Gold mining at Edmonton.

Donnelly, Michael

Although not having the vast mineral wealth of British Columbia or the Yukon, there is gold in Alberta, the promise of which brought score of hopeful miners into the area in the second half of the 19th century.

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The gold predominantly found in the province is 'placer' gold, surficial deposits that occur in the gravel bars of many rivers and streams. The heaviest concentrations are found in and around the city of Edmonton, in the gravel bars of the North Saskatchewan River that winds its way between high bluffs of soft sandstone and glacial debris.

The presence of gold at Fort Edmonton was first noted by James Hector, geologist with the Palliser Expedition, who in 1859 was shown a small amount of gold washed from the river. (1) At the same time, rich strikes on the Fraser River were drawing thousands of American miners north. Late in the autumn of that year, a group of four miners from the Cariboo area of the British Columbia interior, hearing reports of gold at Edmonton, ascended the Fraser River, and by way of Yellowhead Pass and Jasper House, arrived at the fort. This party included two men, Thomas Clover and Timolean Love. Clover, originally from Missouri, would remain four years in the area (3) working and prospecting the bars of the river. The cast Edmonton neighbourhoods of Clover Bar and Cloverdale today bear his name. Love who was often back and forth between Fort Edmonton and Fort Garry for supplies, probably did more than anyone, with his enthusiasm, optimism, and aggrandizements, to create interest in the mines on the Saskatchewan. He was convinced the gold fields would soon prove themselves, bringing an influx of miners and settlement into the area. Trader Joseph Hargreaves met the young Kentuckian onboard a riverboat returning north to Fort Garry at the end of July, 1861, and stated, "The contemplation of the airy castles built by this gentleman served to beguile us part of our first morning on board. (4)

Based largely on Love's reports, the Toronto Globe commented, "There seems to be no doubt whatever that the streams to the east of the Rocky Mountains water a gold region as large as those of the west... (5)' However, Thomas Woolsey, the Wesleyan misionary writing from Edmonton, sounded a more cautionary note to would-be gold seekers when he stated, "And as the residents of Edmonton House are still jogging on in the old-fashioned way, without troubling themselves about rockers, cradles, and other mining requisites, others will do well to respect the great law of consideration." (6)

The 'Overlanders,' roughly 175 gold seekers, passed through Edmonton in July of 1862 on their way west. (7) The majority were Canadians from Ontario who had travelled northwest across the prairie from Fort Garry. Upon arriving at Fort Edmonton they traded their Red River carts for pack horses and continued on, across the mountains. Timolean Love guided one of the groups from Fort Garry and was in no doubt largely responible for sixty miners staying behind to prospect the gravels of the North Saskatchewan and its tributaries. (8) There was gold in the river and in the following year Love went back to the Red River Settlement with between $500 and $600 in gold dust, the results of his summer's work. (9)

The year 1863 was a busy one for miners near Fort Edmonton, much to the disgust of Chief Factor William Christie. "Owing to the desertion of men & the evils arising from the intercourse with Miners and idlers about the Fort," wrote his clerk, "we have had more difficulty in getting through our work this Outfit than usual." (10) In August he added, "Mr. Wm. Munro with Americans arrived from Fort Benton. They are Gold hunters.' (11) And a week later, "Three Americans left this place with the intention of prospecting the head of this river and the north branch. They are guided by Mr. George Gunn of Red River. He knows as much about the head of this River as the man in the moon." (12) The clerk followed up with an entry in September, "A Party of Americans, 5, who have been off prospecting for Gold about the Rocky Mountain House, arrived here today, and have met with no success." (13) At the end of the year, Christie reported, "There has been very little done in the mining way, and I think the people here are getting careless about it. A few Americans & Canadians who came across the Plains from Fort Benton, intend prospecting and mining next summer. (14)

Christie's comments about mining in 1864 were much more positive. He stated , The most of the miners have left this for Fort Benton and other places; we have still a good many about and numbers may yet be here this autumn. Before the water rose, they were doing remarkably well, and made on an average $10 per day & as high as $20 per day has been made. The Amount of Gold dust in hands of miners & Company servants about here is at lowest estimate about [pound sterling]500 worth, most of which will likely fall into the Company hands; the rate it is taken here is $ 16 per oz. (15)

