Coal Black Heart (11 page)

The year 1848 was the turning point. Joe Howe’s Reform party took power in Nova Scotia, forming the first colonial government within the British Empire to be popularly elected. They had a somewhat different attitude toward Nova Scotians’ inherent right to control their own resources. Democracy, remember, was the spirit of the day—making it hard to live by a far-off decision to flog the title to the province’s underground mineral rights to cover some spendthrift English nobleman’s gambling debts. The GMA must have sensed that its day was done. Later in 1848, it was forced to open a small mine in Joggins to prevent Abraham Gesner and some associates from sinking a shaft there. Just months later, Joe Howe—he of the epic battles for freedom of the press and responsible government—introduced a bill in the legislature. It had a dull name
(An Act respecting Casual and Territorial Revenue)
but a huge impact. The legislation provided, amongst other things, that the right and title of Her Majesty respecting all mines, minerals and oil and all rents and profits from them were “assigned to the disposal of the General Assembly of the Province.” Translation: Nova Scotia had repatriated its coal.

Henry Whitney started out as just a kid with a comfortable life in Conway, Massachusetts. After graduating from good old Williston Seminary, his prep school—“Sammy, my Sammy,” went the school song, “My heart yearns for thee/ Yearns for your campus and your old elm tree”—he went home and worked in his father’s store, then spent a few years kicking around the banking business before forming a New York shipping company. During the Civil War, he headed south to speculate in cotton and to dream up a scheme to raise sunken vessels. When those plans flopped, he returned to Boston and joined his dad’s steamship company. He married. When
his father, the General, died in 1878, Whitney took over the company, which grew more prosperous. Historian Don MacGillivray says that Whitney somehow got control of the Hancock Inspirator Co., “another flourishing concern,” and also emerged with power over the “much criticized” Boston Water Power Company.

It was that kind of age in America: anyone could become a Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Astor, Mellon or Vanderbilt. An age when the rich built palaces and the poor went shoeless. Nova Scotia looked like everywhere else, just more so. Great fortunes were being built: by Cunard, the future steamship magnate, and his Halifax associate, Enos Collins, the ex-privateer who had started the first bank in North America, and had reputedly built the greatest fortune in the British Commonwealth by the time he died, in 1872, at ninety-seven.

Yet there was grim poverty too, particularly in rural Cape Breton, still reeling from the potato blight that had hit in 1845, reducing entire settlements to “poverty, wretchedness and misery,” in the words of an emergency legislative committee struck to deal with the crisis. A woman from Loch Lomond recalled one of the food-seeking expeditions that could be glimpsed on Cape Breton roads during those awful years:

All over the island, starving settlers begged for food. “The general destitution,” wrote the “Reverend” Norman McLeod, a charismatic Scottish clergyman who had led a group of his parishioners to settle in Cape Breton, “has made it impossible for the most saving to shut their ears and eyes from the alarming claims and craving of those around them, running continually from door to door, with the ghastly features of death on their very faces.” The blight was in his view payback for his neighbours’ “unthriftiness, and offensive indolence,” and their ability to “well feed and flutter, dress and dandle, and carelessly chafe away with toddy and tobacco.”

Then again, McLeod, tall and sinewy, with the despot’s unblinking eye, had a tendency to see everything as holy retribution. Born in Scotland, he was a fire-and-brimstone Presbyterian who couldn’t follow church doctrine enough to be granted a preacher’s licence. He taught, fished and then, in 1817, with a shipload of adherents in tow, headed for Pictou. Mister Fun he was not. The Reverend George Patterson wrote in
History of the County of Pictou:

Unhappy with the sinning at Pictou, in 1820 McLeod boarded a ship called
The Ark
bound for Ohio, along with dozens of his flock, but stopped and settled in St. Anns Harbour, Cape Breton, instead. There he set himself up as a “moral dictator,” according to historians, “imposing severe punishments for trivial ‘sins.’” Despite his fanaticism, when the potato blight hit, more than eight hundred of his followers obeyed his command to migrate to Australia, where one of his sons lived. McLeod was over seventy by then, but the Aussie penchant for strong drink was too much for him to abide. So he decamped again, this time to Waipu, New Zealand, where his word was again law amongst his followers. Historians there described him “as independent, self-reliant, and autocratic,” and “unwilling to suffer any interference or restraint from any human source. If any men attempted to dictate to him he flung defiance in their faces and followed his own course. His word was law in church and state.”

