Coal Black Heart (12 page)

All of which is to say that by 1893 the black stuff was back; mines everywhere were changing hands at a ridiculous pace and crazy prices. Family lore has it that one Saturday night some men came calling at David MacKeen’s home. He knew what they wanted: the Caledonia mine. So he had his maid tell the men he was praying. That was fine, they said; they would wait. They waited for hours. Finally, just after midnight, MacKeen emerged. They wanted to make an offer for his mine. He was flattered, he said. Unfortunately it was now the Sabbath and, being a God-fearing
man, he couldn’t do business on the holy day. They left empty-handed. Early Monday morning the news broke: most of the mines in Cape Breton were being merged to create a new entity. The value of the Caledonia Mine soared. David MacKeen was a rich man.

Henry Whitney—who now controlled every mine in Cape Breton but one—had gall, give the man that. His emergence as president of the Boston-based West End Street Railway Company in 1887 may have been fraught with scandal, but it gave him credibility and clout in dog-eat-dog America. The largest street railway system in America ran on horses. Until, that is, someone introduced Whitney to a Virginian named Frank J. Sprague, “the father of electric traction.” Whitney awarded Sprague the contract to adopt his electric trolley system for the Boston line—a move that cemented Whitney’s reputation as a corporate visionary.

No one’s precisely sure how Whitney came to strut across the stage in Sydney. One scenario has Nova Scotia premier William Fielding off to Boston in a scramble for new capital to invest in the province’s expanding coal industry. Somehow, the story goes, he meets up with Whitney, who, as president of the West End Street Railway and owner of the Metropolitan Steamship Company, controlled two large consumers of coal. Then the boom began. All historian Donald MacGillivray, upon whom I lean heavily for the account of the events that follow, is sure about is that in the winter of 1891–92 two business associates of Whitney’s—a Halifax lawyer and promoter named B.F. Pearson, and J.A. Grant, a Boston power plant contractor—bought the moribund Ontario Colliery in Glace Bay for $80,000. About the same time, Premier Fielding received word that “influential capitalists” in Boston were mighty displeased by his government’s decision to raise the coal royalty from 7½ cents
to 10 cents per ton in a bid to increase provincial revenues. On April 23, 1892—a Saturday—Whitney paid the premier a little visit.

The next Monday, Fielding introduced two pieces of legislation in the House of Assembly. One capped the coal royalties the government could charge. The other proposed that, if a company paid a higher royalty—or did something to ensure that provincial royalties increased even at the same royalty—a new lease with new conditions could be authorized. Both amendments easily passed. A few weeks later, in his report to his executive council, Fielding wrote, “It was particularly desirable that influential capitalists in the United States should be induced to make an investment in our coal-mining operations.”

Those influential capitalists were already busy. Five years earlier, the provincial government had laid down the law: in future, the only coal leases renewed would be those being actively worked by their operators. The outcome was a free-for-all: leases opening up for the first time in years and being gobbled up by speculators and legitimate operators; companies amalgamating. The timing was impeccable for Whitney and the members of his shadowy cadre known as “the Boston Syndicate.” In the months ahead, they picked up the options to every mine on the south side of Sydney harbour: the International, the Black Diamond, MacKeen’s Caledonia, the Glace Bay, the Gowrie, the Gardiner and the Old Bridgeport. They obtained the Reserve property by buying control of the parent company on the London Stock Exchange. They took over the Victoria Colliery. The GMA still owned the old Sydney mines; otherwise, Whitney and his people held every significant mine lease on the island.

On January 19, 1893, the people of Nova Scotia discovered why. Fielding announced in the legislature that the Boston clique had been handed an unprecedented ninety-nine-year lease, renewable for an additional twenty years, at a fixed royalty rate of 12% cents
per ton. The Opposition howled in grief. The premier harkened back to an old election speech that Charles Tupper had delivered in which he had opined that “what nature intended was that the miners of Cape Breton should sell in the New England market; and … then would Sydney and Cape Breton flourish as never before.”