Although the Hudson's Bay Company was in the fur business and resented the influx of strangers into its territory, it was not above making money from it. Christie opened a "Cash & Gold Account" at Edmonton in 1865, and paid out more than [pound sterling]50 that year to Sam Livingston, Tom Clover, George Flett, and Company employees Oliver Segain, Kenneth McDonald, and William Smith. Another [pound sterling]83 was paid out in the following year. (16)

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Other miners held onto their gold until they reached Fort Garry, where they received a much better price. For example, in the fall of 1864 two men, Murdo Mclennan and Cuthbert Cumming, arrived at Red River with more than two pounds of gold they had washed out in twenty-six days near Edmonton. (17)

Over the winter of 1862-63, eight men had deserted to try their luck at gold mining. (18) Former employee Nils Martinson washed out the value of [pound sterling]68 sterling in twenty-five days (19) at a time when a labourer or boatman employed by the HBC might make only [pound sterling]22 a year. (20)

Miners arriving at Edmonton often were destitute or needed supplies, and complained about the exorbitant prices demanded at the fort.

In the fall of 1866, 150 miners arrived from British Columbia and 500 more from Montana were expected in the spring. (21) The population of the fort was constantly in flux. After assessing the prospects most moved on, but just as soon as they left, another group would arrive. As historian J. G. MacGregor noted, "Chief Trader Christie, sorely torn between wishing that all the miners would starve and seeing that none of them did, had a difficult time." (22)

Longtime Edmonton resident, James Gibbons, was a veteran of the California and Montana gold fields. In the east Kootenays of southeastern British Columbia, he fell in with a man from Edmonton by the name of 'Flatboat' Mclean. On hearing Mclean's reports of gold in the Saskatchewan River, Gibbons, Mclean, and thirteen others, including Sam Livingston, crossed the Kicking Horse Pass into Alberta. (23) The party split up on the Bow River, when Gibbons, Livingston, and two others, proceeded north. After crossing the Red Deer River, their horses having been run off by the Blackfoot, the group arrived at Rocky Mountain House on foot and with no supplies. (24)

In their first season mining on the bars around Edmonton, Gibbons made $16 to $20 a day, while Sam Livingston and another man, Sandy Anderson, earned $25 a day. (25) Supplies were expensive and the miners got by with what little pemmican they could procure from the fo11 which they would mix with flour; a bag of which cost $30. Very little sugar was to be had, and tea cost $3.00 a lb. (26)

The earliest methods of mining were done by hand; pick, shovel, and pan. Gold, having a relative weight much greater than neighbouring gravels, could easily be concentrated through a shaking action in a round metal pan with flaring sides while water was used to carry away the lighter sands. Although the gold pan was invaluable for assessing prospective areas, miners soon turned to use of a rocker and sluice-box in order to process more gravel.

The rocker, or cradle, as it was also known, was a simple mining apparatus comprised of two parts--a hopper into which gravel was dumped and a lower box, three feet long by two feet wide, through which the material flowed. The bottom of the hopper was often a piece of sheet metal perforated with 1/4 inch holes and as water was bailed over top, the gold and finer sands dropped down into the box. (27) The larger gravels that remained in the hopper were then dumped out by hand. The lower box (basically a short sluice-box) was often lined with a woolen blanket held down by transverse wooden riffles. Sitting on wooden rockers and set at a downward angle, the entire device was rocked by hand, which aided in breaking up of material, and helped the gold to settle behind the riffles. In the spring of 1860, using a rocker, Tom Clover washed out $3 .00 his first day, and moving up river, $7.00 the next. (28)

The grizzly, the design of which was attributed to Jim Gibbons, was a unique innovation in gold mining on the North Saskatchewan, where there was no coarse gold to be found. A triangular apparatus, a grizzly was comprised of tightly set, horizontal iron bars set in a wooden frame, and placed over the head of a six to seven foot. sluice box. With water being bailed over top, gravel, shoveled into a dump box at waist height would roll off the apex of the grizzly and onto the ground while allowing the finer material to fall through into the sluice-box. Blacksmiths at the fort forged all of their own naiIs from iron rods--the miners soon purchased all they could get their hands on and grizzlys soon became quite valuable. (29) This system allowed more gravels to be processed with greater efficiency and men using this setup on the river were referred to as 'grizzly miners'. After cleaning out the sluice-box, the miner was left with a mixture of gold and heavy black iron sand. Placer gold from the North Saskatchewan is invariably fine, often referred to as flour gold, and difficult to separate from the black sand. Mercury or quicksilver, easily forming an amalgam with gold, was used in the final separation process. The amalgam was poured into a porous, leather pouch, the excess mercury squeezed out into a gold pan, and the small amount that still adhered to the gold was burned away. (30) It was suggested that those coming into the country bring with them a good supply of quicksilver for without it the gold, 'cannot be obtained. (31) Using these early methods Jim Gibbons claimed that he averaged eight-tenths of an ounce of gold a day between break up and freeze up. (32)