Just how bad were things in Cape Breton, if someone like McLeod couldn’t cut it? With famine threatening, the government intervened, sending food to the island for distribution to the needy. Few died but many lost everything. Many backland farmers sold their few animals to buy meal and seed potatoes; when the blight reappeared the following year, they had no food and no livestock to sell for supplies. Some were forced to hand over their land to
merchants to avoid starvation. Many decided to leave rather than stay and starve; in 1851 alone, five hundred passengers boarded vessels in Sydney for Quebec City.

Others made their weary, dispirited way to the coal towns, where something was happening. The GMA’s stranglehold ended in 1858. Though it was granted new thirty-year leases in any area in which it was already operating, the door was now open to anyone with the capital and ambition to sink a shaft elsewhere in the province. The provincial government, not some far-off foreign power, decided who got access to the coal seams, where and for how long. Since the province had no clear policies for granting leases, it was a giddy, wide-open time—“a period,” as economic geographer Hugh Millward put it, “of rampant speculation and enterprise.”

People and companies sussed out prospects, scrambled to acquire leases, then raised capital. In Cumberland County, in the northern part of the province near the New Brunswick border, a number of American capitalists—looking to meet the increase in demand for coal because of the Civil War—picked up rights. New mines opened in Maccan, Chignecto, St. George, Minudie, Lawson, Victoria and River Hebert. In Joggins, the ascendant mining community in the area, existing mines were improved and lucrative new coal seams were discovered. In 1864 the first major mine in the Springhill area began operation. In Pictou County, local operators with the fee—and, undoubtedly, an in with the new government—lined up for leases. In the two years after the GMA’s blanket lease was broken, the George MacKay mine, John Douglas mine, John Wilson and Carmichael MacKay mines opened up on one side of the East River, running through the Pictou field. Across the water, as Cameron recounts, the New Glasgow Coal Company sank a pit. A mine in the Barton area began operation.

Once the shallow reserves were depleted, the economies changed.
Serious money was needed to sink deeper shafts. Little local operators were forced to sell to outsiders. They, in turn, had to amalgamate or be swallowed by even bigger fish. The rush was biggest in Cape Breton, still largely a pre-industrial economy, which meant that few locals had the capital needed to extract enough coal to gain economies of scale. A few homegrown speculators—Millward mentions Simon Gotreau, Marshall Bourinot and a couple of guys named Roach and McInnis most frequently—gobbled up strategically located leases in the hope that the bigger operating companies would one day need to extend their underground workings. Mostly, outside capital poured in, and partnerships were formed or the locals were simply bought out. New Yorkers picked up Marshall Bourinot’s Blockhouse mine. Two locals named Archibald and Moren joined hands with investors from Halifax and New England and incorporated the Little Glace Bay Mining Company. New York interests acquired the Cadougan and McLeod property. American investors, via the Caledonia Company, bought a lease in the area. So did the London-based Glasgow and Cape Breton Coal Company.

Brown estimates that during the next five years, more than forty exploration licences were issued for tracts in the Sydney coalfield. Several more were granted for the western shore of the island between Port Hood and Margaree. Some enterprising souls asked for and received licences for tracts under the sea floor, along the coast from Mira Bay to Point Aconi. “One enthusiastic adventurer” even took out a licence for a “submarine area” accessible only by sinking a shaft on a little rock called Flint Island, located more than a mile from the mainland. By Brown’s reckoning, many of the licences were taken out by speculators lacking the cash to work them, with the expectation of flipping them later on for a neat profit—“Some of these were fortunate enough to realise their expectations.” For
others, including those who had taken out licences on the edge of the Sydney coalfield, no buyers could be found. In the end, they just swallowed the cost and surrendered their leases.

