Chapter VI: St. Lawrence Town: Its Triumph and Tragedy  (continued)

While miners toiled underground on the Black Duck vein between 1933 and 1941, Corporation prospectors and labourers ranged the hillsides around St. Lawrence and uncovered a dozen separate fluorspar veins. Some of the larger veins - the Iron Springs, Lord and Lady Gulch, Blue Beach and Hares Ears - became full-scale mines. The smaller veins provided a contract wage for the half a dozen men who worked them and provided low-grade ore for the Corporation to blend with the high-grade ores from the Iron Springs and Black Duck veins.

Scores of anecdotes underlie the development of each Corporation vein. The Black Duck No. 2 vein was discovered in 1935 during the clearing of land for a football field. The Red Head vein was located in 1933 and achieved modest fame as having the driest of all St. Lawrence shafts. The Church vein, though the third-widest in the area, never reached production; true to its name, part of the vein lay in the immediate vicinity of a Roman Catholic church whose premises the Corporation was loathe to desecrate.⁽⁸⁾ The accidental discovery of the Hares Ears vein happened when two men who were hired to collect rocks for a road bed unwittingly filled their wheelbarrows with fluorspar from the vein and emptied them before the eyes of an incredulous foreman. Perhaps the most romantic tale concerns the discovery of the 7700-foot-long Blue Beach vein. In the early 1930s, a St. Lawrence woodsman from St. Malo, France noticed in the darkness of dawn that his metal sled runners created sparks over a particular outcrop along his wood-hauling route. Curiosity prompted him to test a piece of the outcrop for fluorspar. He pulverized it, threw the powder on a hot stove and watched as it fluoresced.⁽⁹⁾ Thus was the Blue Beach vein discovered.

Of the nine fluorspar mines that operated contemporaneously with the Black Duck mine, seven were suspended or permanently halted before or during World War II. The same war-time iron and steel shortage that increased the demand for metallurgical-grade fluorspar⁽¹⁰⁾ also created a scarcity of mining equipment, forcing the Corporation to phase out all but the most lucrative operations. Even the Black Duck mine succumbed; engineers found that the vein narrowed with depth and ordered its closure in May 1941. This left the Corporation with two producing mines: the Blue Beach and the Iron Springs.

The Iron Springs mine contained the highest-grade ore of any Corporation vein and possessed the district's most spectacular subterranean scenery. One account of its underground reaches describes a cavern 200 feet deep, 100 feet high and 2 feet wide lined with fluorspar crystals ranging in hue from green through mauve to pink and in size from tiny to 2 feet across.

Stories differ regarding the time and means by which the vein was discovered, but most evidence verifies the following version. Late one afternoon in November 1931, Dr. W.S. Smith and a local prospector, Michael Clark, were returning home to St. Lawrence, having been prospecting in the Salt Cove district. As they waded through Salt Cove Brook, Clark noticed a boulder of colourless fluorspar. On the next day the men located the original fluorspar vein and, while trenching it, uncovered the iron-rich spring that gave the vein its name. Michael Clark was the most successful of the Corporation prospectors and received this eulogy from Dr. Smith:

"The prospector who found the larger veins and some of the lesser ones for the Corporation was Michael Clark. He was painstaking, not objecting to spending a whole day on a few square yards of an area where float occurred... He generally worked alone. Mike died in 1942, in direst poverty."⁽¹¹⁾

The Iron Springs mine experienced a brief period of open-pit mining beginning in 1935, but became an underground operation in 1938. There, working conditions were worse than in the Black Duck mine. Narrowness of the Iron Springs vein occasionally required that wheelbarrows be bent inwards to squeeze through the opening. Dust could not escape the drift, witness the words of one ex-miner:

"In the first eight or ten years they done a cruel lot of dry drilling... They were only using a dry hammer and there was nothing, only smoke and dust all the time... You'd turn on your air hose and blow out your drift as clear as you could get it, you'd clear away your chutes, and start mucking again. When you were going ahead with your light, you could see something like a fog, your light was shining through streaks. You'd see circles, you often see the sun shining like that..."⁽¹²⁾

The mine water, which leaked into the mine at the rate of 2000 gallons per minute, reduced dust levels somewhat, but soaked miners to the skin. In summer this was merely a nuisance; in winter it made the three-mile walk home extremely unpleasant.

The copious water placed a tremendous strain on the pumps and hydroelectric plants. During summer the plants could barely keep the mine dry, let alone power the mills, electric lights and other facilities. Once, a six-hour pump failure caused mine water to rise, and led to the following recollection:

"I was lowered under water, me and another fellow. When the hoistman was given the bell to take us up, he shoved the wrong control and we went down,... under eight feet of water. I didn't mind that. I opened the hatch that was in the roof. This fellow that was with me,... there was only one thing in his mind right then and that was to hold on. I had a job to get him clear. He was the Mine Captain too. I said to him, 'What happened to you?' and he said, 'The only thing what come to me was to hold on when that cold water struck me.' A poor place to hold on, down there eight feet..."⁽¹³⁾

The story shows the dangers inherent in the Iron Springs mine. It also demonstrates what many of the miners believed, namely that their native intelligence and experience in the mine surpassed that of most people, mine captains or otherwise, from outside of St. Lawrence.

Revolutionary history has shown that groups submit to oppressive conditions only while the oppressor remains dictatorial. When he becomes accommodating towards his subjects they read it as a sign of weakness and revolt. On a much reduced scale, the same phenomenon affected the Corporation in 1941.

For about eight years, the Corporation possessed insufficient backing, paid miners abnormally low wages, provided them with abysmal working conditions - and got away with it. Lack of capital sometimes forced the management to choose between paying its employees and paying its debts for customs duties. As often as not the customs officer in St. Lawrence waived duty on incoming mine equipment in order to ensure that miners got their wages.

A combination of circumstances altered the monetary position of the Corporation around 1940. In the late 1930s, Seibert obtained credit from a New York bank, just as the United States reduced its import tariff on fluorspar.⁽¹⁴⁾ These events and the increased wartime demand for metallurgical-grade fluorspar after 1939 alleviated the Corporation's financial uncertainties for the first time since its inception.

The Corporation's changes in fortune did not go unnoticed by the miners. As a concession to its new stability, the Corporation introduced safety lamps underground and began paying the men in cash rather than by cheque. The miners viewed these gestures as a signal to expect a drastic change in their lot. When it failed to materialize, they grew restless and resentful.

Meanwhile another company, Newfoundland Fluorspar Limited (or Newfluor), had secured land near St. Lawrence and had begun to develop fluorspar property adjacent to that of the Corporation. Newfluor was a subsidiary of the wealthy Aluminum Company of Canada and could afford to provide its workers with the latest in equipment and conveniences. Evening conversations in St. Lawrence kitchens inevitably touched upon relative virtues of the two companies and heightened the Corporation miners' sense of injustice. On 17 March 1941, two days after forming a new union, they went on strike.