MATTIE MITCHELL WAS HUNTER, TRAPPER, lumberjack, and woodsman extraordinaire, as well as an experienced guide and all-seeing prospector. He employed most of his abilities at the same time. His employ of one trade involved and sometimes demanded the skill of the others. Two of his most remarkable skills would put his name on the lips of miners and prospectors and the general population around the Newfoundland island nation. His discovery would become known worldwide. His name would not.
White trappers and explorers, who spent much time along the rivers and many tributaries of the Exploits River in central Newfoundland, marvelled at the immense stands of virgin timber growing on the island. Untouched mature tracts of black spruce and balsam fir, majestic groves of towering pine trees, fields full of glistening, sky-high white birch, and billowing aspens ran the entire length of Newfoundland’s long inland valleys.
The timber stands were endless. All of it was untouched, all of it theirs for the taking. Always searching for new opportunities, the industrious trappers and hunters weren’t long in talking about the fortunes of timber available all along the Exploits, which was ever ready to transport the waiting wealth to market. News of this bounty soon reached the ears of entrepreneurs and the governing body of the day. The Exploits River would never be serene again.
On a snowy, blustery January 7, 1905, the government of Newfoundland, in partnership with the Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company—or the A. N. D. Company, as it would become known island-wide for the next one hundred years— entered into an agreement. Five months of heated discussion led to its approval, and it passed in the Newfoundland government’s legislature on June 13 of the same year. The agreement gave the A. N. D. Company an ironclad lease for ninety-nine years, with a further right for renewal, of an area of 3,000 square miles of land in the forested heart of the Newfoundland island colony. The lease included inland water rights, full mineral as well as quarry rights—an added bonus—falling anywhere within the boundaries of the document. Of course, it included total timber rights.
The modern pulp and paper mill was built on the site of the Grand Falls, twenty miles or so upstream from the fledgling town of Botwood. The deepwater port on the ocean side of the Exploits estuary was needed for the transport of white paper from the mill to world markets. The broad, wooded banks of the Exploits River above the Grand Falls, and the growing town which would bear their name, would yield from its seemingly inexhaustible supply of wood fibre for years to come. Opposition members, who had been against the government’s deal in the first place, would never know that it would take nearly one hundred years of pulp and paper production before their fears about signing away all rights to the heartland of the island would become a reality.
ONE OF THE INGREDIENTS REQUIRED FOR the manufacture of pulp into newsprint is sulphur. This non-metallic solid is the thirteenth most common element in the earth’s crust. From sulphur comes sodium bisulphate, a derivative essential in the papermaking process.
In 1905, the A. N. D. Company hired Mattie Mitchell to search for sulphur deposits. A significant find of this element would reduce the costs of importing the material to the island. Now Mattie’s famous powers of observation would really be put to the test. The company gave him a brief description of what to look for, and after he made preparations for an extended journey, he set off from Grand Falls into the wilderness of central Newfoundland with two fellow A. N. D. Company employees, William F. Canning and Michael S. Sullivan. Mattie Mitchell, who was now in his fifties, was about to start just one of the many chapters of his legend that, sadly, would only be read long after the man was dead.
They headed upstream, keeping to the shorelines of the Exploits River. They searched the many ponds and lakes that flowed into the big river valley on their way. The men knew their best chance at finding a sulphur deposit lay where the water had caused erosion. Mattie was their leader. He just seemed to have a sixth sense for direction. The men would talk by their night fire and decide on the next day’s traverse, and in the morning Mattie would lead off toward the agreed-upon site without compass or map.
Mattie seldom followed his people’s rule of travel these days. Though he knew very well the “Red Indian this way, Mi’kmaq this way” mantra, and still harboured some misgivings, he went into the forbidden areas anyway when he crossed the invisible divide. However, he always paused before entering valleys or before crossing rivers where he knew the Red Indians had been. Canning and Sullivan simply thought Mattie was studying the lay of the land and choosing the best route. He appeared to tread lightly as they approached the eastern end of Red Indian Lake. Mattie called it “the Red Pond.” Mattie didn’t voice his concerns aloud to his companions, nor did he mention the great sadness that always shuddered through his body when he knew they had crossed an old trace of the Beothuk’s passing. The signs were never fresh, only faded and weathered, until only their spirit remained, felt only by those who believed in such things.
