Log Cabins

This book, written in verse, tells of my own prospecting experiences and Impressions, and was written while in the bush in 1979. The book describes various mining camps in Canada, and the log cabins prospectors lived in.

It starts in relatively recent times looking at the discovery of silver mines in the Cobalt-Haileybury area of Northeastern Ontario in the early 1900s, and then the search for Gold in the Red Lake area of northwestern Ontario in the 1930s and takes us into more recent times. Red Lake, Ontario, then was (and still is) a small gold-mining town, where in 1968 I met and married a 37 year old widow with three children.

The story also goes back to the Yukon Klondike Gold Rush, which forced prospectors to make a long climb on foot over the Chilkoot Pass and then cross Lake Bennett. The book tells of Klondike Mike, who carried his piano over the Chilkoot Pass, and arrived in the Yukon very exhausted at the end of that trek. Of course, it tells of many details of the town of Dawson, deep in the land of sand and gold.

In recent news (2016) a new significant Klondike discovery was made by a prospector from Timmins, Ontario, whom I met at the Prospectors and Developers Annual Convention ("PDAC") which says they have found the source of the placers, the "Mother Lode".