Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower

By Charlie Angus

House of Anansi Press/February 2022

Reviewed by James Munson

January 26, 2022

In Cobalt: Cradle of the Demon Metals, Birth of a Mining Superpower, long-time Timmins-James Bay Member of Parliament Charlie Angus draws on the experiences of a single Ontario mining town to make the case for overthrowing the grand narratives of Canadian history.

His case is undeniable.

Gaining an appreciation for the outsized impact that Cobalt — a town 500 kilometres northwest of Ottawa and home to around 1,000 people today — had on the country and the world makes reading Angus’s eighth book worthwhile enough.

The town’s colourful past includes the stories of its wealthy mine owners financing the launch of the Montreal Canadiens, its mines supplying the early film industry with the metallurgical materials it needed, its provision of Soviet spies with a trove of false Cold War identities culled from destroyed local records and its status as the place that almost hosted the 1910 Jack Johnson-Jim Jeffries prizefight in which Johnson soundly defended his heavyweight title against the not-so-great “white hope” (it went to Reno).

But it is in articulating the origin story of Cobalt as the template for the development of Canada’s central economic and political structure that Angus delivers his deepest insights, revealing how the national self-image is transfigured when the voices of rural regions and ostracized groups are included.

“By disentangling the story of Cobalt from the parochial politeness of local Canadian history, we orient ourselves with deeper issues such as how the pressure of resource exploitation drove the ‘settlement’of the Indigenous lands of the Americas – both prior to and as a result of the silver rush in Cobalt,” Angus writes.

The area where the mining town of Cobalt was founded had long been home to the Saugeen Anishnabeg (Algonquins of Timiskaming First Nation) and the Teme-Augama Anishnabai (Temagami First Nation) before the it became the site of one of the world’s largest silver mining rushes during the first few decades of the 20^th century.

Those chaotic years are the backdrop for Angus’s argument that Canada’s history is Cobalt’s history. But far from accepting an image of senseless disorder on the frontier, he provides an analysis of the deeper social and political trends that explain how this chaos was created, maintained and exported – for the benefit of a few.

To set the scene, Angus reminds readers that at the time of Cobalt’s birth Toronto was still a provincial backwater, not the globally-connected metropolis it is today. What’s remarkable is the deep connection – and role reversal – the two locations underwent and that Angus has unearthed.

The mad dash for the riches around Cobalt — by both Wall Street heavyweights and veterans of the mining rushes in the far West of the US and Canada — made Toronto a forgettable stopping place on the way to the northern mining frontier. As one joke went: “Toronto? Ah yes, that’s where you switch trains to get to Cobalt.”

It is in articulating the origin story of Cobalt as the template for the development of Canada’s central economic and political structure that Angus delivers his deepest insights, revealing how the national self-image is transfigured when the voices of rural regions and ostracized groups are included.

But in time, the silver rush in Cobalt would give birth to a generation of Toronto’s financial elite and launch its southern counterpart’s incarnation as an international hub of mining finance, expertise and influence, Angus explains. It did this by either creating or refining a range of business practices that sought to maximize profits for owners and shareholders.

Mining in Cobalt began with picks and shovels, but by the time the silver rushes had long faded, the region had seen the development of sophisticated tools for understanding and finding geological formations, as well as new technologies for processing rock to extract more minerals. The corporate structure and lax regulatory regime that incentivized wild speculation, later mimicked across Canada, also took shape in the faraway town.

The approach to claim staking and social relations that gave zero thrift to Indigenous land rights and denied Indigenous people the ability to earn a living – a model exacting heavy costs on Canadian society today – took its shape in the hurly-burly days of Cobalt’s boom times, too.

The country would never be the same.

“The sudden flush of silver money from the mines of Cobalt hit sleepy Edwardian Canada like a high-octane jolt – strong enough to change the trajectory of development in both Ontario and Canada,” Angus writes.

But Cobalt didn’t just make a few people very rich.

The silver rushes on the northern border between Ontario and Quebec in the early 1900s generated a model for development that treated remote, resource-rich regions in the North (the hinterland) as a colony to feed and support the powerful urban locales in the south (the heartland.)

On the cultural front, the image of cottages and canoe rides on nearby Lake Temagami became national emblems, a purposeful attempt to obscure the presence of Indigenous peoples that was driven by the racist belief that their disappearance was inevitable.

The hinterland-heartland arrangement that emerged was taken for granted in a young Canada where the land was seen as the birthright of European settlers. Its harms and destructive power were ignored in a national myth-making process that stratified which narratives prevailed over the next hundred years.

The basic frame of the arrangement is still in place today, with many treating it as a natural manifestation of national development. But by chronicling the details of the Cobalt story, Angus capably reveals how the hinterland-heartland model is the outcome of choices, suppression and design that has created clear winners and losers.

Another way of extracting natural resources is possible, he repeatedly points out.

“When we consider the fact that the immense non-renewable wealth of the mining belt nets less in revenues for the people than the fines for parking violations, perhaps it’s time to revive those early Cobalt debates over how the public resources of the hinterland should be used, and who they should benefit,” Angus writes, citing a Michener Deacon/CBC report comparing mining royalties and City of Toronto parking tickets.

Angus undertakes a kind of intersectional history in Cobalt, one that digs at the true nature of events by including many perspectives long ignored to create a new overarching picture of the country. Through this process, he reveals the roots of an economic and political order and makes a powerful call for its abolition, or at least its deep reform.

James Munson is a correspondent for Bloomberg Law covering environmental and tax issues. He has spent years writing about the North, Indigenous issues and the mining industry.