It may have been their lucky day.

Let There Be a Town

W
hen a locomotive pulled out of Springhill en route to Parrsboro, when it chugged along from Schooner Pond to Sydney Harbour, when it steamed from Broad Cove toward the strait, it farted and wheezed like an old man. From the top of a hill in any coal community a passerby could watch it meander its way through the firs, maples, oaks, birch, pines and spruce, weave past the lakes and along the barrens, skirt the lush hills and the hard headlands. Today a boy on a skateboard would leave it in the dust. But it still filled a person with wonder to see the smoke-spewing metal mastodon bisect the wilderness, and to know that coal, which ran the trains and filled their cars, was responsible for the spectacle.

In 1839 the Albion Mines Railway, the second in Canada, opened, connecting the Albion collieries to a wharf on the East River. With time other rail lines began to vein the Nova Scotia landscape. Some were pre-Confederation public works projects like the provincial line that ran from Halifax to Truro, later adding spurs to the commercial centre of Windsor and the coal towns of
Pictou County. Others were projects that thrilled a nation, like the Intercolonial Railroad linking Nova Scotia to the rest of Canada, which connected first to the coal workings around Springhill, then pushed through to Cape Breton.

The new coal mines that materialized after the abolition of the GMA’s lease did their bit to fill in the network. By 1871, twenty-six mines, employing a total of 2,469 men and boys and 286 pit ponies, were in operation. That year’s report from the Commissioner of Mines also lists sixty-nine locomotives running on coal company rail lines throughout the province. A rail line brought the rest of the world—whether the latest fashions or the newest consumer goods—suddenly nearby. Existing industries thrived; new ones had a chance to bloom. Older communities blossomed into mini–boom towns.

By 1835 a man named Lodewick (Ludwig) Hunter was operating a small mine on a spring by a hill in central Cumberland County, near the Nova Scotia–New Brunswick border. Thirty years later, a man named Nathan Parks started another mine in the area after his wife kicked a piece of coal during a stroll through the woods. Coal was plentiful; in this out-of-the-way part of the province, access was the issue. When the GMA’s lease was abrogated its compensation included a four-square-mile property near the Parks mine. But digging for coal in a place without a railway to move the product to market made no sense. So the GMA sat on the lease—until, that is, construction of a nearby rail line triggered a scramble for mineral rights in the area. Thanks to the railways, Springhill saw its population grow fivefold in a single decade; nearby Joggins swelled by 700 percent in thirty years.

When trains arrived, new places were coaxed into being. First, a number of factors had to coalesce: abundance of coal, for sure, but also the pitch of the seam and the stability of the ground beneath. The most easily reachable reserves were always exploited
first; only when they were exhausted would operators try to develop deeper, more capital-intensive reserves. So with time, the shallower, smaller shafts were abandoned and the mines grew bigger and deeper. Throughout its life the Sydney coalfield was honeycombed with over seventy mines—some producing for only a few years, others for more than a century—only half of which, according to Saint Mary’s University geography professor Hugh Millward, met the lifetime production level of 500,000 tons necessary to qualify them as “major.”

Those with longevity in them were accompanied by rough buildings and sheds slapped up quickly to handle mine-related activities. Every one of them brought men to work the mines and housing for them to live in. If the mines were big enough or there were enough congregated closely together, a village materialized: first a cluster of houses and a general store, both owned by the coal company; eventually, a school, a church, a stable, and structures housing the purveyors of the other necessities of frontier life. Many of the places had Indian or French names long before the collieries arrived, but the places were rechristened with new handles rooted in the name of the seam, or some long-forgotten colliery manager, or the company that mined them. Sometimes they had no name at all. It was as if the miners understood the precarious nature of their existence. An accident of geology was all that stood between these places and nothingness. They were leaps of imagination. On some level the people who lived there must have understood that.

