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Foreword Providing materials for civilization, the dangerous occupation called mining spans the globe, crosses international borders, supports entire regions, and creates tight-knit communities. Using powerful oral interviews that supported a complete company record, Jacobsen’s history of the Emerald Mine poignantly demonstrates how one small place on the face of the planet can affect people around the world. The oral histories gathered in this immense research project demonstrate the accuracy of collective human memory. Details varied little from one storyteller to the next as the ambitious interviewer travelled or telephoned around the country or across the world to record the tales. Arriving at an international rendezvous high in the mountains of British Columbia, immigrant miners, mining personnel who had worked overseas, and their wives and families roosted, perhaps briefly, in the company town or in the nearby village of Salmo. A collective force, not one person or group, created a close-knit community, yet one that families entered and left frequently. Mining families recognize that theirs is a “moving” occupation; some miners and engineers may work in as many as fifty mines throughout their lives and live in as many places. Miners know that eventually a mine will play out, the job will end, and they will have to move on. This history demonstrates the fleeting times that miners spent in various locales, mostly in British Columbia. At some point in time, all passed through the famed Emerald Mine. The Emerald Mine community teemed with an encompassing spirit. Like the families who lived in the Colorado company towns of Climax or Gilman during the 1950s, danger and isolation seemed to create a cooperative camaraderie. Fortunately, the operators of Canadian Exploration Limited understood such sociology and tried to treat everyone compassionately. They hired the wives, widows, and older students, so the miners and workers would stay long enough to see the project through the next day or next phase. Many of the miners’ tales focused not so much on what happened underground, but on survival in a forested wilderness replete with bears that raided garbage cans daily, snow that buried the town up to fourteen feet deep, and temperatures that dropped to 30° below zero regularly during the winters. The glint in the miners’ eyes must have sparkled as they relived their experiences at Canex, telling of accidents or inane events (usually caused by alcohol abuse). Their wives related primitive living conditions where snow blew through the cracks in the pre-fab houses and forced them to solve problems simply to keep warm, cook, and do the laundry. Their stories amazingly ended by saying they would not have changed the time they spent at the Emerald. Children raised in the scenic, emerald-green paradise of a playground are loyal to their childhood home where families of six shared “duplexes” 20 feet wide by 24 feet long!
Miners, the world’s most determined, dogged
people, take great pride in their work and welcome the challenge of
producing more and more materials under the constant threat of injury,
death, and ever increasing environmental regulations. In “Jewel of the
Kootenays - the Emerald Mine,” Jacobsen captures the essence of that
formidable force, “mining mentality.”
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