Reunited with the 3B in the Beaver valley at the foot of Kelly Mountain, the Crowsnest Highway right-angles left to follow the Beaver upstream. Salmo is eleven kilometres away eastward. Hardly noticeable even to a bicyclist, a slight height of land between Kelly and Erie Mountains separates the Salmo watershed from the Beaver’s. About four miles east of the Tee, a 1991 overpass carries the Highway high over the stripped Nelson & Fort Sheppard right-of-way. Through a patchy forest of spindly evergreens the Highway meanders, diverging from the right-of-way which carries on to loop around the south side of tiny Erie Lake, leaving the Highway the north shore. Near the west end of the Lake the Pine Springs Motel and Campground invites travellers to bide a wee. In the shadows of tall timber, the No. 3 slips past the bowered rest area on the Lake’s northern shore to cross Erie Creek on a shoulderless 1953 concrete-decked bridge. The Creek is “…for coarse gold…,” to paraphrase N.L. Barlee in his book Gold Creeks and Ghost Towns (Hancock House, Surrey and Blaine, 1984), “…always worth investigating...”
        The area has been well investigated. By 1898 enough silver had been noted in nearby rocks that the Mersey, the Ben Hassan and the Arnold had been staked and registered, and the N&FS had laid out a siding in anticipation of trains of loaded ore-cars to be pulled to a smelter. The next year the Relief and the Arlington were staked, and by 1903 the Lucky Boy, the Canadian King, the Bella and Rossi, the Henry Clay, Ida D., Waffer and the promising Keystone had been recorded. Though a few might have sent the occasional sack of ore to market, none could hold a candle to the production of the Arlington and the renamed Second Relief.
        Discovered in the valley of the Erie about five kilometres north of the Highway, the Arlington and, actually into the Salmo valley 10 miles farther, the Second Relief, were rich in galena. Come 1901 the Second Relief was employing 50 men to mine and feed a little five-stamp mill that the owners had dragged to the site. A second five-stamp battery added the next year increased capacity to 25 tons per day, demonstrating the potential of the property despite a failing cyanide-process gold recovery plant. In March of 1905 the Second Relief Mining Company acquired the property and were soon mining it with a 35-man workforce. Nearby, the London-based Hastings (B.C.) Exploration Syndicate, Limited, had purchased the Arlington in 1901 and, its local affairs managed by Leslie Hill of future Okanagan fruit endeavours, in 1905 paid its investors a one shilling dividend. The next year its 30-man crew sent 1300 tons of gold- and silver-spiced galena to the Hall Mines smelter at Nelson. Second Relief mined that entire year with the aid of a small steam engine to power the operation when Winter withdrew the services of Erie Creek. The mines worked through 1908, though Second Relief had leased its property to independents and the Arlington shipped but 88 tons. Come 1913 the Arlington closed and the Second Relief changed hands. Injecting a little capital into the operation through their Relief Gold Mining Company, J.A. (John) Finch of Spokane and Lorne Argyle Campbell hoped that a fine crusher and a new cyanide agitation plant would extract more gold from the ore and propel the mine to profitability. Production ceased in 1918 and the next year the Mine’s surface plant was consumed by the conflagration which razed the upper Beaver valley.
        Amazingly both mines sprung back to life in 1927. While Consolidated Mining and Smelting was diamond-drilling for galena on the nearby Arnold and St. Louis, the Oscarson Mining Company of Erie took over the Second Relief group with a 20-man crew, cleaned up the mine, built a dormitory and a new water-powered plant with a Blake crusher and a ball mill. With 5,000 tons of ore in sight and the tailings of the old mine to treat as well, Oscarson got to work mining 23 tons the next year.
        To the Arlington in 1927 came a Chicago-based outfit with a specialized plant to process the tailings for silver, presumably. Deciding to have a go at the old mine itself, in 1928 the company installed a well-used 15-stamp mill, only ever using one of the three 5-stamp batteries to crush 20-odd tons. In 1929 the Relief-Arlington Mines, Limited, suspended work at the Arlington to concentrate on the Second Relief. In June of 1933 the William N. O’Neil Company, Limited, bought out Relief-Arlington and re-equipped the mill to regain profitability. Through the Second World War the outfit worked, making its last appearance in the B.C. Minister of Mines reports in 1946.

