The Radioactive North

By "Radioactive North" we mean an area within which the major Saskatchewan uranium discoveries have been made, where uranium has been produced, and where new mines are presently going into production. This area forms a kind of halo around the Athabasca Sandstone that stretches from Lake Athabasca on the north to Cree Lake on the south, and from Wollaston Lake on the east to the Alberta boundary in the west.

As a result of these discoveries, Saskatchewan is well on its way to becoming a major source of uranium, challenging the first-place Elliot Lake area of Ontario. Vern Hogg recalls some of the early history from an administrative point of view.

After the war, at the suggestion of the federal government, the provinces passed an order-in-council excluding uranium from those minerals that could be included in a claim. In 1946-1947, the federal government, through the crown corporation, Eldorado, set up at Goldfields on the north shore of Lake Athabasca to prospect for uranium. They found, of course, that uranium was excluded, so they asked the provinces to reverse their decision. Consequently, the provinces passed another order-in-council to include uranium as a mineral that could be prospected for.

Before this, in 1942, the federal government had expropriated the mine that was producing uranium at Great Bear Lake, because uranium had become a strategic mineral in the production of what was referred to as "the bomb". By excluding uranium from prospecting they had prevented anyone else from playing around with it. Then later they found that they had to reverse that decision because uranium at Great Bear Lake was exhausted. This meant that by retaining the ban on uranium they were in effect preventing discoveries from being made.

We developed regulations so prospectors and small companies could obtain large areas to prospect, called reservations.

Actually, at the time the large companies were not interested in uranium. They asked, "Where's the market?" It was only when the United States said, "We're going to need a lot of uranium" and established the price at $10 a pound that these companies became interested. Companies would get contracts with Eldorado, the government company. You couldn't sell uranium to just anybody. You had to sell it to the government.

These reservations could be held for a certain length of time and then the companies could acquire certain claims and allow the rest to go back to the Crown. In 1951 a lot of these reservations did go back, but Gunnar Mine was discovered on one of them by Albert Zeemel.

The company, Eldorado Mining and Refining, didn't want a shack town on their property. We looked at the air photos and there were three sites some distance from Goldfields. I sent an engineer up and he looked at these and reported on their merits. I then went up, covered the area and selected the present site of Uranium City. I was accompanied by Dr. Gillanders of Eldorado, as they were anxious that a municipal set-up be developed. The question came up as to a name and I suggested Uranium City.

ALBERT 0. ZEEMEL

Albert Zeemel was originally from Lee River and worked as a prospector.
Photo - Zeemel family collection.

In the tradition of many fine Canadian prospectors, the late Albert Otto Zeemel learned the art of his chosen profession first hand from his father, Fritz Zeemel.

Albert was born in Lac du Bonnet, Manitoba, on March 19, 1911. His family moved to Winnipeg when he was in Grade 3, then moved back to Lac du Bonnet for a few years, and then returned to Winnipeg, where he finished his education.

Joining his father in prospecting in the early 1930s, Albert devoted the rest of his life to the search for mineral resources. Following initial field experience, he attended a prospector's school operated by the Province of Manitoba, where he obtained his diploma. His instructor at this school was J. S. DeLury, the head of the Department of Geology at the University of Manitoba.

Albert Zeemel's prospecting activities took him to various places in Canada, but his greatest efforts were devoted to northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. He was working mainly for mining companies, one of which was Bob Jowsey's God's Lake Gold Mines, for which he prospected in the 1930s in the God's Lake, Sandy Lake, and Island Lake areas.

His first steady mining job - which led to a long and successful association - was working underground at the original Beresford Lake Camp of Gilbert LaBine's Gunnar Gold Mines in Manitoba. This activity lasted from 1938 until the mine was closed down in May 1942, due to ore exhaustion. In the continued employ of Gunnar Gold, Albert then became chief prospector, and that same year staked a large block of claims of chromite discoveries in the Bird River area of south-eastern Manitoba.