Why else, for example, would William Penn Hussey big enough to blot out the sun, come moseying up the west coast of Cape Breton on his white steed one day in early 1888? Did he insist on dressing as a cowboy and wearing a pair of six-guns back in Boston, where he carried on business as a coal merchant? We can only speculate. What we do know is that the locals were mesmerized by this apparition
from the moment he rode into town. “The native people, frozen by the isolation of the past, could lend him no inspiring hope,” J.L. MacDougall wrote in
The History of Inverness County
in 1922. “A more timid man would have taken to the tall timbers instanter: but William Penn Hussey was not built that way. He loved to dance on difficulties.”

They were considerable. The Scottish pioneers in the area had been hacking coal from the outcrops with pick and shovel from the moment they arrived. The fact that there was no harbour, railroad or market didn’t seem to worry the big man one bit. He paid $62,500 for a property, then headed for Europe to round up investors. By all accounts Hussey was a persuasive fellow; somehow he talked his way onto the floor of the British House of Lords to tell them about his Broad Cove plan. Soon wealthy capitalists from Britain, France and Switzerland ponied up cash. When a Swiss moneyman resisted his blandishments, Hussey came up with one of the greatest confidence tricks I’ve ever encountered: Back in Cape Breton he painted the walls of rock facing the sea black. Sitting in a boat some distance offshore, the investor, probably, had never seen coal reserves as large as the ones he thought he now beheld. In any event, he was in. The Broad Cove Coal Company was up and running.

By the time of Confederation, new settlements were materializing at intervals of surprisingly short duration around the great harbour on the eastern end of Cape Breton. Think of Sydney, the island’s largest centre, as the main reference point. The north side of the harbour housed the oldest mining areas: Sydney Mines, which we shall hear much more about later, and North Sydney, by 1870 the fourth-busiest port in Canada, thanks to the coal shipping piers built there
and the steamships arriving daily from around the world to take on loads of bunker coal.

The south side was a newer, more dynamic work-in-progress. Cow Bay—yet to be renamed Port Morien—was the site of the original French mine that had supplied the fortress of Louisbourg. In 1837 its population had consisted of 187 people, mostly British loyalists and Scottish emigrants. Thirty-five years later, the Gowrie Mine was going. So were the Blockhouse Colliery—the scene of the first coal miners’ strike in Canadian history—and the South Head/Cow Bay Colliery. The settlements of Dominion and Reserve Mines were still to come. But the opening of the Lingan colliery pushed the population in those parts to 3, 500.

Glace Bay—named for the jagged sea ice that the French found filling the harbour during winter—was also just starting to hit its stride. When the 1871 census was taken, Glace Bay was just a bleak collection of four collieries at the far end of the island, the province, the continent. A wave that started at Glace Bay’s rugged headland wouldn’t make land until it hit Europe. Twenty years later, though, 2,459 people lived there. A decade from then the population had swelled by nearly 7,000, and it was officially a town.

One of the appendixes in the 1871 census is a list of occupations held by the citizens of industrial Cape Breton (Lingan, Cow Bay and Glace Bay). It goes without saying that there were clergymen (16), lawyers (10), doctors (10), teachers (39), butchers (10), telegraphers (18), tanners (18), fishermen (75), sailors (141) and cabmen (10). I’m not sure what to make of the fact that these three towns still boasted a startling number of farmers—783—along with 99 shoemakers, 369 servants and 43 barkeeps, but only one barber, machinist, druggist or mechanic, along with a single member in each of the “showman,” shop boy, cordwainer (leather worker) and confectioner categories. Mostly, people worked in or around the collieries—miners (783),
labourers (487), blacksmiths (97), carpenters (197), engineers (69), clerks (67), coal cutters (23), brakemen (13), foundry men (n), firemen (6), mine agents (5) and mining engineers (2).