        Towards Salmo from the N&FS’s “Old Erie” at the eastern end of Erie Lake lays the little settlement of Erie, originally “North Fork” before the railroad came through. It isn’t much of a place and never was. Clara Graham, in her chapter 4 of “The Kootenays in Retrospect” (Kootenay Yesterdays, vol. 3, ed. Edwd. L. Affleck, The Alexander Nicolls Press, Vancouver, 1976), reports that in the early 19-aughts the settlement consisted of a handful of miners’ shacks, the Erie and the Mersey hotels, Jas. R. Hunnex’s general and drug store out of which operated the post office, another general store run by W.T. Beadles, a school, and the Great Northern station. While Graham was in residence, Joe Read opened a store and took over the post office, and J.P. Bell modified Beadles’ store building into a livery barn. Erie today is a few residences scattered about, the budget-priced Selkirk Motel across the Highway from a service station sharing its roof with the Skyways Truckers’ Haven, a few minor businesses. What remains of Erie the mining camp lays hidden in middens and buried in the dirt.
        
Salmo

        Eastward from Erie the Highway bumps over the railway’s level crossing where 1916 Lakawana 9030 rail was still in place in 1999. Five miles farther is Salmo (663m), welcoming east-bound guests with the Sal-Crest Motel where “the oldest telephone booth in the world” is built into a huge hollow log which dendrochronologically confirms its claim with 465 growth rings.
        On the western outskirts of the Village near the Sal-Crest, a wye intersection blends the eastbound No. 3 and the No. 6 coming down from Nelson and sends them southward down the Salmo River’s valley. Turning northward on 6 puts one on Railway Avenue. To the left the old Nelson and Fort Sheppard’s empty right-of-way melts into a tiny ex-yards stripped of steel and superintended by a little single-storey’d combination station/freight shed in shabby white, its shiny gabled roof metal-clad to slough off heavy falls of snow, the plants in its sagging window boxes dead from neglect, a flurry of abandoned papers littering its floors. Near the far end of the yards the Reno Motel marks Second Street leading off easterly to the Municipal Campground, a well grassed, well treed terrain equipped with a utility building with showers. The drawback is that the grounds are a public park and playground.
        In 2002 the only other place in town offering over-night accommodation is the fancy old Salmo Hotel, an eye arresting two-storied wooden confection which has stood at Railway and Forest/4th Street since 1912, its architectural details picked out in colourfully contrasting paints, the lower level of its double-decked veranda serving as a sidewalk. Unfortunately, only one room is available for over-night guests. The raw lumber fronted Silver Dollar Hotel next door to the Salmo on 4th is, as its prominently displayed motto, “Party Time,” suggests, just a bar.
        In the entire Village, there are only three buildings of historical or architectural distinction. The Hotel, of course, and across Railway Avenue from it, GN’s Great War-era station, the second one to occupy the site after GN removed the first to Northport, Washington, during a dispute with the local council. Southerly from the station, on the town-side of Railway, the concrete facade of the one-storey Jas. R. Hunnex building, raised as a drugstore in 1934, sports some art deco details. For fun, several walls around town are enlivened by lithic murals created by the students of the Village’s School of Masonry.

        Incorporated as a Village on October 30th, 1946, Salmo today makes much of its living from travellers, but in past days was a jumping little community. As outlined by the displays in the Chamber of Commerce-run museum on 4th across from the Hotel, the mining of tungsten, silver, gold, lead, and zinc was, along with forestry, once Salmo’s occupation.