God's Lake Gold Mines and Gunnar Gold teamed up on a chrome project in 1944, at a time when an intense search for strategic wartime metals was taking place. Albert came up with another chrome discovery at Euclid Lake, about 30 miles north of Bird River. Following this brief stint on chromium prospects, Gunnar Gold moved Albert to its Chartrand, Allie, and Robitaille claims in Hislop Township, east of Timmins. Heavy overburden frustrated these efforts, so when the Canadian government lifted the ban on public prospecting for uranium in 1952, Albert and his partner, Walter Blair, were quickly moved to the Goldfields (Uranium City) area on the north shore of Lake Athabasca. The discovery of what was to become Gunnar's large open-pit uranium mine was made by Albert for Gilbert LaBine on July 2, 1952. Albert and Walter made fine prospecting partners, but Walter became ill and was relegated to tending camp and doing the cooking while Albert continued to prospect. It was at the very southerly tip of the Crackingstone Peninsula, at St. Mary's Channel, that the discovery was made. The surface showing was by no means spectacular, being almost entirely covered with muskeg, but a couple of small outcrops protruding through the boggy carpet revealed narrow stringers of pitchblende, which turned out to be on the footwall P1 of the main orebody. Preliminary diamond drilling commenced that October, turning up wide intersections of good uranium mineralization. The decision was then made to continue drilling through the winter months, and a large-scale program was initiated which eventually outlined the massive orebody. Gunnar Gold brought the mine into production on October 21, 1955, with an initial daily ore capacity of 1,250 tons. Milling capacity eventually rose to 1,650 tons during the next two years.

Albert continued working the Gunnar until 1972 but maintained a lively interest in mining until his death on June 10, 1980. He was devoted to mining and, shortly before his death, was prominent in a tour of uranium developments in the Athabasca Basin area of northern Saskatchewan. One of his numerous sidelines was the conducting of prospecting demonstrations at the Winnipeg Rock and Mineral Show, such as panning for gold using gold specimens from his considerable collection.

Albert was one of the few Certified Prospectors in Canada and was actively involved in the Manitoba Geological Society and the Manitoba Prospectors and Developers Association. He was also a member of the Winnipeg Rock and Mineral Club and the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy and served on the board of directors of the Prospectors and Developers Association.

(Hanula et al., 1982, p. 293-294)

This 1950s ad from the Toronto Star Weekly for Red Strap overalls
featured Lee River’s Albert Zeemel known widely at the time for his uranium discovery in Saskatchewan. The ad used a photo of Zeemel that originally ran in the Financial Post. Artwork courtesy Levi Strauss.

Ted Ellingham was Resident Geologist during those early bustling years and said . . . .

When I was there it was a very bustling community. There were so many people around that accommodation was pretty limited. You had to pretty nearly line up to get a meal at a cafe, it was a real boom town.

There was a Uranium City area proper and then Eldorado had their townsite over at Beaverlodge. They were there first and had to provide accommodations for their people. They had the Ace Mine going, and I guess the Fay was going at that time too. It started to produce in 1953 - started milling.

I spent a fair amount of time with people from the federal government. The Geological Survey of Canada had representatives in the area who were gathering information, similar to what we were keeping track of. Don MacLaren and Hogarth were two fellows there I did work with. Travelling around with them, combining our efforts in going places, to cut down the costs of air travel.

As far as prospectors are concerned, the ones who immediately come to mind are the Pat Hughes organization - the Tara Boys. They were very active. They had considerable holdings in the area at that time, up around Laird Island, where they did a lot of work. Gordon Moore, of course, was one of the stalwarts of the area. He came quite early. He worked with TMC at one time - Technical Mines Consultants. They were the outfit that handled quite a number of the concessions. They did the exploration work for the owners. Goldfields Uranium and Rix Athabaska Uranium were of the same part and parcel.

Most of the finds had been made before 1953. Cayzor, Rix Athabaska, and even Lorado were known in those days. After 1953, they were all getting ready to get into production. The problem was finding a mill to send the ore to. You couldn't possibly see every mine developing its own mill. Eventually, the Lorado custom mill entered the area and took production from these smaller satellite mines.