There still weren’t enough of them. Workers were being siphoned off to build railways. Strikes caused temporary dislocations. Miners moved from coalfield to coalfield. The GMA’s internal correspondence burst with complaints about labour shortages. An 1864 report by the province’s immigration agent is indicative: “There are many new mines now opening,” he wrote of Cape Breton County, “and several companies will require hundreds of mechanics and laborers in the Spring.” In relation to nearby Victoria County, he declared, “in consequence of so many young men being now employed at the coal mines opening, there is good demand for farm servants. Mechanics and miners will find profitable employment.”

Since the Nova Scotia government seemed unenthusiastic about immigrants, the industry depended upon emptying out the rural areas, the marginal fishing and farming communities, the thin band of humanity that seldom extended more than a mile or two from the coastline. In Cape Breton, which accounted for roughly two-thirds of the province’s coal production, the influx during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was truly epic: between 1871 and 1911, the population of the industrial part of the island grew from 12,246 to 57,263. It was, pointed out historian Del Muise, as if the earlier migration from the Scottish highlands to backwoods Nova Scotia was being replicated in the new migration to the coal towns.

The McKeen clan, which had actually fled Scotland for Northern Ireland in the late 1600s, would have understood precisely what Muise meant. A pair of them—brothers, John and James—had
planned to emigrate in 1718. But John died before the ship cast off, leaving James to sail to North America with his brother’s widow and her four children. One of her boys, also named John, married late in life and eventually moved his family to Truro, in the absolute centre of Nova Scotia. In 1811 one of his grandchildren, William, moved to the isolated settlement of Mabou, on the western coast of Cape Breton. There he prospered—in part, it’s said, by foreclosing on the properties of settlers who owed him money during the mid-1840s famine. In 1849, according to historian Robert Morgan, McKeen received “for nominal sums, 1,100 acres and continued accumulating settlers properties until 1855.”

William and his first wife had twelve children. When she died, he remarried and had another twelve kids, the third of whom was named David. Why am I telling you all this? Because David, who may have changed his surname to MacKeen, made his way to Glace Bay in the early 1860s to find work in the nascent mines. So impressed was Caledonia Colliery manager Henry Poole that he sent MacKeen to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering. By 1867 David MacKeen had married Poole’s daughter Isabelle, who died in childbirth. MacKeen devoted himself to prayer and hard work, before long moving up the ladder until he controlled the mine.

MacKeen became a local councillor, then a Member of Parliament in John A. Macdonald’s 1884 caucus. He married again, and this wife also died in childbirth. Then, in Halifax, he met Jane Crerar, who came from a family of buccaneer Pictou lumbermen. It’s said that her grandfather, on the verge of financial collapse, had bought a leaky schooner, loaded it with lumber, placed a sign on the stern reading “Liverpool or Hell,” and taken his cargo to England to save the family business. The couple eloped in 1888. At fifty, MacKeen became a father.

Here a little executive summary–style background is helpful: demand for Nova Scotia coal streaked into the ionosphere during the Civil War with the Reciprocity Treaty between Canada and the United States in place. By the end of the war in 1865 two-thirds of Nova Scotia’s coal production was heading for the American market. Demand started to drop with the end of hostilities. The export trade collapsed even further when the Reciprocity deal was abrogated in 1866. (The prospect of free trade with the United States was partly responsible for the decisions by Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec to join Confederation a year later.) What’s more, the American market was again closed off by higher tariffs and a series of freight rebates that were designed to help coal producers in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Thus began a flurry of failures and amalgamations throughout the province’s coalfields; independent coal companies had just a one-in-four chance of surviving in Cape Breton during the 1860s and 1870s. Thank God, then, for John A. Macdonald’s 1879 National Policy—launched to create a strong manufacturing base in Canada—which established a fifty-cent-per-ton duty on coal imports into Canada. Sales of Nova Scotia coal to Quebec soared. The exploding Maritimes market—which grew by 200 percent during the same period—also bolstered demand.