Some Saskatchewan Operators

E. F. Partridge & Associates is the name of a mineral exploration group, still going, that will always be remembered as one of Saskatchewan's most successful "small operators". Eric Partridge, the field man and leader of the group, has been at it for 30 years - since 1946. It was with some difficulty that the writer was able to elicit from this reticent, rather shy, man details of his achievements, which are not small. In 1946, I organized a long-range program of prospecting in Saskatchewan. That fall, October, I came out west to Prince Albert and visited my brother - a dentist here (Prince Albert) since about 1936. He and Floyd Glass talked me into prospecting in Saskatchewan. As a consequence, I have been here ever since.

That winter, 1946-47, I made a tour of northern Saskatchewan with Floyd Glass, flying. We went to see the two Studers, Adolph and John, and as a consequence I recognized that the Precambrian area was essentially virgin - and a long-range program of prospecting was embarked upon. We went to several other places - Stony Rapids, Fond du Lac, and Goldfields. Uranium City didn't exist then.

We talked to a few other people, and that winter I formed a firm called E. F. Partridge & Associates. It was financed essentially by Saskatchewan people - some medical people and two or three local businessmen. Over the years, the group subscribed some $260,000 - a significant amount of money. It's old dollars I'm talking about, over about 20 years. That was their direct investment. On top of that, would be money from the sale of optioned properties. I mention this because I think it was very significant that we did have enough businessmen locally who had faith in the country.

We started in a kind of small way, reaching a peak about 1957. I had as many as 20-23 men employed. That would be six parties - six two-man parties - plus other personnel.

As a consequence of the study of aerial photos, geological maps, and other available data of interest, we would take a section of the Province and would thoroughly prospect it. In the summer, it could run to a maximum of 1,200 square miles, which would be a reconnaissance exploration type of work. Our traverses would be 4 miles, sometimes 6 miles, apart, at right angles to the geological formations. If we got any encouragement we would, in mid-season, concentrate on one sector. If not, we'd finish the area off on a reconnaissance basis and come back to it the next year.

This went on till 1962, when a partnership was formed with Falconbridge Nickel. They put up a portion of the exploration funds, which were then running at 60, 70, and 80 thousand dollars per season. I don't think they ever exceeded 85. As a long-term exploration program, we started in the lower section of a belt of sedimentary rocks, the Foster River area.

I am leading up to the discovery, if you wish, of the "Wollaston Trend". It wouldn't be honest of me to even suggest that I recognized the Wollaston Trend as a particularly favourable belt for the deposition of either base metals or uranium. But I will recite a little instance that happened at an annual meeting of the Saskatchewan Mining Association. It would have been in the winter of '69-'70. Someone speaking to Allan Swanson, who was the Exploration Manager of a group of companies called the Dynamic Group, complimented him on having carried equity in the Gulf Minerals uranium discovery at Rabbit Lake.

And Swanson said, "That fellow there deserves more credit than I do," pointing at me.

I remember getting a brochure from New Continental, the company which had the permit where the Gulf Find was made. The main points of promotion were two properties I had under option, one to Great Plains Development and the other to Falconbridge Nickel. The Great Plains option, near Lucy Lake, didn't pan out, but the other, the Falconbridge option, was the lead-zinc occurrence which I think ultimately will become a producer.

This is evidence that mining companies, even the giants among them, still depend, and I tend to think will be for a long time to come, upon the efforts of the smaller exploration companies such as myself and my financing group. More often than not, these smaller companies sort of show the way. They don't usually end up finding the mines, but they do find enough mineralization, the scent, to get into the majors with the money. You have all the best aspirations in the world, but you have to have the money to keep you in the field.

Pilots and prospectors are interdependent. Prospectors need the services of the aircraft that moves them from place to place and the pilot depends upon the prospector for a good part of his income. Scotty MacLeod, one of Saskatchewan's early fliers, recalls some of the work he did for Eric F. Partridge he said . . . .

One of the earliest prospectors we did a lot of work for was Eric Partridge. At one time he was employed by the Saskatchewan Government Airways, at the La Ronge base. Then he got interested in prospecting and over the years he's been a pretty solid type of prospector. He has come up with some really interesting properties. Still at it, after all these years . . . .

I met him first about 1948. He loves the work — and he is a man with exceptionally high integrity. He doesn't try to "fast sell" a property, knowing him over these years. His properties generally proved up - they had some really good indications on them.

We've done a lot of work for Eric over the years. Not every year. He is a chap that shared the work around amongst the flying operators. The first time I can recall flying Eric was just south of the Geikie River, about straight west of Southend, Reindeer Lake. That would be about 100 miles northeast of La Ronge, about where the road to Rabbit Lake goes now. We serviced his camps, and he would want moves every three weeks or a month.