When the three men reached the place where the wide mouth of the Exploits sucked great volumes of water away from Red Indian Lake, they crossed over the narrow inlet at the lake’s east end by boat and journeyed west along its northern shore. As they searched all along that shore and walked upstream a fair distance to explore every one of the brooks and streams that poured into the lake, Mattie’s companions always felt as though their Indian guide was impatient to continue travelling.
When they reached the mouth of Sandy River, later to be named the Buchans River, Mattie seemed to be content and led his small party steadily upstream. His step seemed to be more earnest than usual as they journeyed upriver.
The British had left their mark at Red Pond in 1811, nearly one hundred years before. The Buchans River got its name from a Royal Navy lieutenant, David Buchan, who was one of the few Englishmen who had shown some concern for the plight of the few remaining native Beothuk Indians. In a vain effort to communicate and establish relations with the elusive Beothuk, he had headed an expedition to the frozen shores of this Red Indian Lake.
In the winter of 1811, the ambitious lieutenant indeed made contact with the Indians, and was so confident he would be accepted into their trust that he left two of his men to spend the night in the Beothuk camp. Before noon the following day, they saw red blotches on the white snow long before they reached the site. His two men had been beheaded, but not before a brutal fight for their lives. The campground, and even the frozen lake nearby, was spattered with the blood of his two soldiers. The Beothuk had long since disappeared into the silent forest. Buchan was devastated, as much for his failed contact with the Indians as for the loss of his men.
Buchan returned to the frozen Red Indian Lake again in 1820. This time he brought with him the body of a Beothuk woman her people called Demasduit. The whites called her Mary March, after the Blessed Virgin, Mary, and for the month in which she was captured by the whites. Demasduit had died in captivity, from the white man’s terrible lung disease, tuberculosis. Buchan left Demasduit’s body in a hastily built teepee near the river that would eventually bear his name and retreated back to his schooner in the Bay of Exploits.
MATTIE LOVED HIS “CUPPA TEA.” He was always the one who chose the spot for their mug-up. The place he chose to boil the kettle on the banks of Sandy River on this expedition would change the history of Newfoundland forever.
On this day he decided to lunch and boil up on a large outcrop that jutted out of the riverbank and which disappeared into the rushing water. He usually looked around some before deciding on a place for their meals. This time he didn’t take any time making that decision. He simply walked below the overhanging rock, removed his pack, and announced that this was where they would rest and make tea.
The outcrop upon which he had started a fire close to the river had a reddish brown stain running through it. In some places it was grey, and in other places a yellowish green stain ran out of the cliff. All three men recognized that this geological formation contained some kind of unusual rock. As it turned out, the discovery didn’t contain sulphur, but sulphides. Mattie led the others to two more outcrops of the same material in the same area.
They spent two days carefully choosing the best rock samples to take back with them. During all this time Mattie didn’t appear surprised or even excited. It was as if he had known where to find this strange rock. The samples they took back were a thousand times more valuable than sulphur. What Mattie Mitchell had led the men to was the biggest sulphide-based metal deposit in the world. It contained copper, lead, zinc, gold, and silver.
It would take five more years before the first motor-driven boat would take 1,000 tons of samples of the ore across Red Indian Lake to the railhead. From the railcar it was loaded on board a ship at the new port of Botwood, and from there shipped to Sweden for testing. The A. N. D. Company learned that Mattie’s find was extremely valuable. However, the technology to separate the various minerals was not known.
The flotation process needed to separate them was not perfected until 1925, when the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), at its metallurgical lab in Flat River, Missouri, finally solved the problem. Two years more passed, and on May 19, 1927, ten men arrived at the site that would bear the name Buchans and started the groundwork for a world-class mine.
Over its lifespan the Buchans mine would yield out of its depths 16.2 million tons of some of the richest high-grade ore on the planet, with a combined value of US $3.6 billion. In 1905, in thanks for his discovery, Mattie Mitchell received his wage of $18 per month, plus a bonus of one barrel of flour for his discovery. The barrel of flour was worth $2.50.