In 1868 it was reported that fifty men were at work on the gravel bars around Fort Edmonton, averaging $12 to S20 a day. (33) By 1872 the yield had dropped to $7.00 or $8.00, (34) and although the gravel bars continued to be worked by a dedicated few, returns continued to diminish.

During the mid 1890s with the increase in settlement to the area, gold mining once again experienced a boom, with production peaking at $55,000 in 1896. (35) At the time local banks were purchasing gold at $15 an ounce. (36) Three to five hundred men (37) were at work on the river with many living in log shacks or crude dug outs carved from the riverbank. (38)

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Stated the Edmonton Bulletin in the spring of 1897, Already the rush has commenced, and impatient miners and prospectors, local experts, wandering fortune seekers and businessmen, not waiting for the ice to leave the river, have staked claims all along the banks from high to low watermark, all seeking to secure a share of the precious metal whose very name is a magnet to attract millions. From the high river bank directly back of the business portion of the town, can be seen far up and down the river innumerable stakes and pins set up there as soon as the frost had left the ground, staking off the newly located claims..." (29)

By then, the gravel bars a long the river, having been worked repeatedly over the years, were only paying $ 1. 50 (40) for a hard day's work, "a poor man's diggings. (41) So why the renewed interest? A newly arrived mining adventure from Omaha had undertaken assays to investigate the theory that adhering to each grain of 'black sand' were minute particles of gold, amounting to far more then could be recovered through conventional means. More assays seemed to support this and stories began to circulate that the blacks sands, once thrown away, could hold $300 or as high as $15,000 per ton. (42) The rush was on. However, in July of 1897 the Edmonton Bulletin reported, (43) The hopes that were entertained last spring as to results of the treatment of the black sand have not so far been realized..." The rush was off but Edmonton banks still took in $50,000 (44) in gold that year.

A new feature was added to Edmonton gold mining activities with the introduction of gold dredges in the 1880s. Extracting the river gravel through mechanical means--or dredging--was first attempted on the river in 188 1 and the following summer saw the first steam powered dredge, Goldfinder at work on the river. (45) These 'dipper' dredges often were simply barges mounted with a hand-operated backhoe that would dump the river gravels into an onboard juice box. Much larger machines followed that employed greater steam power, multiple engines, and a chain ladder system of buckets that could excavate eighteen feet down into the riverbed

Some of the early dredging operations were successful, others failed, and some simply made wage . The 30-inch Easton dredge working at Miner's Flats (Laurier Park) in the summer of 1895 returned $9.00 a day for a crew of three, while nearby two men at work with a grizzly were earning $1.25 a day. (46) One of the more successful dipper dredges was that owned by the Star Mining Company, a group of Strathcona business men, averaged $50 a day. (47)

By the turn of the century, as interest in mining expanded, severa l large dredging companies were formed to more efficiently exploit the river's gold bearing gravels. Large amounts of capital investment, much of it from English investors, (48) resulted in the formation of the Edmonton Gold & Platinum Dredgingly indicate Ltd., (49) the Alberta-Victoria-Dredging Syndicate, and the Saskatchewan River Gold & Platinum Proprietary. Commented the Bulletin in 1901, Day and night there is borne up from the river bed here, the whirring, wheezing, grinding of the big gold dredges of the Saskatchewan River Gold & Platinum Proprietary at their work of scooping up, with their big automatic buckets, the gold bearing gravel from river bottom, bench, and bar. (50)

The operation of these large dredges was described as "an indescribable, unbearable, earsplitting roar." (51)

After running successful dredging operations in New Zealand, a mining engineer by the name of F.P. Hob on arrived at Edmonton in 1898. With the latest technology and advances in fine gold recovery, Hobson took over management of the large dredges--the Otter, the Minto, and the Alberta. As the Edmonton Bulletin in 1902 stated, "Mr. Hobson has done more than any to make the dredging industry a legitimate and paying concern." (52)

