<i>Cobalt</i>
Authors: Thomas B. Cole
Journal: JAMA (2014)

Silver was discovered in 1903 on the shore of a lake about 500 km north of Toronto. By 1906 more than 40 mining sites had been cleared from the surrounding forest, and the town of Cobalt had sprung up around them. In just a few years Cobalt was one of the world’s most productive sources of silver ore. The ore was near the surface, so it could be mined without heavy equipment. Threadbare prospectors sought their fortunes with no more than a pick, a wheelbarrow, and a few sticks of dynamite, pitching tents on their claim sites and hauling gear and supplies up the muddy roads from the railway station. When the surface veins played out, the miners dug deeper. Shafts were sunk into the rock, and tall enclosures called headframes were built over them to house the elevators that shuttled men and equipment in and out of the mines. Cobalt thrived for several years, but then the price of silver fell, the deposits played out, and most of the mines were shut down. By 1931, when Canadian artist Yvonne McKague Housser (1897-1996) arrived to paint its portrait, Cobalt was past its prime. To Housser, the town’s hard luck was part of its charm, and the bones of the landscape were irresistible—the sagging foundations, rickety piers, and the commanding presence of the headframes on the ridge above the town. She liked the way the town was stacked upon itself; the dominant feature of this painting is its verticality, from the peaks of the headframes to the mineshafts plunging far below the surface. Housser was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1897. She studied at the Ontario College of Art from 1915 to 1920 under William Cruikshank, J. W. Beatty, and Robert Holmes and received additional training in Paris the following year. In 1922 she returned to Ontario to teach and paint. Housser exhibited her work at the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1923 and subsequently participated in group shows at the National Gallery of Canada and other venues. In 1930 she traveled to Vienna to take a course in child art from the Viennese painter Franz Cizek and subsequently taught children as well as adults. Housser admired the work of American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, whose mildly distorted adobe structures and enlarged flower parts were exaggerations of reality if not quite abstract, and her paintings of Cobalt are similar in that way. Like other Canadian artists of the era, Housser went on sketching expeditions, but she preferred human-made to natural landscapes. Her first visit to Cobalt was in 1917, when she was still a student and the town was prospering—its 28 active mines produced more than 2000 tons of silver ore that year. The cramped and chaotic layout of the town reflected its origin as a squatters’ camp, when the rush was on to pitch a tent, start digging, and get rich. The men swarming in gave little thought to building an infrastructure that would last more than a couple of winters. Sepia-tone photographs of Cobalt’s early years show muddy streets, stray boulders, open pits and mining trenches, piles of construction debris, benches made of boards laid across tree stumps, open-air wood stoves, kiosks offering shoe shines or a “quick lunch,” log cabins and prefabricated tar-paper dwellings with corrugated tin roofs, horses pulling wagons and carts, and throngs of men in suits, wool sweaters, and wide-brimmed hats disembarking from the train. Ultimately Cobalt developed into a stable community, but in the boom years it was noisy, dirty, and dangerous. Small-time prospectors worked the surface veins with hand tools while larger operations used dynamite to open tunnels and clear the shafts, dampening the din of picks and shovels with the rumble of explosions. Ore wasmined by the cartload and crushed by the mills into small mountains of waste rock called slag. Arsenic and other minerals leached out of the slag and drained into the lake. Fecal matter washed into the waterways from privies, stables, and dairies. Despite warnings from the Ontario Board of Health, insufficient action was taken to protect the water supply, and outbreaks of typhoid occurred in 1907, 1909, and 1917. Anne Saunders, a nurse, washed her patients’ linen, scrubbed their cots, and buried their excreta—not an easy task when the ground was cold. During one epidemic Elizabeth MacEwen, a schoolteacher, saw bodies laid out along the roadside for disposal. Still there was resistance to set aside minable land for waste dumps. Eventually 1200 cartloads of garbage and manure were hauled out of town. Mining was and is a hazardous industry. In 1906, only a month after Anne Saunders arrived in Cobalt, an explosion of seven tons of dynamite destroyed her house and many others in the area. She attended to the injuries of her neighbors andthensetabout repairingherhome.Fires startedandspread easily inCobalt, due to theprospectors’ unfamiliaritywith explosives and the ubiquitous piles of debris. TheCobalt Volunteer FireDepartment lacked the resources to fight amajor fire. Ononeoccasion thevolunteersdynamitedsomehouses tocreate a firebreak, but the explosionmade the fire spread faster. After eachdisaster the townwas rebuilt as soon as possible so the miners could resume digging. In 1931, when Housser came to Cobalt to paint, the silver boom was over and the town was dormant, but its history was clear to anyone who walked its streets or toured its deserted mines. Hand-colored postcards from Cobalt’s better days deleted the shanties and dressed up the town’s land-