Cobalt

The Making of a Mining Superpower

Charlie Angus

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781487009502
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

Finalist for the 2023 Trillium Book Award

The world is desperate for cobalt. It drives the proliferation of digital and clean technologies. But this "demon metal" has a horrific present and a troubled history.

The modern search for cobalt has brought investors back to a small town in Northern Canada, a place called Cobalt. Like the demon metal, this town has a dark and turbulent history.

The tale of the early-twentieth-century mining rush at Cobalt has been told as a settler's adventure, but Indigenous people had already been trading in metals from the region for two thousand years. And the events that happened here — the theft of Indigenous lands, the exploitation of a multicultural workforce, and the destruction of the natural environment — established a template for resource extraction that has been exported around the world.

Charlie Angus reframes the complex and intersectional history of Cobalt within a broader international frame — from the conquistadores to the Western gold rush to the struggles in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. He demonstrates how Cobalt set Canada on its path to become the world's dominant mining superpower.

Copyright © 2022 Charlie Angus

Published in Canada in 2022 and the USA in 2022 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

To Live in the Age of Melting: Northwest Passage by Evalyn Parry reprinted on page 9 with permission from the author.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Cobalt : cradle of the demon metals, birth of a mining superpower /
Charlie Angus.

Names: Angus, Charlie, 1962- author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210290234 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210290439 |
ISBN 9781487009496

(softcover) | ISBN 9781487009502 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCSH: Mineral industries—Ontario—Cobalt—History. |
LCSH: Mineral industries—Canada. |

LCSH: Cobalt mines and mining. | LCSH: Cobalt (Ont.)—History.

Classification: LCC HD9506.C23 C63 2022 | DDC 338.209713/144—dc23

Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

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House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

To the late Vivian Hylands, who welcomed our family into a Cobalt that was steeped in memory and lore. Lady Vivian swore she was going to be the first person to edit this text. She passed over to the other side before that could happen. This book is for her.

[Cobalt, Ontario] resulted in so much lying, deceit, fraud, over-reaching ambition in such a Pandora’s box of miseries, that it would almost have been better if the place had never been discovered.
— Reverend Samuel Blake, 1911

Preface

The Demon Metal

The world is searching for cobalt, the miracle ingredient of the digital age. The metal’s capacity to store energy and stabilize conductors has made possible the proliferation of rechargeable batteries, smartphones, and laptops. More crucially, in the face of catastrophic climate change, cobalt offers the hope of a clean-energy future. Access to reliable supplies of cobalt will be essential if we are to advance into the era of the mass-produced electric vehicle.

But cobalt has a much darker side. The relentless drive to feed the cobalt needs of Silicon Valley has led to appalling levels of degradation, child abuse, and environmental damage in the Democratic Republic of Congo (drc), the world’s number-one cobalt producer. The situation is so dire that human rights campaigners have denounced cobalt as the blood mineral of the twenty-first century.

Tesla, Google, and Apple would love to cut their ties with the abuses in the drc, but cobalt is an extremely elusive metal. Thus, it is not surprising that, in 2020, billionaires Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill Gates formed a mining company to seek out new sources of cobalt in northern Canada. They named their company KoBold Metals.1

Kobold is a variant of the German word for cobalt, derived from the kobalos, a satyr and shape-shifter in Greek mythology who mocked the work of humans.2 In the Middle Ages the kobalos became the kobold — a demon living in the mines of Germany. The men who made their way into the perpetual darkness of the metal mines knew the demons were close from a burning sensation on their fingertips as they touched the cobalt-laced rock. And they knew the kobolds were watching them from the telltale sounds of banging and footsteps echoing through the caverns.

To anyone who has stood in the dark depths of an underground mine chamber, such superstitions are perfectly understandable. As miners dig deeper, the pressure from the millions of tons of earth above them increases. This pressure causes the weight around the underground openings to shift, eliciting a terrible groaning. Sometimes there’s a loud banging — like two boxcars hitting each other in a freight yard. Other times the pressure is more subtle — like the sharp snap of a twig being stepped on, which evokes the deeply unsettling feeling of being stalked in the blackness.

Mining traditions around the world have variations of the legend of the kobold. In the silver mines of Bolivia, the miners leave offerings for El Tío — the devil spirit. In Cornish mines, there are stories of the Knockers; Welsh miners worked alongside the Coblynau. In some cases, these creatures are condemned spirits, forced to work for eternity for no gain. In other cultures, the goblins help the miners by leading them to the ore.

For miners in Germany, the kobold held a particular menace. The metal was even denounced from the pulpit by a sixteenth-century Reformation firebrand who called it “the black devil.”3 Cobalt is elusive because it has no distinctive colour in its natural form, which made it hard to spot amid the mixture of nickel and copper ores. But when miners burned rock where cobalt was present, the airborne dust and vapours had the potential to kill or seriously incapacitate them.4

Little wonder that they feared the demon metal.

It is doubtful that today’s billionaire class has reflected much on the dark power of the kobold. They are looking to strike the next great mineral rush, which is taking place within a broader geopolitical struggle to control the market in strategic metals. The cobalt rush has drawn investors back to a little town in Northern Ontario. A place called Cobalt.

There is a powerful synchronicity in this renewed interest in Cobalt, Ontario. This is not just some old mining town looking for one more chance to flourish. The events that took place here more than a century ago set Canada on its path to becoming the world’s preeminent resource extraction superpower. The country dominates the global industry; three-quarters of the world’s mining companies are registered in Canada.5 The maple leaf flies over international zones of resource exploitation ranging from uranium mines in the former states of the Soviet Union to gold projects in the Amazon to the metal deposits of Africa, where horrific human rights abuses are accepted as part of the cost of doing business.

To make sense of this, we need to return to Cobalt — the place that let loose the demons of the earth.

Introduction

The Cradle

Something dramatic happened here. You get that sense as soon as you arrive in the town of Cobalt (population 1,500), with its winding streets and hodgepodge of little houses perched atop rocky ridges. The locals will tell you about the immense wealth. Riches that dwarfed the Klondike. Hills that flowed with streams of pure silver that had been polished smooth by the glaciers and touched with a beautiful pink glow. This colour was the fingerprint of the kobold demons, as cobalt turns pink when it oxidizes. The wealth of these magnificent rose-silver veins was so valuable that, during the First World War, the British government pleaded with Canadian authorities to avoid a miners’ strike at Cobalt because of the impact it would have had on the war effort.

That wealth is long gone. What remains are fading photographs at the local museum, showing streets packed with men in stetsons, hustlers in suits, and immigrant families hauling their worldly possessions off the train. At a time when settlers in Canada were largely Anglo Protestant or Francophone Catholic, Cobalt was giving birth to the multicultural future. All in a ramshackle place that looked like the stage set for a Wild West movie.

Cobalt has been designated as both a National Historic Site and the most ...