Eldorado took a certain amount, but they were pretty restrictive as to from whom they accepted ore. I don't know why. Because they didn't have the capacity? Of course, they wanted first of all to put their ore through. They had a 2000-ton-per-day mill, yet they didn't have it operating at full capacity for several years.

Prospectors in the Uranium City area in those days? There were many - Wahlberg, Alvin Oak, Old Sam Dago from Nicholson, Jock MacKinnon, Eddie Otto who committed suicide, Curly Lanetti, and Charlie Swenson. Charlie had an interest in Lake Cinch in the early days. He was involved in the hotel business later, of course. He kept up his interest in exploration, having so many people going through the hotel.

Gus Hawker, a prospector? He would like to think he was, but Gus is the type of individual that wants advice in the worst way, and then won't take it. He'd had his mind, made up before and would want only to have his decision confirmed. If the advice didn't confirm what he had made up his mind to, he wouldn't listen. He was the darndest man for getting out on properties and picking up samples. His store counter would be just strewn with them. I wonder what the radon level was in that store.

George Findlay, a retired prospector, can go back to the years before the uranium era when the big, and only, operation was the development of the Box Mine, a gold producer owned by Consolidated Mining and Smelting, which came very soon to an unhappy end. The ore was too low-grade to make money he recalled . . . .

My first prospecting in Saskatchewan was in 1936 when the Goldfields boom was on. I came in as a freelance prospector, out of Edmonton. My partner, Charlie Murray, and I built a boat at Fort McMurray and drifted down the Athabasca River and across to Fort Chipewyan. We rowed with oars and we bummed a ride with a trapper's skiff and kicker who was going into Goldfields.

The town was bustling then. Men were coming from all over. The ice had just gone out and the men were being flown in, particularly from Prince Albert. They were told that there was lots of work up there. Canadian Airways would fly them in, so long as they had the fare.

I met one chap, he came off the plane with a carpenter's kit and the next day he was out fishing. He had been told there was lots of work, but the jobs had all been filled. We had a fish net, so my partner and I were catching whitefish. We were doing alright and we worked on the boats unloading - the Hudson's Bay boats.

The Box Mine headframe was just going up, so we put in about three weeks there before I hired out with Consolidated. I worked around the camp, doing some surface trenching and prospecting at the Box Mine. Then they shipped me to Pine Point, Northwest Territories. I remained in the NWT until 1950 when the uranium boom broke. I came down to old Goldfields, which was abandoned by then, with a diamond drill crew to work at Nicholson Mines, a uranium operation. Prospecting wasn't allowed other than by the federal government, which by this time had staked Eldorado-Beaver lodge.

Nicholson never erected a mill. They sent out some ore, they had a very complex ore, at Fish Hook Bay. They never did have the tonnage, I guess. They had gold, they had platinum, and they had minerals I can't even pronounce. I think even the mineralogist didn't know what they had.

George Home was a pilot with Saskatchewan Government Airways, one of the companies, along with Athabaska Airways and McMurray Air Services, that did the bush flying in the area he recalled . . . .

We had a base at Uranium City and one at Stony Rapids, and I worked out of both bases. There was a lot of mine service work done out of these bases. The base at Uranium City was at Martin Lake. The big rush at Uranium City was two years before I got there in 1955. There were a lot of 10 and 20-minute trips, which makes for much hard work. Besides, the hills are quite high, if there's a 350-foot ceiling and the hills are 600 or 700 feet high you're kind of picking your way through the valleys. With a ten minute trip there's pressure to make it regardless of the weather. Most accidents are on short trips.

Alec MacAskell prospected in the eastern section. His "back door" uranium find never amounted to anything, he missed the "boom" he recalled . . . .

I was with Consolidated and for three or four years with Dee Exploration - Jim Parres - mostly northeast of Stony Rapids. There was nothing that turned out, nothing that was big enough. We found mineral deposits all right, but all small ones.

