publications

2001 Mining Sourcebook

Published by Canadian Mining Journal

The current edition of the Mining Sourcebook ranks as one of the most beautiful ever produced. On the cover and in an exclusive nine-page portfolio, readers will find remarkably evocative black and white portraits taken by Louis Palu. He has the extraordinary talent to capture on film the soul of Canada’s mining industry, the people who work in it. Looking at his work awakens every memory–the sounds, the smells, the sense of privilege–that we have of being part of this great enterprise.

The latest annual Sourcebook, like the 109 versions before it, is packed with information about Canada’s mineral producers. No one else offers a single publication with such detailed information on underground, open pit or mineral processing practice and equipment in this country. Also included is a comprehensive Buyers’ Guide listing over 600 suppliers and the thousands of products and services they offer. Operators, researchers and suppliers should all have a copy.

ISSN 0840-6723

Soft cover $95 in Canada; $97 in the U.S.; and $101 in other countries.

Available from Southam Magazine Group, tel 416-442-2122 or 800-668-2374

Quinn Kola: Tom Payne’s Search for Gold

by Alice Payne

Review by Ward Neale, condensed

This is the story of a colourful adventurer and mine-finder in the first half of the 1900s, a combination of his own hand-written memoir and later research by his daughter Alice, a well-known Canadian geologist.

Tom came to Canada from Essex, England, in 1912, to make his fortune farming in western Canada. When he decided in the 1920s that farming wasn’t for him, he became involved in northern transportation and took an interest in mining.

His big find came in 1936 when he encountered free gold in staked ground adjacent to what became the Con mine. As soon as it became open he re-staked it, and a small 100-share company was formed and named “Quin Kola Gold Mines”. He was now en route to fame and fortune.

He set his sights on another target–oil. After the Leduc discovery in 1948, he drove 160,000 miles around Alberta looking for a suitable drill site. He found one, and his “Metro” well blew in on May 25, 1950, and produced for 30 years.

That is the bare bones of Tom Payne’s career. The flesh on those bones is an understanding the reader receives of the hardships, hopes, joys and skulduggery that was the life of those pioneers to Canada’s northwest. Tom Payne’s own adventures are almost beyond belief. Like me, you will probably agree that Arthur Hailey chose well when he used Tom Payne as a model for his prospector in the novel Hotel.

ISBN 0-9686646-0-1

Soft cover $25 / Hard Cover $40

Available from Crossfield Publishing, tel 403-938-5770, crossfield@cadvision.com, or Cdn. Soc. of Petrol. Geol., tel 403-264-5610, jaime.croft@cspg.org