This would entail taking his tent and supplies and a canoe with a little motor, camp stove, and everything he would require to live in the bush for a month. He would live out there by himself at the start. Then he got married to a real fine English girl and she went out to the bush with him.

One of the first moves I can remember, I arrived at the camp and they had their firstborn by that time. He was occupying a little hammock, just like the Native people do with their babies. Between a couple of trees, happy as a lark.

What moves a bunch of emigre Poles to get into the mineral exploration business in northern Saskatchewan is a mystery. But they did, and Kazik Parada, their lowly prospector, recalls some of their experiences he said . . . .

It started by chance. I worked in Regina at that time, and I ran into a fellow by the name of Charteriski, who was, incidentally, a Prince, a regular Prince. Just on paper, sort of, not in reality. But he could still claim a title. But anyway, I met him in Regina, and he introduced me to another fellow. Emile Weirzycki was his name. Weirzycki had just lost a partner, whom he had got down in Ontario someplace, so he asked me if I was willing to go up North. Of course, I didn't know what I was getting into at the time. I didn't have a clue what northern Saskatchewan looked like. But anyway, to make a long story short, we got together and I came up on a six-week trial, over breakup in 1955.

At that time, besides Emile and I, there were John Tarnowski, Andrew Wolokowski, and the old General Wolokowski (a real General) and the Prince and Tarnowski, I don't know what you call him, a Baron or something. That's right, I was the only peasant in the group.

The young Wolokowski had some training as an exploration engineer with Imperial Oil. He knew something about oil but nothing about hard rock mining, I don't believe. Weirzycki had already one year of prospecting behind him, and he also had attended the Prospectors' School in La Ronge in 1954.

So he was an old hand compared to the rest of us. Otherwise, that's the only training there was. That was it.

In the beginning, it was the most horrible time we had in the bush. And the most wonderful at the same time, if that is possible. It was. We suffered. We ran out of grub. There's a story that Ed Broom, the manager of Government Trading at that time, will tell you. He said we used to go out for six weeks with eleven dollars worth of grub. It was almost true, but not quite, and that was before inflation! But we did live off the land quite a bit. Weirzycki was the kind of man who liked to live off the land, but when we came to town we had to show off. We had steaks and that sort of thing. Tartar steaks and so on.

I came out on trial and we went out in the Black Birch Lake area, Spear Lake, about 40 miles northeast of Buffalo Narrows. We went there because of the release by the Government of maps of radioactive occurrences-uranium. It was mainly to check out some of their findings. We found several showings. We named one lake after my home province in Poland - Lugan. It was sort of between us. It never got on the map. We staked claims in several places, nothing large to speak of. We never made a fortune.

Right about this time this group of Poles in La Ronge, and some others in Regina, plus some others from as far away as Chicago, got together and formed a mining company, calling it Westpol Exploration, which meant "Western Poles". They were going to do their own drilling. They bought a Packsack drill, plus some other equipment. They even had their own electromagnetic equipment.

Most of the money came from the fellows in the United States - Chicago and so on. And one lawyer in Regina. They optioned off a property in the Northwest Territories, so they got some of their money back. I don't think they recovered fully what they invested.

As far as I was concerned, I didn't know what the arrangement was, with the knowledge of English I had in those days. I couldn't speak it. My salary was $150 a month, plus some interest. I don't know what it was, probably 21/2% of whatever we staked. Some nominal thing. So I never expected any cash out of the interest part. A hundred and fifty a month was a pretty fair wage in those days.

The name of Lew Parres will appear elsewhere in this history, especially regarding his role in the Hanson Lake Road, Western Nuclear Mine, and the Choiceland iron deposit. But these references fall far short of fully defining the role of Lew Parres in Saskatchewan mineral exploration. True, he spent much of his time elsewhere, but he had the knack for handling many projects at the same time; so, even with the limited amount of time spent in Saskatchewan, the work accomplished was prodigious. Bruce Long, Mining Recorder at Flin Flon, and later Creighton, Saskatchewan, knew firsthand of Lew's activities and had this to say . . . .

I'll tell you this, if we had fifty Lew Parreses we'd have found a lot of orebodies, because Lew could raise money, and Lew made money, and for a long time every penny Lew made he ploughed right back into the ground. He had some difficult times, but he had faith.

North of the Churchill, about straight north of here, a very inactive area, Lew went up there. He raised money. He staked a lot of ground and did a lot of work. He was in with the Guggenheim interests. Lew would go into an area like that, one that had hardly been looked at. He probably flew it, ran geophysical surveys, and did a lot of diamond drilling.

But the way things are now, he has had to lay off most of his staff. He had a diamond drilling outfit and he sold that. Like most of them, he has pulled in his horns. Things have slowed down. Copper prices have dropped. And there's uncertainty about provincial and federal policies.

Lew has done a tremendous amount of work around Reindeer Lake, as well as around here. He's tried hard throughout the years. There are properties he did work on that have since been brought into production. He was the finder of the Hanson Lake orebody. He was also a driving force in the discovery of the Choiceland iron deposit.