Somebody was going to prosper, that much seemed certain. Within nine months the Whitney syndicate had broadened into the Dominion Coal Company, which officially incorporated on February 1, 1893, with an $18-million stock offering. The upshot: Whitney and his cronies had a near monopoly on the coal resources of Cape Breton without investing a cent of their own money. The first thing they did was consolidate, shutting down four of the eight local mines and centralizing production at the most efficient collieries. By so doing they hoped to cut management fat, streamline the transportation system and reduce duplication in everything from storage facilities to office help. Some of the decisions were head-spinners; the mine with the best-quality coal was shut, while another with the cheapest production costs was abandoned. Mostly, they spent. The ever-critical transportation system—a rat’s nest of small, decrepit rail lines and antiquated wharfs—was improved, enlarged and centralized. Existing shafts were extended farther under the ocean. They sank expensive new mines. Everywhere, they added the latest appliances and equipment.

To what end, it was hard to say. “It is not our business to surmise as to whose shoulders the blame of these failures and delays should rest upon,” said a nameless writer from the
Canadian Mining Review,
after visiting Dominion Coal’s Cape Breton operations a year after the consolidation,

Progress was the ethos of the day, prosperity the blinding light which illuminated all things. Success transformed—especially success of the sudden kind. So if the government and business people and ordinary citizens had lingering concerns they ignored them. A decade later production from the Dominion Coal mines would have quadrupled. Whitney would be musing in the
New York Times
about using his Cape Breton businesses to—get this—control the price of iron and steel throughout the world.

Before that could happen, it was necessary for there to be workers. So many workers that even the flood of humanity from the countryside—many of them Scottish Gaelic speakers who knew hardly a word of English—couldn’t fill the void. Dominion Coal and the GMA tried; they sent word north to Dingwall and Bay St. Lawrence, and south to L’Ardoise and Petit-de-Grat. In the hayfields of the Margarees men leaned on their pitchforks and shook their heads in wonder at the extraordinary possibilities life would hold if they just moved to the other side of the island.

By then, the Canadian government’s ambitious campaign to attract immigrants was in full swing. Dominion Coal’s overseas recruitment campaign met with full approval. Its agents, who were
paid by the head, beelined to British, European and pre-Confederation Newfoundland ports, spreading the gospel about the opportunities available in Nova Scotia—which, according to the literature, was on the verge of becoming the manufacturing centre of Canada, now that the intercontinental railway was completed and the province had access to markets as well as raw materials. The ad seen in many European countries read like this:

Soon, the Nova Scotia government had also seen the light about immigration—the best and maybe only way to develop the province’s natural resources. The first piece of propaganda rolling off the printing presses in Halifax in 1870 made Nova Scotia sound like some kind of muscular, northern Arcadia: “Nova Scotia surpasses every country of the same extent in the world in the variety and supply of material resources,” it said. “All that an emigrant need supply himself with before leaving Europe is money.”

You can almost hear their hearts pounding in their chests as they read those words half a world away. Envision the men—maybe freshly scrubbed after a day in the Lancashire pits, the dust of the pit perhaps still coating the insides of their nostrils and throats, infiltrating every crack or crease—perched formally in neat rows of chairs under the moonlight as the Dominion Coal Company agent pushed the glass slide into the Victorian magic lantern. Maybe there’s an audible gasp—as from Berbers staring up
into the Saharan sky and glimpsing their first airplane—as the images of mounties, glaciers, majestic waterways and impossibly long railroads appear on the whitewashed side of the building. And all the time, the agent’s voice fills the night air, singing the praises of this rough-hewn paradise, this land rather like home, yet so enticingly different.

It would be hard to resist if, say, you were a middle-aged, fourth-generation miner who understood what life in the British mines promised. The images would appear like revelations. Everyone looking so prosperous and healthy—not like your uncle hawking his insides out with black lung, or the bloke across the street bent double from all those years working in tunnels no wider than a rain barrel. There, at the very least, was a new start in a place where a person’s position in the world wasn’t something permanent and beyond his control. There was the dream, of a better future, they’d say to themselves as the light from the primitive slide projector glinted off their wistful faces.

Lazytown

I
t’s a mug’s game to stand in a burial ground and try to channel an ancestor’s thoughts and feelings from a century earlier. But here I am, on one of those Emily Carr fall days, wondering what it would have been like for my great-grandfather as he saw for the first time where his aspirant dreams had led.