I made a little money on the uranium there, right under my house at Stony Rapids. But we didn't find it in time. We knew it was there somewhere because of the float [mineralized boulders] all around. We finally found it. We had been walking over it for years, on the portage up to Stony Lake - right beside my house. Eldorado did a little work on it, there were some good assays, but they never delineated the length or width. Yes, we struck the vein - an iron formation - good assays, but the boom was over, that was about 1954. It was almost impossible to get rid of anything. But, it's still there, nobody is doing anything with it, as far as I know.

To be a northern "character" is not to be laughed at, or criticized, but more likely admired by those who wish they dared to be different. Gus Hawker, Uranium City storekeeper, and ex-bushman-prospector is certainly different. Some say his stories are not to be believed but those same people would go miles to hear them he recalled . . . .

I came in 1951, the reason I came here was that drilling was about to begin, and I thought it was a good place to do a little business, so I put up a tent store.

When I came to Goldfields the mine (The Box) had closed down, but uranium was just starting. And of course, the town was booming good because they were all coming in here for uranium - you see, Eldorado was just starting.

I saw two men come here, they had a Geiger counter. One put the counter on the other guy - they were joking - and it kicked. They'd been drinking the water near Eldorado and it kicked in his stomach. So they went back, and they got $9000 for the mine. I don't remember his name. He went back to Finland and he was happy with the $9000. All these companies, they never pay you much for a mine. The only time they'll pay money for it is if a small company has enough money to hang on to it for a while, like Lake Cinch. Eldorado paid $900,000 for it and they wouldn't give you a dollar, or me.

It was the happiest time I spent in my life, that year at Goldfields, because we were all broke, and nobody was higher than the other. The Indians and everybody were the same, everybody had a good time. I used to go out at night and cut the wood with an axe, cut down the trees, haul wood in, and get the kids to help me carry it. The kids would carry according to size - the little ones carried the small trees and the big kids the big ones. We'd all be in a line bringing in the wood.

I went over the Gunnar property, but I didn't like it and I said to Albert Zeemel: "I don't like this ground." It looked too small to me.

He staked it and of course, made a fortune out of it. He staked it and he offered me $2000 for that house next door here, in 14 shares of Gunnar Mines. Within three weeks they were $22. I later sold that house for $1000, and it was worth three-quarters of a million. I missed that one, of course, you can't hit them all.

I was sued for $100,000 for my first sale of claims, it was down by Gunnar. I sent this man down to stake just six claims. He got some grub and went down and staked the six claims for me and two more for himself. He came back and Pat Hughes, President of Northgate, now in Ireland, offered me $100 apiece for them, I said, "Okay".

By noon that day, I had a wire offering me $12,000 for that ground, and I said to Pat Hughes, "You didn't need them, did you?" He said, "No, that's all right".

So I sold them for $12,000. Then by about three o'clock in the afternoon, I was offered $35,000. Now, I said, I haven't taken any money. I haven't sold the ground, I thought. So I resold it.

Then these men from Toronto came up and offered me $75,000, and said, "You can't turn this down." But I said, I just sold it this morning to a man by the name of Dingman.

So I saw Dingman, and he said, "No, you sold that ground. You can't sell it again." Then the argument started. "Well, I can get $75,000 for it".

He sued me for $100,000 because I'd stopped him from making that amount. I go to court. I had asked that the money be paid "immediately". He claimed "immediately" was no proper date. I had ten lawyers and they figured that "immediately" was immediately. So they fought the case, and they found an old case where a bicycle was sold in England, which was to be paid for immediately. The judge said that was 24 hours, I had received no money. So I won the case.

If the above story seems somewhat confusing, I, the author, offer no apologies. That's the way it was told to me, and at the time I thought I understood it. Now I'm not so sure.

Charlie Swenson, I met fairly early here, about '52 or '53. I remember having some grapes. There was no fruit here. And he had a few men, so he split the grapes up. He paid me $45 for them. They went to all the drillers and himself, too. Charlie was a promoter. I don't think he was a prospector. I don't think he had that in him.