Flamboyance may be the hallmark of the promoter, and blind optimism of the prospectors, but there's another breed of northern mineral explorers who are of an entirely different brand. Theirs is a quiet, persistent nature, scientific, even being hard-nosed, but not negative. Such a man is Don Fisher, no longer in the business, but at one time one of these types, who was almost literally moving mountains, but so quietly that few knew he was around. Publicity was the last thing he craved, he said . . . .

I came here because I was interested in the Incentive Program which was established by the Liberal government in 1955 to look for minerals. And I figured that this had tremendous potential, which most Canadians and mining organizations had overlooked.

I came from Toronto. Very few were coming here, because it was considered Saskatchewan didn't have any real mining potential. There were two things felt to be wrong with Saskatchewan - one was politics and the other was that the geology of Saskatchewan was most unfavourable for the location of mineral deposits. I had other thoughts about the place. There was enough encouragement around that with sustained work some results could be achieved.

I took the geophysical approach. There were some geophysical results, some very good ones, that indicated there must be some differences that were causing these anomalous conditions. Geophysics indicated that the Province was not entirely underlain by granite. It looked very exciting to me.

At the time I organized a small mining syndicate, called the Don Fisher Syndicate, and raised the financing from three major mining companies in the usual grubstake-prospector-syndicate fashion, whereby they would put up a certain number of dollars, and I would put up my best personal efforts. The major companies I was working with knew what mining was all about, so when I outlined my program to them, they accepted it. I was not selling ground. I was selling good mining work and an approach to it. The approach involved a kind of integrated exploration whereby we would use geophysics and geology as our tools.

So when I first came up here I came as an individual. I hired my crew up North, they were all fairly green Indian boys. I brought in a few seasoned men from Ontario who had worked for me before. Together we formed a group that had, as its basic intention, to carry out long-range work. We weren't trying to find a mine in one day. First of all, we were quite happy just to get a feel for the country - to test out a few theories. In the first year of operation, we were very successful in proving these theories.

We did a thorough analysis of all the geophysical anomalies that existed in northern Saskatchewan. The sources were government surveys that had been flown by both the provincial and the federal governments back in the fifties. There had been a mad scramble for ground at that time, 1957. A lot of people were looking for instant riches and were very disappointed to find pyrite (fool's gold), or graphite, in huge anomalous zones.

Our approach was to test these anomalies, to apply to them certain very down-to-earth techniques. For example, blasting with dynamite and looking at the rock itself, not just going on the surface. Backed up with geophysical knowledge, we were able to look not only at surface outcrops but also at areas inaccessible to the older prospectors, down to depths of about 5 feet. And we had a drill to back us up so that we could test these things out. Essentially that was the approach: find an anomaly, outline it, check it out, judge it, and assess it by sampling.

Our target area, if you want to call it that, was essentially what we considered to be an intrusive belt from La Ronge to Reindeer Lake, which is known as the La Ronge-Reindeer Lake-Flin Flon Triangle.

Some of the Indian boys I employed were John MacLeod, Sampson Roberts, Eugene Visintine, and Fred Cook - all very excellent prospectors. I also brought in geologists from foreign countries. Among them was Klaus Thiel who is now chief of Uranerz Exploration, and very successful in having found a mine at Key Lake.

I believe the little nucleus that we set up at one time has gone on to better things. There was Bruce Campbell, and Gerry Labine who is still in La Ronge, and I think the rest have taken off. But Ken Lintott is still up there, with Wollex.

We had a very successful relationship with Wollex and we covered a lot of ground, in Saskatchewan as well as Manitoba and the Northwest Territories.

Murray Pyke, of Wollex, I met in La Ronge in 1967 when he was working for Great Plains Development Company. We got together and discussed ways of performing better work and other forms of activity in Saskatchewan. At that time he was attending the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon getting his Master's Degree. I was very active in my own syndicate and he was putting his own company - Wollex - together. Then suddenly, the uranium boom was upon us and we had an agreement, working side by side, whereby he would do some of the geological work and we were doing the follow-up surveys, the prospecting, the on-the-ground type of work. It was very successful, and we did a tremendous amount of work in Saskatchewan.

My base was up at Otter Lake, rather than La Ronge. When I first came to Saskatchewan we didn't have much money to spend, so it was always a matter of stretching the budget. There was a road north from La Ronge to Otter Lake, 50 miles, so the basic cost of flying this distance was eliminated.

When I got up there Garry Thompson, who is now a very successful tourist operator, was just getting started himself. He had a little old shack up there, full of lime and bluestone, belonging to Rottenstone Mining, your outfit. So I made a deal to rent the cabin and eventually bought it from him. I think it was the most successful investment I ever made. It saved me thousands and thousands of dollars over the years.