Free Coal Black Heart by John Demont

The ensuing decades brought heavy industries—machine shops, bridge and structural steelworks, factories that manufactured mining machinery, heavy wagons and trucks, marine and stationary motors, glass products, marble and granite. For a time, as the twentieth century dawned, Pictou County was one of the steelmaking capitals of Canada.
    The natives—like newspaperman Joseph Howe, who visited the Albion Mines in 1830—were left gape-mouthed by what they beheld: the store “in which is kept a more various and extensive stock of goods than is to be found in any mercantile Establishment in the country;” the foundry, which resembled a “Vulcan’s workshop” in which “the swarthy artisans are busied adding link to link, and fashioning, by the cunning of their hands and the sweat of their brows those mighty chains to which the ship of some ‘great admiral’ may be indebted for her safety.” Most of all, by the pits themselves, which, once entered, make a visitor feel like “Captain Symmes traveling through the opening at the Poles.” Inside, a visitor would encounter “a lot of Beings, looking more like Demons than men” the lamps on their cap making them appear “like the Cyclops, who has but one glaring eye in his forehead.” From head to toe, he went on to write, “these people are covered with coal dust, which mixing with the perspiration drawn out by their hard toils, gives their features a singular and rather melodramatic expression.”
    Howe’s stomach fluttered during the descent into the pit. “Are we blown to a thousand atoms?” he wrote. “Are we suffocated by sulphur and fire damp? Are we not lying, like an Egyptian Mummy, beneath a ponderous pyramid of ruins?”
    Smith watched the early days of this metamorphosis unfold from the comfort of Mount Rundell. The man who would become his chief lieutenant in Cape Breton, on the other hand, began his tour of duty in an old framed house—“perfectly innocent of paint”—built over some mine workings that had settled and thrown the floor so far out of whack that one side of the sitting room was two feet below the other. His name was Richard Brown. When he arrived at the Sydney Mines in 1826, the conditions must have seemed squalid to someone with a grammar school education who had grown up on a viscount’s estate. The four hundred acres of land belonging to the mines had fallen into neglect. The roads were “scarcely passable,” he later wrote; before 1830 the only means of transportation was by foot on paths through the woods. There wasn’t a single school. The only place of worship: a small Roman Catholic chapel where the priest from Sydney officiated “once, or perhaps twice, in the course of a year.”
    Brown was there to work, not to seek redemption. I’ve been able to find only a single drawing of “Lt.-Col. Richard Brown, ‘F.G.S., F.R.G.S.’” In it he wears a dark coat, patterned bow tie and white, stiff, high-collared shirt. He is seated, looking off to his right, holding some sort of document in his left hand, his right hanging nonchalantly off the back of his chair. There’s a touch of Captain Ahab to that hooked nose, lank swept-back hair, thin lips and haunted stare. He had a hunger that even developing and running the most productive coalfields in the British colonies couldn’t fill.
    In his spare time he scoured the island’s cliffs and outcroppings and wrote the definitive book on Cape Breton’s coalfields—along with an authoritative history of the island, which he illustrated with hand-drawn pencil sketches that historians and geologists were still marvelling over a century later. He was a self-taught paleobotanist—someone who uses fossilized plant remains to reconstruct bygone environments—before anyone had coined a word for the specialty. He was visionary enough, as the
Canadian Mining Journal
put it, to be the first person to “see and appreciate the value of the Island’s under sea [sic] coal measures,”