Alice Thompson lives in Uranium City. She was the first White woman to settle there, in 1950. She recalls many of the names of those who prospected, developed the area and built Uranium City . . . .

We brought this house over from Goldfields - over the portage, over Beaverlodge Lake. I have been in the area since 1950. The most famous prospectors in this area were Johnnie Wahlberg and "Gentleman Jock" MacKinnon. Johnnie passed away a few years ago. Gentleman Jock is 74 and still out prospecting. Johnnie Wahlberg was quite a booze artist. He would come in out of the bush and all winter he would stay drunk. Gentleman Jock would take care of him.

Some others - Steve Yanik, his brother Joe, Foss Irwin, Frank Camsell [Camsell Portage was not named after him but after Charles Camsell, Deputy Minister of Mines - BR], and Old Andy Fossum. We used to call him the Vanilla Kid.

Gus Hawker had a tent where the store is now. There was a slough there and Gus Hawker got the idea he was going to feed his kids' goat's milk, so he got a goat.

The Vanilla Kid and a bunch of them were drinking one night. They decided that they were going to have what we call "Moose Milk". But they couldn't get any fresh milk. All they had was this poor goat. They figured they couldn't milk the goat and run back and forth to get the milk to mix with the rum, so they just moved the goat right into the hotel, where the rum was. Can you imagine a bunch of drunks trying to push this goat upstairs? They got it there. So they had their Moose Milk, although it was Goat's Milk.

And then there was Curly Lanetti. His partner became "bushed", so he took him out.

Charlie Swenson, I've known for years and years, even before he started his mining promotion. And Jack Sarcee, from around Camsell Portage. He was the one who told me the height of the hills beside a lake was equal to the depth of the water in the lake.

Norman Chopping, trapper-prospector, had a Native partner. This poor fellow got an appendicitis attack and died in the bush. It was cold, so he froze. Norman had to bring the body in, so he sat him up in the sleigh. Of course, it stayed there, frozen stiff. On the way out he had to stop to make tea and eat. So he'd take this body out and prop him up against a tree, just so he'd have company.

Alice Thompson lives with Arnold Rawcliffe in a house that was pulled over from Goldfields in 1950. Arnold is a retired diamond driller. No, not one who drills for diamonds, but one who uses diamond-studded bits that bite their way through the rock and bring up samples for examination by the geologist and testing by the assayer . . . .

It's looking into the earth, using diamond bits, and bringing out the core. Then the geologist checks it and assays it.

My first drilling job in the Uranium City area was in 1962, first at the dock at Black Bay putting in the pilings. Then on Beaverlodge Lake, to Uranium Ridge, and all over, including Eldorado.

Drilling in the winter? You're working pretty hard, so there's not much trouble keeping warm. Water is the biggest problem. If you are a long way from water, you have rubber hose lines out, and you cover them with snow. Everything's fine until your coal oil stove goes out. The coal oil stove's at the lakeshore to warm the water before it enters the hose, but if your line is long you put another coal oil stove between the lake and the drill. If the hose freezes, if the stove goes out, you try to break the line, but whatever freezes you have to thaw out in the water, maybe half a mile of it, in a barrel. We used to call it "cooking spaghetti".

But living in tents - it's not the best: 12 by 14, four guys in a tent, a heater that usually smokes. And they stink, depending on who you've got in there. It seems hard, but it isn't as hard as it looks. The hours are usually 12, sometimes 24. Regular in the North was 12 a day. But here, now, they're straight 8.

In 1947, I was getting $1.75 an hour, but that was tops, as a driller. A helper - $1.10 or 90 cents. Now, around $5.80-$6.00 an hour, plus board and lodging.

Alice Thompson again, this time at Johnnie Wahlberg's wake she recalled . . . .

