Coal Black Heart (13 page)

Lawson sent two police officials to Jamaica to photograph the contents of a coffin marked “George H. Towle.” Regretfully he wrote, “I could not photograph the contents of the ocean’s depths.”

All this chicanery didn’t do much for Cape Breton. The Boston contracts took every bit of Dominion coal production. The trouble was the price—$2.25 per ton, even though it could have fetched $4.00 on the open market. The arrangement nearly bankrupted the Cape Breton mines. Whitney’s attention was elsewhere: keeping New England Gas and Coke afloat by providing it with a stable, cheap supply of coal. At roughly the same time, his most overreaching vision of all came into being: establishing an iron and steel industry in Cape Breton. Not just a run-of-the-mill metal concern—“A Pittsburgh in Canada,” trumpeted the
New York Times
on February 17, 1901.

The piece was datelined St. John’s, Newfoundland. And no stock promoter could have asked for a better shill job:

Let’s leave the last thought alone for a second and concede that it was probably hard not to get caught up in the excitement of the moment. Canadians, as the century dawned, lived in a young country at a moment of endless possibility: a transcontinental railway was opening the west and providing a new home for the flood of immigrants pouring into the country; the national policy of industrial protection meant new industries got a foothold; the prices of wheat, newsprint and base metals headed skyward as exports soared and our trade balance shifted.

The end of the nineteenth century marked the close of the age of wood, wind and water in the Maritimes. From here on in, Nova Scotia would be transformed by coal, steam, iron and steel. Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, on a swing through Sydney in 1900, prophesied that Sydney “would become not only the Pittsburgh of Canada, but the Glasgow and Belfast of Canada.” Pictou County’s New Glasgow, to give another memorable example, was on the way to becoming “the Birmingham of the Country.” The Canadian government helped pave the way with tariffs that protected domestic iron from foreign imports and forced most Canadian rolling mills to use Nova Scotia–made bar iron as a raw material. The end result: by the late nineteenth century New Glasgow and its surrounding towns had evolved into the equivalent of a modern-day business hub. Pictou County even had its own industrial behemoth ready to take on the world: the Nova Scotia Steel Company,
which, according to historian T.W. Acheson, “represented the most fully integrated industrial complex in the country” at that time. Based in Trenton and New Glasgow, it had open-hearth and blast furnaces, forges, foundries and machine shops as well as large Newfoundland iron ore deposits. If there was any question about Nova Scotia Steel’s clout, that changed in 1900, when it acquired the Sydney coal mines from the GMA and started building coke ovens and a blast furnace in Sydney Mines to turn all that nearby coal into steel.

Whitney? To develop his steel complex he struck a typical deal with a desperate Nova Scotia government: a 50 percent royalty cut, a reduction in federal bounties, a thirty-year municipal tax exemption and a grant of 480 acres right on Sydney Harbour. Naturally, the linchpin of the arrangement—alongside the government largesse—was a deal that required Dominion Coal to supply the steel plant with product at a below-market rate at a time when prices were climbing. Once the contract was in place, Whitney and his partners hit the market with $25 million worth of stock—$15.5 million of which went to Whitney and his cronies for their efforts in putting the deal together.

Two years later he had vamoosed. Control of both Dominion Coal and Dominion Iron and Steel lay in the hands of James Ross, who had helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway (and a sizable personal fortune) from his base in Montreal. After all this time it’s hard to know whether Whitney sold out willingly, or whether Ross just bought control on the stock market. It didn’t much matter. Though it was a mess, Cape Breton’s steel industry survived. As 1902 closed, 30 percent of coal production was bound for Sydney’s coke ovens and blast furnaces and the new mill that had just been built in Sydney Mines.

One day I took a walk to see where John William Briers, Margaret, and their children Harold, John, Amy and Norman, came to permanently settle. By then, more kin had joined them: one of Margaret’s sisters, Amelia, had emigrated with her husband, Robert Hodgson—variously described as a labourer in a wagonworks and a blacksmith before he became a shop merchant in the nearby Cape Breton town of Little Bras d’Or. Margaret and Amelia’s eldest brother, Samuel, also made the crossing to Cape Breton, and settled in Sydney Mines in 1905. According to the 1911 census he was a “labourer in a coal mine” and had previously been a teamster.

Clyde Avenue is only a few blocks over from Forest Street where they first lived. In 2007 at least it’s leafier, the overall vibe a bit more settled. My mother remembers the house as white, but number 12 Clyde is painted burgundy now, and its three levels are topped by a peak roof shaded by oaks, elms and birch trees. A green recycling bin stands resolutely on the front lawn. I walk past it, up the few front steps to the wooden door, and push the bell. When there’s no answer I cup my hand over my eyes and peer into a small sunporch filled to bursting with tennis trophies. Then I walk out to the sidewalk and snap a picture with my cellphone to show to my mom.

