Ontario's silver and gold rushes

Cobalt: the silver town, 1903

Ontario's silver boom started with a railway. Crews were building the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway through the north. On August 7, 1903, two lumbermen, James McKinley and Ernest Darragh, were looking for timber for railroad ties near Long Lake. They found silver instead.

Their claim became the McKinley-Darragh mine, which ran from 1904 to 1927. The Ontario Heritage Trust says the area held "some of the richest deposits of native silver the world has ever seen." In the rush of 1905 and 1906, Coleman Township saw the most intensive prospecting Ontario had ever known.

The town of Cobalt was incorporated in 1907 and grew to a peak of about 6,000 people. At one point, the camp had more than 100 producing mines. By 1910, Cobalt ranked fourth in the world for silver, and production peaked in 1911.

The good times didn't last. After 1920, silver prices fell sharply and the camp's fortunes faded. Cobalt's legacy is bigger than its silver, though. It's often called the cradle of Canadian mining, because the miners trained there went on to open up mines across the Canadian Shield. In 2001, the Government of Canada designated the Cobalt Mining District a National Historic Site.

The Porcupine gold rush, 1909

As the railway pushed north, prospectors followed. The Porcupine gold rush began in 1909, when Benny Hollinger, Sandy McIntyre and others made the first large gold discoveries. Thousands of people poured into Tisdale Township and the area around it.

By 1912, several mines were running, including the famous "Big Three": Dome, Hollinger and McIntyre. That year, the railway opened a branch line from South Porcupine to Timmins, which made it much easier to bring in the heavy machinery needed for hard-rock mining. Timmins was incorporated as a town on January 1, 1912, and named after Noah Timmins, a merchant from Mattawa.

The Ontario Heritage Trust says that for a number of years, the Porcupine produced more gold than any other region in North America.

The Porcupine Fire of 1911

The boom had a dark moment. On July 11, 1911, a forest fire swept through the camp. It destroyed South Porcupine and Pottsville, partly burned Golden City and Porquis Junction, and killed at least 71 people.

Kirkland Lake and the "Mile of Gold"

Meanwhile, gold was turning up elsewhere. The Larder Lake rush of 1906 came with finds at Swastika, and in 1911 William H. Wright made the first strike at Kirkland Lake. The Tough-Oakes became the camp's first producing gold mine in 1912.

Kirkland Lake's gold sat along a single fault called the Main Break. Seven major mines lined up along it, and the stretch became known as the "Mile of Gold." The Ontario government says those mines produced more than 700 tonnes of gold over 80-plus years.

The peak came in the late 1930s. The Lake Shore, Wright-Hargreaves, Teck-Hughes, Sylvanite, Kirkland Lake Gold and Macassa mines, along with others nearby, employed about 5,000 men, with a yearly output worth more than $30 million. The town's population reached nearly 25,000 at the start of the Second World War.

Harry Oakes

The camp's most famous name is Harry Oakes. Born in Maine in 1874, he staked the Lake Shore and Tough-Oakes properties in 1911. Lake Shore became one of North America's biggest gold producers and made Oakes enormously rich. He moved to the Bahamas in 1935, was made a baronet in 1939, and was murdered in 1943. His murder was never solved.

Red Lake and Hemlo

Ontario's gold story kept going long after the early rushes. The Red Lake area was so remote that serious mining didn't start until 1925. That year, claims registered by Ray and Lorne Howey and George McNeely set off a major gold rush. More than 1,000 prospectors flooded in, and at the boom's peak in the 1930s and 1940s, there were 12 producing mines.

Then, in 1981, a drill hole at Hemlo hit the main gold zone. Three mines followed: David Bell, Golden Giant and Williams. By one industry count, Hemlo has produced about 22.4 million ounces of gold and was still producing in 2023.

Ontario's big strikes at a glance

Ontario's place in Canadian gold today

Gold is Canada's most valuable mined commodity. In 2024, Canadian mines produced about 200 tonnes of gold, worth $16.9 billion, which made Canada the world's fourth-largest producer.

Ontario led every province, with 79.9 tonnes, or about 40% of the national total. Quebec came second with 55.5 tonnes. The Ontario government counts 18 producing gold mines in the province, which produced about 2.5 million troy ounces in 2024.

Northern Ontario is still gold country. Detour Lake, in northern Ontario, was described by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2024 as the largest gold-producing mine in Canada. The Mint even struck a special Gold Maple Leaf using only Detour Lake gold. You can read more on our history of bullion coins page.

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