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The Otter, constructed in 1898, was 86 feet by 26 feet wide. A 150-horsepower steam boiler fired six engines, and an endless ladder chain of thirty-two steel buckets, each weighing 365 pounds. The dredge had a capacity to move 2,500 cubic yards of gravel a day. (53) By 1901 the Minto and the Alberta were also at work on the river, both with capacities of 3,000 cubic yards a day, and each built at a cost of $40,000. (54)

With gold averaging 25 cents a cubic yard in the gravels of the riverbed, the future looked bright for the dredging industry in Edmonton. An optimistic Hobson stated, "...there is every prospect of the dredging industry on the Saskatchewan becoming one of the largest and best paying dredging industries in the world." (55) These large machines, however, were often prone to mechanical failure and breakdowns. The 1901 season saw the Otter averaging only 10 yards an hour while the Minto moved only 2,000 yards all season. (56) However, by late August the Otter had still managed to take out 200 ounces of gold valued at $3,200. (57)

In 1899 there were nine companies with at least fifteen different dredges working on the river, (58) but by 1907 there were only two. (59) By then, the Otter was lying idle by the Low Level bridge and the Minto had been dismantled. (60) At least into the 1920s occasional dredging attempts continued to be made, but without great success. These large scows were often also subject to the vagaries of the river. For example, a late spring flood in 1924 caused one dredge to break loose, severing fifteen ferry cables on its 175 km. trip downriver from Edmonton before finally coming to rest near the hamlet of Duvernay. (61)

In the 1890s the Edmonton Bulletin made an observation that was common knowledge to most miners. "It is a peculiarity of the gold in the Saskatchewan that it has no known source of supply and yet it is apparently inexhaustible," it said. "Many bars on the river have been worked over and over and yet they yield pay." (62)

Early prospectors along the worth Saskatchewan tried following the showings of gold upstream, hoping to discover the source. However, A.R.C. Selwyn, Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, when travelling down the river in 1873, concluded that the gold was not derived from the mountains at the river's headwaters, and so to look there for coarse gold was hopeless. He suggested instead that the source of the gold was "boulder-clays," glacial deposits carried across the plains from the northeast. (63) Miners persisted, however, and focussed their exploration on the headwaters of the other gold-bearing streams--the Brazeau, McLeod, Pembina, and Athabasca --but a strike was never made.

Joseph Tyrrell, surveying along the North Saskatchewan in 1886, was shown gold occurring in the cinders and clinkers of a naturally burning coal seam. His own assays showed traces of gold in the clinkers but also in the surrounding rock soft Cretaceous sandstone of the Edmonton Formation. (64) He published a report showing that the sandstones of the Edmonton Formation were comprised of granitic rocks from west of the Upper Columbia Valley, lain down before the Rocky Mountains became an impediment. (65) With the erosion of this formation by the river, gold particles were concentrated on gravel bars. Following his report, prospecting in the mountains virtually ceased and the focus returned to the area of the river that had always been more productive--sixty miles above Edmonton and eighty miles below." (66)

Roger Morton, Emeritus Professor of Geology at the University of Alberta, stated, "when it comes to the source of the gold in the North Saskatchewan, if you look at the gravels along the riverbank, you have these beautifully, rounded quartzite pebbles which originally came from Cambrian rocks, occurring to the west in the central ranges of the Rocky Mountains." In 1986, gold bearing, quartz veins were discovered in Cambrian rocks along the Continental Divide in the Athabasca Pass. These quartzites were originally lain down as tidal sands, (67) 540 to 520 million years ago. The stresses and high temperatures of mountain building during the late Jurassic (150 million years ago), caused these rocks to fault and fracture, and silica rich, hydrothermal fluids containing gold to be deposited. (68) As the Rocky Mountains continued to be thrust up, these rocks in turn, were eroded by ancient rivers which concentrated the gold in alluvial deposits. Major erosion occurring during the advance and subsequent de-glaciation of the last ice age (20,000 to 10,000 year ago), further concentrated these gold particles in the gravel bars of the modern day North Saskatchewan River. Research conducted by one of Morton's students in 1990 showed very clearly, that these vein systems in the Cambrian quartzites are the probable source of Saskatchewan River gold. Said Dr. Morton, " People want to know where the origin is, the mother-lode--it 's to the west in the central ranges of the Rocky Mountains, within the borders of Jasper National Park."