Johnnie Wahlberg and his partner Jock MacKinnon had been in the bush together for 25 years. Johnnie died and it was the habit up here that after the funeral you go back and have coffee and sandwiches at the house. But both these men were bachelors so I offered to get off work early and serve coffee and have the pallbearers and immediate family come back to the house.

As it turned out, all the Eldorado dignitaries came and we were serving coffee. But the pallbearers forgot to show up. They'd stopped on the way back from the graveyard to have a drink and they eventually arrived.

I was politely serving coffee and sandwiches, but I knew Old Jock would like a bottle of beer. So I very discreetly put a bottle in front of him. Well, George Mikelow, Frank Camsell, and all the other old prospectors rushed out, brought beer in by the case, and brought bottles in. That one bottle of beer - that was it.

The party broke up at four o'clock in the morning. They were dancing on the lawn and they were singing. But, I'm sure that Johnnie Wahlberg was laughing in his grave, and enjoying it, too. I had a drink for Johnnie.

Alice again, on the dances in the old days . . . .

The dances in those days were "out of this world". They were held on a the platform we built outside. There was a little railing around. A few of the Natives who could play guitars would get together and we'd all dance. But the biggest trouble up here is mosquitos. So open-air dancing isn't exactly a sport. But we used to get a barrel and put it in the corner of this platform and make a smudge. By the time we got home, we were more smoked than the hides were.

They used to fly the booze in. When I was in Goldfields they used to get it once every two weeks. We had a pilot on Saskatchewan Government Airways - Lefty MacLeod. You gave him your order and he made the run every two weeks. When the plane landed the whole town got drunk. I remember once when you couldn't find a sober person in Goldfields. We'd all get together - Steve Yanik, Stell McIvor, Curly Lanetti, Happy Kays, and Slim, and we'd go from door to door to get everybody drunk. The only song they could sing was "Goodnight Irene", but they never did say goodnight. It was morning before it was over.

Sixteen years after Alice Thompson moved her house from Goldfields to Uranium City, exciting new uranium discoveries were made in the Wollaston Lake area, far to the east. Following the first discovery by Gulf Minerals at Rabbit Lake, just off the west shore of Wollaston, the company sent out prospectors into the area to locate other, nearby orebodies. Art Sjolander was one of these prospectors. His luck was one of those once-in-a-lifetime affairs he recalls . . . .

Probably the most exciting time of my life was when I was working for Gulf Minerals in 1966. Rabbit Lake had already been found, the year before. The next spring I was hired, and I got them to put me down on Collins Bay, about five miles north of the present mine. I put down there because it was on the line of strike. Also, there was a nice beach, a lovely beach.

A lovely campsite, so my partners and I put up a camp. I had a metal folding table which I put up and prepared something to eat.

One of the scintillometers we had didn't appear to be working properly. Most of the gear was still down at the beach, so I went down and got this scintillometer, brought it back, put it on the table, and switched it on.

It went wild, "Zeeeeeeeeeeee".

So I said to my partner, "This thing is haywire".

So I fiddled around with it, switching it on and off, and every time I switched it on it would go, "Zeeeeeeeeeeee".

By God, I started to get the idea that this thing wasn't crazy, so I took it outside. I walked away from the tent about 20 feet. As I walked outside the noise gradually diminished and the dial registering the needle would drop down too. So I fiddled around, back and forth and around. Every time I came into the tent this thing would squeal. Go right off the scale.

So when I said, "This has got to be something".

So I walked down to the beach and got a shovel and started poking around in the ground under the table right in our "kitchen". I pulled out a piece of pure pitchblende that weighed 111/2 pounds. Eight or ten inches in diameter, pure pitch.

So that was the Collins Bay orebody, which they drilled, and have been drilling for a year. Several million tons. So that's how easy it was to find the Collins Bay orebody.