It was September 1902. He was alone; Margaret and the four children would come two years later, as was often the way for turn-of-the-century immigrants. John William Briers had boarded the
Siberian
in Liverpool, along with a boatful of other Lancashire miners, London labourers and British domestics and farmers. There were even two other Chorley men aboard—Robert Iddon, twenty, single, who used to live with his parents at the far end of Charnock Richard, and Thomas Hart, a married father of one who made his home not far from the Rigby family grocery store—also bound for the Cape Breton mines. The North Atlantic can be a terror at that time of year, so the nine-day crossing to St. John’s, Newfoundland, and on to Halifax was likely a hard one. There, John W. and the sixty-six other adults, fourteen
children and four infants went through immigration. Eventually, he hopped on another steamship heading east along the province’s jagged coastline.

It would have seemed so arbitrary to him, the way settlements materialized for no obvious reason along the Cape Breton shoreline: Port Morien giving way to what would become Glace Bay, followed by communities that in time would be christened Dominion, New Waterford and New Victoria. Then his steamer would enter the great harbour of Sydney, and he would taste the coal dust in the air, and see the silhouettes of the iron towers rising from the land, signalling that he had reached the place the locals simply called “the mines.”

I walk out to the end of the antique cemetery on Shore Road and look back in the weak fall sunlight to see what he would have seen: a carpet of leaves, the land sloping gently upward above low cliffs, the rocks beneath striped with ancient plants and animals. I’ve dug up some old photographs from around the time he arrived. Nobody smiles in pictures like those. I take a short walk to where one of them was taken—the corner of Main Street and Shore Road, a spot known as Sutherland’s Corner. Today, with its spacious lawns and comfortable bungalows, it’s the epitome of small-town contentment. The November 26, 1902 shot out-and-out gives me the creeps: muddy, wheel-rutted roads, thinly dispersed wooden buildings, dilapidated fences with missing slats, naked poles lining the street like crucifixes, windblown clothing on the line, a lone, dark, blurred figure fleeing up Main Street.

Moustaches shaped liked push brooms and bicycle handlebars adorned the faces of the men who walked the primitive streets of Sydney Mines. Wide-brimmed fedoras, bulging derbies and cloth miner’s caps sat atop their heads or were pulled down low over their eyes. Though they were workingmen the new-world informality of
the twentieth century was strange to them, and they sported waistcoats, ties, suit jackets and long coats that dragged in the mire.

I’m assuming that John W. Briers’s first accommodations were in one of the company row houses erected near the mines. Space was tight even if the coal companies slapped up housing as quickly as the lumber arrived. Foreign experience mattered in the local labour pool hierarchy, and Briers was one of those seasoned miners brought in to fill the turn-of-the-century skills shortage in Nova Scotia’s collieries. When the rest of family arrived, they ended up in a house on Forest Street, a short walk from the Princess Mine, Cape Breton’s biggest, which would operate for a full century after it opened in 1875.

John Briers was a pick-and-shovel man, which meant that he would work right at the coal face, in a seventeen-foot-square room separated from the next chamber by a sixty-foot pillar of coal. The seams were five to six feet in thickness there, allowing the men to mostly work standing up. His duties were clear: cut, shoot and load the coal, all the time keeping an ear tuned to the creaking timbers that held the shale and stone of the roof in place. He was thirty-one, which made him, by local standards, a veteran in a green, inexperienced industry. To this day I don’t know if he had ever been out of England before boarding the ship to Canada. But I seriously doubt it.

A Cape Breton map from 1863 identifies the area where my people settled as Lazytown. There’s a story behind that: farmers, arriving to sell produce in the morning hours, found hardly anyone up and about. Coal mining was shift work. At that time in the morning, most of the men were at the mine, and their wives—after arising at dawn to get their husbands off to work—had returned to bed.

So Lazytown it was, even though this has always been a place of toil, enterprise and endeavour. When Joseph DesBarres, the Lieutenant Governor of Cape Breton, encouraged United Empire Loyalists to come to the island in 1784, a few settled here. A century before my great-grandfather arrived, a ship carrying Gaelic-speaking Scots made land in the vicinity, the area’s first significant migration. After the GMA arrived, the pace picked up. The 1901 transfer of the last of its north-side leases to the Nova Scotia Steel and Coal Company—run, for a change, by homegrown business talent—signalled a new chapter in the Sydney Mines story.

