by Graham Brazier
Some Notes on Coal Mining on the T’sable River (contd)
Following the closure of the ‘forsaken’ Baynes Sound mine in 1877, (outlined in September’s Flagstone) prospecting for coal on the banks of the T’sable River wasn’t undertaken seriously again until early in the twentieth century. It was 1917 when a site ‘1 ¼ miles above the old mine’ was first identified as one worthy of further exploration. By that date, coal had already proved its dominance of the local economy. Four mines operated in the vicinity of Cumberland and four others had already made their contribution, exhausted their profitable seams and closed. Sixty-four men had lost their lives in an explosion in 1901, a two-year long strike widely believed to have been engineered by Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited to divert attention from a stock scandal, had scarred the community but the demand for coal was unrelenting and the search for more continued throughout the region.
Explorations conducted in 1918 and again in 1920, however, were inconclusive. Another twenty years went by before Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited, which, despite its name, hadn’t involved a member of the Dunsmuir family since 1910, applied for a license to prospect in the area. Active exploratory drilling began to show promise in the early 1940s, but the decision to open a mine at the site approximately 5 miles inland by road from Buckley Bay is not well documented. It seems that two other sites were considered at the time: 1) the site of the old mine (3 ¼ miles from Buckley Bay) and, 2) an outcropping at Cowie Creek, the watershed adjacent to the T’sable River in a southerly direction. [This is near the site presently being considered by ComplianceCoal Corporation for the Raven Underground Coal Project.] It’s not clear exactly when the decision to locate the mine at the northern most site was made, but by 1946 the Company seems to have settled on it as it began considering building a road from Cumberland directly to the potential mine site on the T’sable River – a road which would reduce the travel distance for its workers from 22 to 10 miles and avoid having to pass through Union Bay and Buckley Bay on public roads. This was the Company’s response to the workers insistence that payment of their hourly wage be calculated from the time they left their home – the one they rented from the Company – to the time they returned to it. Consequently, the Company’s interest was to minimize travel time.
The Company’s calculations indicated that an adequate road could be built for $65,000. This, of course, was $65,000 the Company preferred not to spend and it suggested that perhaps this was the responsibility of the provincial government. Provincial road standards were, however, significantly higher than ‘adequate’ and would, it was estimated, require an expenditure of $357,169. Talks involving the Company, the Highways Department, the miners and Cumberland business groups went on during 1946 and 1947 and concluded that a road was essential but were unable to reach agreement on who should pay for it. Then in July of 1947 a Vancouver newspaper shed its own form of light on the subject when it wrote that the ‘discovery of a rich new coal mine which gives promise of becoming one of the best producers in the coal mining history of Vancouver Island’ may create a ghost town of Cumberland if the 10 miles of road is not built. The implication was that the Company would have to provide housing for workers at the mine site and therefore draw from the present population of Cumberland. With words that could only have come from the Company, the article went on: “It is estimated that T’sable River, when in full swing, will be able to produce one million tons per year and sufficient coal has been blocked out to guarantee that production rate for at least 25 years.”
Developmental work, employing twenty or so men who lived on the site during the work-week and returned to their homes in Cumberland on weekends, went on during 1946 and 1947 while the issue of the road remained unresolved. Meanwhile dissemination of the Company’s optimistic message was taken up in Victoria by The Daily Colonist. In September of 1947 it disclosed that it had ‘learned from reliable sources here yesterday’, that “Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited is completing plans to put into full-scale production a new mine at T’sable River that is expected to double Vancouver Island’s production…Experts who have made exhaustive tests and explorations estimate the seam is capable of producing 1,000 tons a day for the next 30 years.”
1947, it turns out, had a few more surprises to deliver. Oil had been discovered in Leduc Alberta. No. 5 mine exhausted its profitable seams and closed; leaving No. 8 the only functioning mine in the area where three hundred miners were employed. The T’sable River mine was still in the ‘developmental stage’. In the meantime it appears that the issue of the direct road from Cumberland to the mine site was quietly resolved. When the mine finally opened in 1949, miners were put up in Company housing in Union Bay during the work-week and allowed to return to Cumberland to be with their families on weekends. Daily travel to the mine was consequently reduced to ten miles – five miles south on paved public highway to Buckley Bay and then another five miles west on private unpaved road.