The history of prospecting, exploration, and mining in Saskatchewan is not all romantic tales of individual fortunes and the building of mining communities in the North. Once a mine is in production and the community stabilized, it loses its glamour, but for many the struggle then has just begun. For those who do the work - the miner, the mucker, the millman, the hoist man, the mechanic, and the electrician - there is a challenge to collectively advance the interests of the worker, and many times during the process of building trade unions there is the challenge to accomplish this, to have to resist the efforts of the employer to maintain an "open shop", a company town, where the boss' voice is the law. The workers at the plant at Eldorado Nuclear at Uranium City are represented by the United Steel Workers of America. Staff Representative Terry Stevens services the local . . . .

Eldorado Nuclear was the only producing uranium mine in the past number of years. They were organized by Mine Mill and Smelter Workers in the fifties, but as a result of the merger in 1967 they came with Steel, and I had the opportunity of servicing them. I'm familiar with the area now.

Uranium mining is pretty scary. First of all, the earlier mine was at Port Radium on Great Bear Lake, and we've had a lot of people come from there. Things we didn't know a decade ago, and the industry knew but didn't notify people of, was the radiation exposure in uranium mining It shows up 15 or 20 years after exposure to it. Now we're seeing people who came out of poorly-controlled mining conditions at Port Radium succumbing to various troubles, but we are lucky to have the assistance of the Occupational Health Department. Bob Sass, Director of Occupational Health, is tremendous.

The Atomic [Energy] Control Board has been slow. The Ham Commission Report is a conviction of the federal government, the Ontario Government mining safety regulations, and the companies. They knew and were aware of over-exposure to radiation and silicotic conditions. We've got enough publicity on it that the Ham Commission has come out with this indictment of the federal government and the mining industry.

So we hope we're doing some things right now. We're having better standards, better testing, and more enforcement. And the provincial government, thank God, has said: "Look, we're going to see that the workers in Saskatchewan are going to receive the full benefits of our standards and regulations, even though uranium mining comes under federal control. We're going to impose ourselves on it and if they don't like it they can test it in court". And they're doing that, and we are very pleased about it.

Eldorado is a crown corporation and thus is dealing through the federal government. It's a bureaucratic nightmare. They are always hesitant to take the lead. They are followers, and kind of distant. Until our last agreement, which we settled in June 1975, vacations with pay, and the extended vacation benefits which we had at Thompson, Manitoba, were never available to our members in Uranium City. The full subsidy allowances and the board and room charges and the housing accommodations we've had in Yellowknife were never available to our Uranium City members.

I guess one of the reasons was the reluctance of the federal government to, to be a pace-setter - and also the depressed market for uranium. For years they made no money. At least they said they didn't. They paid no taxes, Uranium's gotten healthy now.

Under the old agreement it could cost a man up to $15 a day to eat at the cafeteria. If it was steak night the T-bone was $5.75. If the hungry miner wanted a second helping it cost another $5.75, as it would in a restaurant. Now they pay $3.00 a day for board and room and they can eat as much as they want.

And then there are the energy costs. There's no natural gas, there's no road into here, so they have to bring in barrels of fuel oil in tankers. The company subsidizes the housing. You can rent a house for 50 or 60 dollars a month, but the heating cost was growing terrifically. It is a very cold climate. So the guys were really concerned, with fuel oil going to a dollar a gallon their pay cheques were going to dwindle. So we negotiated a fuel oil subsidy that this year will reach 750 gallons of fuel oil for every family of every employee who is living in a house in Uranium City. The company will supply 750 gallons a year. We think with proper insulation the average house will run 1000 gallons a year.

But those are the kinds of things you have to do to attract people to live in an isolated area. Isolated areas have their own social and economic problems, so they have to have these extras from what people get in the South. Or, why would people want to go there?

Yes, a few years back we had a strike that lasted a couple of months. I wasn't involved in it so I don't recall the issues to it. I was working in Winnipeg. It was in 1971, I believe, '71 or '72. It was successful in that it was concluded and a settlement was reached. Fortunately, we didn't have to strike. This time we received the best settlement we've ever had in this part of the country without striking.

Our organizing interest in Gulf Minerals is to the extent that we're keeping a very careful eye, and trying to cultivate some friends so we can get organized there.