After the 1890s, interest in gold mining began to wane in the Edmonton area. Settlement and farming were on the rise, the district was booming and many other economic opportunities were available. Still, the summer of 1914 saw renewed interest with scores of unemployed men once again working the gravel bars with grizzlys, averaging $2.00 to $4.00 (69) a day." (70) There was another resurgence in mining during the depression years of the 1930s. The Alberta government in 1933 even commissioned a 'Relief Placer Mining Camp' for single unemployed men. Fifty men were selected and over the month of June were provided with the material and instruction for mining gold on the North Saskatchewan River. Hampered by high water, the project was considered a failure financially and the camp was closed. (71) Others were able to make a living; said Dr. Morton--"During the Great Depression, there were a lot of people who actually survived quite well mining gold. A former colleague of mine from the geology department, his father and friends actually produced a lot of gold down near Devon. Using the engine out of a Model A Ford to run a pump, they made enough money to subsidize their farming which certainly wasn't doing well at the time."

After the 1930s gold production dropped again until 1980 when the price of gold hit an all time high of $850 U.S. an ounce, and production in Alberta peaked at 4,276 ounces. (72) This was largely due to gravel pit operations in and around the city of Edmonton. Placer gold recovery as a by-product of gravel production continues today, with the amount of gold varying from year to year.

Alberta never did realize the great mineral wealth of its neighbours to the north and we t. For example, in 1896 Alberta produced 2,662 ounces of gold, (73) whereas from 1863 to 1867, British Columbia produced 957,860 ounces of gold, much of it from the Cariboo. In 1900, at the height of gold production in the Klondike, more than a million ounces of gold came out of the Yukon. (74) Although dreams of striking it rich have faded, gold mining still occupies a place in the economic history of the province. Even today there are certain bars on the river whose upper layers can yield a good return after a high water event. As to the legitimacy of Jim Gibbon's claim of averaging eight-tenths of an ounce a day on the North Saskatchewan in the early days? Dr. Morton commented, "Oh I think so, they worked from dawn 'til dusk-cold-wet-mosquitoes, people would do anything for gold."

Michael Donnelly grew up along the North Saskatchewan River west of Edmonton. He is a writer and works as an archaeologist across Alberta, British Columbia, and the Northwest Territories.

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NOTES

(1) Vancouver Daily Province, March 8,1924.

(2) Tyrrell, J.B. Gold on the North Saskatchewan River. Transactions of the Canadian Mining Institute, Toronto, 1915. 161.

(3) Berry. J.P. Clover Bar in the Making 1881-1931, 1931.

(4) Joseph James Hargreaves. 1871. Red River. Montreal. 61.

(5) MacGregor. J.G. Edmonton--A History. Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1967, 60.

(6) The Nor'-Wester. Letter from Thomas Woolsey, June 11.1862.

(7) MacGregor. J.G. 1974. Over land by the Yellowhead. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie Books, 79.

(8) MacGregor, 1967, 60.

(9) The Nor'-Wester. August 19,1863.

(10) Fort Edmonton journal, entry for May 3,1863. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/33.

(11) Ibid., August 8.1863. Hudson's Bay Company Archives. B.60/a/33.

(12) Ibid., August 17.1863. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/33.

(13) Ibid.. September 17,1863. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/33.

(14) Letter, WJ. Christie to Alexander G. Dallas, December 31,1863. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/33.

(15) Letter. Christie to William Mactavish, August 30,1864. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/34.

(16) Edmonton Cash & Gold Account, Edmonton Ac counts, 1865/66. Hudson's Bay Company Archives, B.60/a/34.

(17) The Nor'-Wester, September 16,1864.

(18) Ibid., June 30,1863.

(19) Ibid., December 11,1864.

(20) Goldring, Philip. "Labour Records of the Hudson's Bay Company. 1821-1870." Archivaria 11,1980/81.53-86.

(21) The Nor'-Wester, March 2,1867.

(22) MacGregor, 1967,65.

(23) "The Narrative of Jim Gibbons," Alberta Historical Review, Summer 1958, 6:3, 1-6.

(24) Ibid., 4.

(25) The Edmonton Bulletin. May 17, 1897.

(26) Gibbons, op. cit., 5.

(27) Blower, James. Gold Rush. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1971, 122.

(28) Berry, 1931, 3.

(29) Gibbons, 1958, 6.

(30) Blower, 1971, 122.

(31) The Nor'- Wester. Letter from W.M. Monkman. June 2, 1863.

