Grubstaking Tale

After Gillies and Hollinger found gold, they immediately staked around twelve claims and placed the discovery together, together with an extra one for a dear friend and partner they had who was called Barney McEnany, who was not able to work with them due to physical impediments. The claim that was made later on turned into the basis of the Porcupine Crown Mine. Given the fact that both partners had different grubstakers, they had to figure out how they were going to divide the twelve claims they had evenly. So they decided to flip a coin. Hollinger was the winner and picked the six claims that were located on the west and then laid the foundation for the big Hollinger Mine that was one of the biggest and most productive producers of gold. After they returned to Haileybury, Hollinger and his sponsor who was McMahon, who was ten bucks richer now because of his agreement with Gilbert Labine, talked about this with Alphonse Pare, who was a young student and the nephew of Noah Timmins. Timmins was a storekeeper that had previously made his fortune from a so called La Rosa mine at Cobalt. He thought it was a good idea to go along with Pare’s idea and purchased the six claims for $300,000. The six claims that the Gillies had staked for himself and Jack Miller then turned into the Acme Mine however this was only after they also, became part of the Hollinger domain. Gillies and Miller the optioned the area to the O’Brien interests, which was also in Cobalt. Then a test diamond drilling was done on the area and a big amount of core was passed over to an engineer to get out for assay. There was such a great amount and it was so weighty that they decided to lighten the weight and threw away all the stuff that did not look like it has a lot of quartz content in it. This is how we can tell this man did not have a great deal of experience as what he was doing because it was later shown in tests that a great amount of the gold was in the wall rock schist. The result was that the O’Briens allowed their option to lapse, and this was quickly taken by the Timmins partnership. The total amount of production of all the gold mines in the area is well over one a half billion dollars by far.