By the time John Briers stepped off the boat, something else momentous had occurred: Whitney had folded his tent and decamped. It was the sort of thing that happened all the time during the Gilded Age, that post–Civil War period of robber barons, railroad tycoons and steel kings which somehow slopped over from the United States into Nova Scotia. A carpetbagger only interested in fleecing investors? A short-sighted opportunist who stumbled from one business mistake to another? After all this time, it’s hard to say about Whitney. But I have my suspicions.

A few things are clear. As Donald MacGillivray has written, Dominion Coal’s success was predicated on gaining access to the New England market. Things therefore looked good in 1894, when the American House of Representatives erased the duty of seventy-five cents per ton on imported coal. But within two years the duty was almost back to its former level. The 1896 Smoke Nuisance Law further limited coal’s use in the U.S. market. Even worse, production of bituminous coal in the United States was doubling every decade from 1840 to 1910.

The American market, therefore, was lost. Desperate to breathe life into the Dominion Coal stock price, Whitney and his partners tried to flog Nova Scotia coal in Britain and Germany,
two of the leading coal-producing nations in the world and experimented with using coke on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. (The latter endeavour led to a stupefying corporate shell game and ended with Whitney and the others buying a moribund penitentiary in Halifax as a pilot plant to convert coal into coke, gas tar and ammonia.)

Somewhere along the line—by grand design or pure fluke—he seems to have come up with a nifty little scheme: Dominion Coal would sell its production to another Whitney company, the New England Gas and Coke Company, which, in turn, would sell the coal gas it produced to the Massachusetts Pipe Line Gas Company, another firm in the Whitney stable, for distribution in the Boston market. Also key to the arrangement were Whitney’s plans to build a large plant at Everett, Massachusetts, to convert Dominion coal into coke and other by-products.

The whole thing was contingent upon Whitney getting a charter to set up his new gas distribution company. Boston financier Thomas Lawson had a first-hand view of what followed, in 1896. In his exposé on the world of Gilded Age finance, published nine years later, Lawson wrote that Whitney employed an army of operatives—bought-and-paid-for ex-senators, representatives and local political bosses, lobbyists, detectives and “runners” who “kept ‘tabs’” on every move and deed, day and night, of the members of the Massachusetts legislature. Then he set up the headquarters for Massachusetts Pipe Line at Young’s Hotel, where he took over parlours 9, 10 and 11, along with rooms 6, 7 and 8 on the second floor.

The legislative committee approved the charter. But when the governor vetoed the bill, shares in Dominion Coal and the other related Whitney outfits “began to sink in price like pigs of lead from a capsized boat.” Then, wrote Lawson, who spent the entire episode in the back rooms with Whitney and his cronies, “Fate … let fly another of her quiver’s contents.” Word got out that in a previous campaign much like this one, Towle had gone back on his promise at the last minute and forced the bribees—if such a word exists—to accept fifty cents on the dollar of what they had been promised. A messenger showed up at Young’s Hotel with the “ultimatum of the Great and General Court of the dear old
Commonwealth: ‘Money in advance or no bill!’” Whitney et al., who had been heavily buying to support share prices, thought they had averted financial disaster by persuading the state’s “able and fearless” governor to approve the charter by writing in an amendment that put a sixty-cent ceiling on the price for which it could sell its gas. Dominion Coal and New England Gas shares upticked briefly—then ploughed steeply and irrevocably downward on news that the charter had been amended and “was not worth the parchment upon which it was embossed.”

Lawson, who was there, recounted the mob scene as the ruined investors and bought politicians descended upon Young’s Hotel “swearing desperate consequences to Whitney and Towle regardless of the effect upon themselves.” The next morning a “desperate,” “wild-eyed” Towle and Patch—who sound like a pair right out of
Nicholas Nickleby
—showed up at Lawson’s office with a suitcase of documents, cash, a $10,000 cheque and orders from Whitney to disappear. Lawson gave Towle gold for the cash and he, Patch and the evidence “faded out of my life and into the gray mist of eternity.” When the members of the Great and Good Court of the old Commonwealth of Massachusetts showed up looking for their payola, they learned that their “stuff” had been delivered to Towle, who had high-tailed with it to foreign shores “where he was living in luxury with Mr. Patch.”

Which wasn’t quite true, according to Lawson’s account: