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Local legend has it that the silver boom at COBALT , just off Hwy 11 some 50km north of Temagami, started when a blacksmith named Fred La Rose threw a hammer at a fox and hit a rock instead, breaking off a great hunk of silver. Whatever the truth, mining began here in earnest in 1903. Subsequently, in the frantic search for silver, new mine shafts were dropped every few weeks and within a decade the haphazard collection of tents, log cabins and huts had swollen to contain seven thousand people. With output burgeoning, Cobalt merged with nearby Haileybury and New Liskeard to form the "tritowns": the miners lived in Cobalt, the managers on the Lake Temiskaming waterfront in Haileybury; and the mine owners kept their distance in New Liskeard. Life in Cobalt was perilous: typhoid, smallpox and flu were common and many of the homes were built from wooden dynamite boxes, and so were regularly wrecked by fires. The high times ended with the Great Depression, but Cobalt struggled on until the steep decline in silver prices in the 1980s. The last mine closed in 1990 and Cobalt's future looks decidedly gloomy. Cobalt today is hardly compulsive viewing, but you might drop by Canada's oldest Mining Museum (June-Sept daily 9am-5pm; Oct-May Mon-Fri 1-4pm; $3.25), housed in a converted newspaper office, with a vast collection of ores from the mines, including a collection of luminous stones. Up the street, an old head frame (the top of the mine shaft) protrudes from the roof of what was once the grocery store - the store used the disused shaft as a refrigerator - and opposite a small park has a large painted sign listing the 104 mines operating in 1908.
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