Bed. The ore yielded in rectangular chunks to the swing of a pickaxe and cost less to quarry and handle than did a contractor's fee for removing earth; the ore was mined literally as cheaply as dirt. Young men and boys cobbed the ore and loaded it into cable-driven ore cars that trundled across the island and over a swaying suspension bridge to the pier. There the cars spilled their contents into storage bins fitted with trap doors for emptying into the hold of ships. By the time the first cargo of ore left Bell Island for Nova Scotia in December 1895, Thomas Cantley of the New Glasgow company had already christened the mine site "Wabana" from the Abanaki 'wabunaki' meaning 'morning land', or the place where the sun first rises.⁽⁹⁾

Ownership of the Bell Island iron deposits underwent some revision during the initial years of mining. In 1895 the New Glasgow company amalgamated with the Nova Scotia Steel and Forge Company Limited into the Nova Scotia Steel Company Limited; this latter company became known as the 'Scotia'⁽¹⁰⁾ The Scotia initiated changes in the mine's surface facilities and secured additional property, including some submarine claims adjoining the Butler claims, its geologists reasoning correctly that the shallowly dipping ore beds extended out beneath Conception Bay. The Scotia directors, however, miscalculated the cost of renovations and soon found that the company was in financial trouble.

In Nova Scotia, meanwhile, a Bostonian named Henry Whitney had just leased large portions of the Cape Breton coalfields and was seeking a nearby iron ore supply for a proposed steel mill.⁽¹¹⁾ He approached the Scotia directors about buying some of their Bell Island holdings; the directors tentatively accepted the offer. Before the Butlers fully understood what was happening, the Scotia company exercised its purchase option and bought the three original claims for $120,000 on 4 March 1899. Having achieved clear title to the property, it began serious negotiations with Whitney, who by then had incorporated the Dominion Iron and Steel Company Limited or the 'Dominion'.

On 21 August 1899, the Scotia and Dominion companies signed an indenture giving the Dominion company part of the Bell Island iron deposits. The contract details merit some elaboration, as they determined future development of the mines. In exchange for $1.1 million, the Dominion company took the Upper and Lower Bed holdings on the Scotia land claims, all holdings on the adjacent submarine claims and all mining facilities. This left the Scotia company with only the superior-quality Middle Bed. It therefore built a new pier and tramway and secured a submarine area beyond the Dominion submarine claims to ensure itself a future supply of ore. In brief: on the land claims the Dominion owned the Lower and Upper Beds and the Scotia the Middle Bed; and on their respective submarine claims each company owned all three beds.⁽¹²⁾

The Scotia-Dominion contract may have pleased the management of the companies involved, but for Bell Island miners the $1.1 million price tag aggravated a sense of grievance that had been simmering since an ineffectual wage strike in 1896. Early signs of labour unrest came in the fall of 1899 when a St. John's journalist touring the mines noticed an ore car scrawled with the words: "I am killing myself for 10¢ an hour."⁽¹³⁾ Chronic discontent tarnished the 1900-01 winter, and on the following June 17 the 1100 Dominion and Scotia employees went on strike chanting: "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work!"