(32) Edmonton Geological Society. Edmonton Beneath Our Feet A Guide to the Geology of the Edmonton Region, Edmonton, 1993, 50.

(33) The Edmonton Bulletin. February 28, 1881.

(34) The Manitoban. Interview with Alfred Burrows. June 15, 1872.

(35) The Edmonton Bulletin, May 4, 1899.

(36) Ibid., March 11, 1897.

(37) Ibid.

(38) Ream, Peter T. The Fort on the Saskatchewan--a Resource Book on the Saskatchewan and District. Metropolitan Printing. 1974, 207.

(39) The Edmonton Bulletin. April 15, 1897.

(40) Ibid., March 8, 1897.

(41) Ibid., June 6, 1895.

(42) Ibid., April 15, 1897.

(43) Ibid., July 19, 1897.

(44) Ibid., May 4. 1899.

(45) Ibid., May 20, 1882.

(46) Ibid., August 5, 1895.

(47) Ibid., May 10,1901.

(48) Ibid., August 20, 1896.

(49) Ibid., March 16. 1899.

(50) Ibid., August 19,1901.

(51) Ibid., May 4, 1899.

(52) Ibid., August 4,1902.

(53) Ibid., September 29,1898.

(54) Ibid., May 10,1901.

(55) Ibid., October 28.1901.

(56) Ibid.

(57) Ibid., August 19,1901.

(58) Ibid., March 27,1899.

(59) Clarke Dredging Co. (The Edmonton Bulletin. April 20,1907) and the Huff Grading Co. (The Edmonton Bulletin. November 9,1907)

(60) The Edmonton Bulletin, April 23,1907.

(61) Coutu, Hector. 1980. Our Crossing--River to Roads--A History of the Brosseau, Duvernay and Surrounding Area. Edmonton: Co-op Press Ltd., 85.

(62) The Edmonton Bulletin, June 6,1895.

(63) Tyrrell, J.B. Gold on the North Saskatchewan River. Transactions of the Canadian Mining Institute, Toronto. 1915,170.

(64) Ibid., 171.

(65) Ibid., 172.

(66) The Edmonton Bulletin, February 28,1881.

(67) Shaw, Robert Peter. The Geology and Geochemistry of Gold Mineralization at Athabasca Pass, Central Rocky Mountains. British Columbia. Canada. Edmonton: University of Alberta, 1990.7.

(68) Ibid., 52.

(69) Rees, D.B. Notes on Placer Mining in Alberta. Edmonton: Province of Alberta Dept of Lands and Mines. Edmonton, 1938.

(70) The Saskatchewan Herald. Battleford, September 4,1914.

(71) Rees, op. cit., 32.

(72) Godfrey, John D. Gold. Edmonton: Alberta Geological Survey, Alberta Research Council. 1985, 4.

(73) Ibid.

(14) Lotz, J.R. The Dawson Area--a Regional Monograph. Ottawa: Dept, of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, 1966, 14.

BY Donnelly, Michael

Drugs in Edmonton

This afternoon the morality department of the city burned about $500 worth of the precious drug opium. This constitutes various amounts which have been confiscated from time to time during the past two weeks and represents some hundreds of dollars in fines, which have been paid into the treasury of the city by users of opium. About fifteen layouts with which the drug is cooked and prepared for smoking, as well as the necessary pipes in which to light and inhale it, were also burned in the furnace, causing a right merry blaze.

Some idea of the amount of opium smoking that goes on in the city may be gained from the fact that this is only the quantity ordered to be put out of the way for the past two weeks and does not represent anything like the amount taken over by the attorney-general's department.

It is a common request to detectives and others connected with the police department that they procure, for people outside, tins of opium which are in their possession and they are told that there is a good market for the same, and that it can be easily disposed of. In fact, it was only this morning that one of the police officers was approached upon the subject, but he stated that owing to the risk entailed in connection with the matter he thought it would scarcely be wise to endeavour to procure any for the man.

That the men who handle this drug make big money is evidence by the fact that they are nearly always able to meet the heavy fines which are imposed by the court in connection with the prosecution, and very rarely are compelled to go to jail for the offence. The cost of it amounts to considerable, and it has increased in a marked degree lately, and Tallie tins, the standard method of packing the raw drug being worth from $30 to $40, and are hard to obtain even at this price, but the users of the product freely and gladly give these amounts in order to obtain it.

Edmonton Capital, August 1, 1913