My guess is that when John William Briers walked out that door he headed south on Clyde, along the muddy rutted road, before taking a quick right and walking two more blocks along King Street. Since the day the GMA arrived, Sydney Mines had been a one-company town. It’s still easy to glimpse the early outlines of the community created in the image of the coal company masters. The nicest homes, owned by the executives, lined Shore Road and extended up the hill where Richard Brown’s abode, the first in Sydney Mines, today stands festooned with Halloween decorations. The rows of company housing stretched out along
Pitt, Crescent, Main and Forest streets so that workers were close to the mines. Infiltrating the town like catacombs were the mine works, which are now “greenfield sites”—big chunks of vacant land, overgrown with heather and brush, that have morphed into nature trails and venues for teenage drinking, dope-smoking and nookie.

All told, it should have taken only a few minutes for him to walk to the Princess Mine. He would have company, loads of it. According to the 1901 census, all but two of Nova Scotia’s counties had seen their population decline in the previous decade; the area around Halifax, the biggest urban centre east of Montreal, had grown slightly. The population of Cape Breton County—the newly industrialized eastern chunk of the island—had climbed by nearly 50 percent during that period. The head count of Glace Bay, the destination of coal miners and labourers from Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Russia and Eastern Europe, had tripled in a decade. Sydney’s population had doubled almost overnight as Dominion Iron and Steel imported Poles, Lebanese, Syrians and Austrians to work the steel mills. Brand new neighbourhoods—complete with company houses, streets and stores—materialized around Dominion Coal’s No. 2 and No. 4 collieries in the area that would come to be known as simply Dominion.

In Sydney Mines, which also doubled in size from 1901 to 1911, not quite everyone was a miner or steelworker. When I perused the lists of occupations in the 1901 census I also found teachers, store clerks, servants, locomotive engineers, horse drivers, moulders, stablemen, carpenters, teachers, blacksmiths and a pair of female Salvation Army preachers. I saw a dressmaker (Florence MacKinnon, thirty-seven, who still lived with her parents), a barber (John H. Boutilier), one insurance agent (a Newfoundlander named Joseph White), a tailor (James MacKinnon), a tin merchant (John McCormick),
a tinsmith (Amable Bernard), a diver (James Cann), a typewriter (Daniel Harrigan), a policeman (Stephen McLean), a shoemaker (John McIsaac), a barrister (Blowers Archibald), a doctor (Bernard Francis) and a Roman Catholic priest (C.F. MacKinnon).

Most working people, though, were bound for the steel mill or the mines. When John William Briers headed toward the pithead he was joined by a hodgepodge of humanity: Scottish, Irish and English, but also French, Spaniards, Dutch and even a few Swedes, Norwegians and Germans. A surprising number of them were Newfoundlanders with names like Tobin, Cashin and Hurley. Historian Ron Crawley has a logical explanation: between 1890 and 1914 Newfoundland’s ailing fishery was in a state of crisis. The opportunity to work in Cape Breton’s burgeoning steel and coal industries produced what he calls “one of the most dramatic movements of people in Newfoundland history.” When the Briers family arrived in Nova Scotia, about half the Newfoundlanders living in Canada made their home in the province. Of that number, 57 percent—or nearly 3,700—lived in Cape Breton. And
The Daily News
(St. John’s, Newfoundland) would see fit to carry the following ditty on July 7, 1903:

When John and Margaret arrived in Sydney Mines, the first vestiges of civilization were just beginning to appear: hotels (the Jubilee and Old King Edward, both on Main Street); the red sandstone federal post office, a few privately owned stores, now that the province had passed a bill ensuring that the miners were paid in “coin of the realm” rather than scrip redeemable only in the company-owned “pluck me” stores. The town was still poorly equipped for newcomers no matter what their origin. Water came from wells until 1900. It took another three years before the town’s first chief of police was appointed. That same year the first electric street lights went on, and an electric street railway began running. But it was 1907 before the town got its first plank sidewalk, and 1928 before the first automobile groaned through the streets.

Which, through the most convoluted of thinking, brings me to Arthur Lismer, the painter. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that it was Lismer, from 1916 to 1919 principal of the precursor to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, who suggested that his pal Lawren Harris come east for a visit. In 1921—the year after the two took part in the founding of the Group of Seven, which impressed on Canadians the majesty of their own wilderness—Harris spent time in Halifax, then headed to Cape Breton.

Harris was always drawn to impoverished urban places. What he saw in Halifax shocked him enough to put brush to canvas to depict the poverty in the city’s harbour tenements. His impressions from his trip to industrial Cape Breton had to gestate longer. A black-and-white Harris ink published in the July 1925 edition of the
Canadian Forum,
entitled
Glace Bay,
shows an emaciated woman clutching a couple of urchins to her chest in front of a nightmare collection of shacks and colliery buildings. It’s like a prelude to
The Scream,
drawn moments before the subject howls in existential horror.