By the mid 1950s the T’sable River mine employed between 200 and 230 men and produced 150,000 – 200,000 tons of coal annually. Production, however, never did equal the projections made by the Company in the mid 1940s and the Exploration Department remained active, drilling numerous bore holes in areas adjacent to the mine as they sought out new marketable seams. Once again they were drawn to Cowie Creek where, in November of 1948, an outcrop of coal described as ‘good coking coal’ was identified on the north branch of the creek. Over the course of the next decade the Exploration Department returned to the Cowie Creek area several times where they conducted drilling programs with varying results. In 1951 A. F. Buckham, head of the Exploration Department wrote, in a memo to the General Superintendent: “The very good showing at Cowie Creek makes drilling here a ‘must’ sooner or later.” Following an expenditure of several thousand dollars in 1952, Buckham reported the results in another memo: “The area [Cowie Creek] then, is not the ‘bonanza’ we are looking for. Although the work has proved a large tonnage of coal it has also proved the presence of several large faults. I regret making such a report although it may be some consolation that we have found the faults before making large capital investments in a mine, instead of after.” Nevertheless, some drilling was resumed in 1953-54 and by 1955 the results underwent a dramatic change and it was reported that they (the Exploration Department) believed they had located ‘several possible mine sites…in the area between the T’sable River and the south branch of Cowie Creek’.
While the Exploration Department offered encouraging results it also invariably recommended the expenditure of further sums of money in order to ‘prove’ the results. For a couple of reasons, 1956 was not a year that Management was likely to be receptive to such a recommendation. Coal production had just taken the first of, what would be many downturns. In addition the Department of Highways had begun to enforce load limits on the public portion of the road between the mine and Union Bay and had found their trucks to weigh up to 40% over the legal limit. It appears that the obvious solution of reducing the weight of each load was unacceptable to the Company as it immediately began to research costs associated with the construction of a private road between the mine and Union Bay where the coal was delivered for shipping. In the meantime, the Department of Highways gave the Company two years to solve the problem. In response, the Company simply resumed its practice of overloading its trucks and carried on business-as-usual.
By 1957, it became evident that managers were disappointed with the production of the T’sable River mine and wanted to develop an alternative. The problem was that the head of the Exploration Department suggested that an expenditure of an additional $38,500 was required to ‘prove’ the Cowie Creek results. Management apparently wasn’t prepared to take the estimate without further investigation and produced one of their own which suggested the expenditure required was between $75,000 and $100,000. One, unnamed member of the management team observed; “If the Cowie Creek coalfield had proved itself to be a more or less foolproof undertaking I would long ago have recommended the closure of the T’sable River Mine and the rapid development and opening up of the Cowie Creek area.” I’m left with the impression that the Company was deeply divided on this issue and that it may have been the subject of much internal debate over the course of the next few years. Perhaps it was even the source of Bill Johnstone’s contention that, from the beginning, the T’sable River mine was in the wrong place. [Bill was a long-time miner and author of “Coal Dust in My Blood”. He died in Courtenay on his 102nd birthday, March 2, 2010.]
In any case, after eleven years of operation, Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited closed the T’sable River Mine in April of 1960 and 200 miners were without work. Almost immediately, however, a group of three experienced men formed Comox Mining Company Limited and hired 100 of the miners to extract coal on a smaller scale. Under the direction of Stan Lawrence, this operation went on for another six years before the markets completely dried up and coal mining ceased to be a part of the economy of the Comox Valley. All the easily worked deposits had been worked, railways were converting to diesel fuel and other markets were changing over to oil and natural gas. When interviewed ten years after the closing of the mine Stan Lawrence predicted “that Cumberland’s coal will not be rediscovered, at least not until the world is extremely desperate for energy because of the small quantities and fault lines.”
[Final note: The T’sable River mine produced slightly less than 2 million tons over its lifetime, which turned out to be seventeen years. This amounted to 8% of the output projected by Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Limited in 1947.]
Read More: Part III: Exploration, Sampling and Maneuvering (1966 – 2010)
Denman Opposes Coal 