It is an awkward moment, and it happens all the time. Jessica Bjorkman will meet a stranger, a new face in town, and if they start talking, and if the conversation winds around to the inevitable career question — ‘‘So, what do you do for a living?’’ — she will sigh, just a little. See, it is complicated.
Ms. Bjorkman is not a wild-eyed old man with a grizzled beard yodeling around the great north woods on the back of a donkey. And she does not live in the Yukon. And she has not memorized all the words to Robert Service poem, the Cremation of Sam McGee.
So when she tells someone, “I am a prospector,” that someone will invariably shoot her a curious look.
“Most everybody is surprised,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “I say we go out looking for rocks that have potential. We are the step before a mine, basically, we are the ones out there, on the ground, looking for something promising.”
She is looking for the same thing that the old guy on the donkey was looking for in the Klondike, circa 1898: Gold.
The 31-year-old is not alone in her passion for pursuing a lucky strike. She inherited the gold bug from her father, Karl, as did her five younger siblings, all of whom, save for the baby, Karla, who is still in high school, are prospectors and employees of Bjorkman Prospecting, an all-in-the-family northwestern Ontario enterprise that is as rare as the precious metal they seek. Jessica’s mother, Nikki, keeps the books.
They are a family that moils for gold.
What keeps them all going, in part, is an elusive, glittering dream that their fortune could be just up ahead, around the next corner or through the next thicket of trees, waiting to be discovered.
“You always have that chance,” says Jessica Bjorkman, the de-facto family spokesperson for this story. “Most people who prospect for their career have the gold fever.
“Having curiosity is very important to finding good rock and definitely the lure of that rare chance of finding beautiful visible gold keeps you checking every outcrop.”
There have been dreamers for a long time in these parts. The province’s gold mining history predates the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896-99. Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the first significant strike was only about a two hour drive from Canada’s largest city.
John Richardson was an Irishman, a dirt farmer with a rocky, miserable tract of land near Madoc, Ont. In 1866, in an act of desperation, he hired a part-time prospector, Marcus Powell, to poke around.
Mr. Powell, or so the legend goes, fell into a cavern. The walls were covered with a shiny metal. They were covered in gold.
Word got out. Fortune hunters of every stripe poured into the area from as far away as Europe. Eldorado City sprang up from nothing. Hotels, bars and a post office bloomed. The population swelled to 3,000 and a police force ballooned to 25, to keep the peace.
Alas, the would-be boom was a bust. The so-called Richardson Mine, with its golden walls and untold riches, proved too difficult to mine profitably and closed in 1869.
Eldorado City is now a ghost town.
“John Richardson died a pauper,” says Isabella Shaw, a local historian. “But the story is that each of his four sons inherited $1,000 and a team of four horses, which was a lot of loot back then.”
There were other dreamers.
A prospector named Harry Preston slipped on a moss-covered rock near Porcupine Lake, a few kilometres east of modern-day Timmins. Beneath the moss was a quartz ledge, covered in gold.
Porcupine Lake’s Hollinger mine opened in 1910 and yielded 19.3 million ounces of gold over the next 60 years. Major finds followed in Kirkland Lake and Red Lake.
“By 1930, Canada became the world’s second largest producer of gold, with Ontario responsible for most of that output,” Stan Sudol writes in a recent Canadian Mining Journal article. Today, the province has 13 gold mines, and ranks 14th in the world in terms of gold production.
And it all starts with the humble prospector, as it did for the Bjorkmans.
Karl, the family patriarch, is a former Ontario Hydro worker. In 1984, he moved the clan from Windsor to Whiskyjack Lake, a picturesque slice of water near Atikokan, Ont.
He cleared the land, built a cabin and supported his growing brood by working construction jobs. But rocks, more than mortar and concrete, were his true fascination, a gnawing itch that saw him bury his head in geology textbooks and, eventually, after about a decade, emerge to try his luck at prospecting.
As each of his children finished high school, they joined what became an expanding family franchise: first Jessica, then Katarina, then Bjorn, Ruth and Veronique. Karla, the baby, is last in line.
Katarina now has a geology degree. Ruth is working toward one.
“My dad let each of us decide what we wanted to do,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “He didn’t force us to choose prospecting.”
Getting started is the easy part. All you need is a prospecting licence and $25 to pay for it.
Finding a mine is the hard part. Prospecting is a lottery and winning tickets are rare.
(According to the Ontario Ministry of Northern Development, Mines and Forestry, the odds of a mining claim becoming a productive mine are 1 in 10,000, and the odds of that mine actually being a gold mine are, well…)
The Bjorkmans livelihood depends on staking claims. A “claim” can range in size from 16 to 256 hectares. If the rock samples taken from the claim show promise, the next step is to option the land to a mining company.
The company can then develop it or, more likely, take a closer look and decide to abandon it after a year, or maybe two.
For the average prospector, the dollars earned optioning properties to mining companies or staking claims and taking rock samples on a company’s behalf for a day-wage, adds up to a nickel-and-dime existence.
The Bjorkmans are still looking for their mine, but have managed to option a few properties over the years, and make a decent living.
You can pay the bills. Just forget about that weekend golf getaway to Palm Springs or owning a fleet of luxury cars.
“We own a fleet of Dodges,” Jessica Bjorkman says, with a laugh. “If you find a mine, you are going to be rich, but if you don’t, you are basically working a hard job for a mediocre living.”
A special night out for the Bjorkmans involves gathering around the campfire for a hot dog roast, while a great day off means waking at sunrise to hunt moose and deer and partridge — a particularly tasty delight — and then watching a sunset while catching bass or pickerel for a fish fry.
If money is not the immediate motivation, and quite possibly a pipe dream, then why moil for gold?
“It is the adventure,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “You get addicted to it. To do this job, you have to love the bush, and Northern Ontario bush is not your beautiful red pine parkland forest.
“It is blowdowns and thick brush. Some days it is just so horrible that you feel like crying.”
If that does not sound enticing enough, try hot and unbearably buggy summers, slogging through swamps and winter days where every tree is coated with dripping wet snow and the only way to keep warm is to keep moving.
There is all that, plus bears.
“Most people just can’t hack it,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “We have hired people, and for every 50 we hire you might find one good one.”
There are perks. A prospecting trip to Norway in 2007; flying into remote access jobs by a helicopter or a float plane; seeing a moose with a newborn calf; stumbling across an old, abandoned cabin or mine; crisp snowy mornings; fall leaves and fiery sunsets.
“It is a back-to-nature life, in many ways,” Ms. Bjorkman says.
And the Bjorkmans are apparently built for it. They are a different breed, at once in touch with their natural world and a throwback to another world, to an earlier time, where Miner ’49ers went in search of unimaginable riches.
“I can’t imagine doing anything else,” Ms. Bjorkman says. “I don’t think any of us could ever live in the city.”
National Post
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