        From the construction camp that N&FS contractors Foley, Stewart and Welsh established in 1893 on the flats near where Erie Creek (at the time called the North Fork of the Salmon River) joins the Salmo, a tiny settlement grew up around the little lumbering operation. It was originally called “Salmon Siding” for the River which was named for the salmon which haven’t been seen in these waters since the damming of the Columbia River in the 1930s. As “salmon”-something is not an uncommon name in north-western North America, locals of classical bent suggested the community distinguish itself from other places by adopting the Latin for salmon, Salmo. In 1897 the settlement was re-christened; the River soon conformed.
        The aforementioned Clara Graham in her chapter 4 of “The Kootenays in Retrospect” (Kootenay Yesterdays) states that, come 1899, Salmo two general stores run one each by W.G. Norton and Prosser & McLeod, a post office mastered by W.T. Beadles, and four hotels: the Northern, the Pioneer, the Grand and the Salmo. School classes, which had been convened by Miss A. Doran in an old store in 1897 and then skipped a year, were being taught by Leonora Coghlan in May of 1899. By 1901, when Isabella Reith arrived to teach, only J.A. Benson’s Northern and the Linklaters’ Salmo remained in business, and Beadles ran the only store in town.
        Though it gladly catered to the prospectors and miners investigating the mineral shows in the neighbouring mountains, Salmo founded itself on forestry. Among the earliest outfits were the F.R. Rotter Lumber Company and Frank Lavin’s Salmo Lumber Mills. These operations were apparently fleeting, likely shutting down in 1896. In 1901 the Kootenay Shingle Mill Company established itself on the flats near the confluence of the Salmo and Erie Creek and imported a crew of Japanese workers which it housed separately from the rest of its employees. When the Davies-Sayward Mill and Land Company shut down its mill at Pilot Bay in 1903, many of its ex-employees moved to Salmo to work in the shingle mill which served as the settlement’s economic heart from until 1928. The Salmo Secondary School now occupies the site.
        In 1931 West Kootenay Power and Light strung its 63kV No. 7 line up the Beaver Creek valley from its substation at Tadanac, bringing electricity to Fruitvale, Salmo and on to Ymir. Not even this source of cheap power could revive the Mill: the trees were gone, and Salmo had to content itself with distributing supplies to the miners in the surrounding mountains.
        
Jersey City and the Emerald

        In 1896 traces of gold were discovered locked into the sulphide-infused quartz veins that webbed the quartzite and schist formations on Sheep Creek, a tributary of the Salmo, perhaps five miles downstream from the Village and east. Though the Yellowstone was staked on July 18th and the nearby Kreen on September 10th, the showings didn’t excite interest until 1899 when mine development began. In 1900, while nearby claims such as the Motherlode, the Nugget, the Queen, and the Kootenay Belle were being evaluated, the owners of the Yellowstone installed a 10-stamp mill and began a two year career during which they waggoned down the Creek to Salmo and loaded on the N&FS. Their efforts grossed them $124,000. In 1902 the Yellowstone was exhausted and operations suspended. By that time, however, the Queen group of four claims was showing promise enough to attract a succession of lessees who by 1908 had equipped the mine with 20-stamp mill. That year American capital bought the mine.
        It was not gold, however, that was to be the primary metal sought in this region. The aftermath of the Wall Street Panic of 1907 caused base metal prices to rise sharply. Sheep Creek, its valley and surrounds having been already noted for showing galena, became the focus of a miniature stampede in 1908 which set the mountains ringing with pick-axes striking stone and saw 200 properties staked or re-staked.
        The best properties were the HB on the Aspen Creek tributary of the Sheep, and the Emerald, a few miles farther south, below the prominent stain on the high western slopes of Iron Mountain. For years the stain had been thought to indicate iron, but John Waldbeser discovered in 1906 that it was the signature of galena, an ore of lead, zinc and silver. Three years of development proved that Emerald’s lode was considerable, and ran to 60% lead with traces of silver and of tungsten, a curious metal occurring in the wolframite that complicated the ore. While the owners of the Kootenay Belle worked most of 1909 with a 4-stamp mill to free gold from their property on Nevada Mountain facing Sheep Creek, Waldbeser got serious about developing the Emerald, setting up the Iron Mountain Limited to do so on June 7th, 1909. That year a crew of six mined 1400 tons, waggoned 1100 of it down a scary little track to Salmo and shipped it by rail to Trail for a yield of 382 tons of pure lead and almost 1700 ounces of silver. It was enough to keep the crew working and the operation struggled on to profit during the later years of World War One. In 1919 a concentration mill was raised.
        While Waldbeser was examining the stain on Iron Mountain, a few miles away on a high tributary of Sheep Creek P.F. Horton and H.M. Billings were hammering at the rocks. In 1910 they located their HB property and quickly bonded it to Consolidated Mining and Smelting which in 1912 took 742 tons of the Mine’s lead-carbonate ore to Trail. Despite a high percentage of zinc the ore ran through the smelter well, but CM&S felt that it could do better by letting independents mine the HB. W.R. Salisbury took over in 1913, sending his ore to Trail. In 1915 an American company took over and exported the ore to a smelter where the zinc was a valued by-product of lead extraction. In the dark days following the Great War the HB went quiet.
        The years of peak gold production in the Sheep Creek valley ended during the early years of W.W.I, but by then base metal mining was well established. Despite the drastic roll-back in base metal prices after the Great War the Emerald continued production. In the same Ministry of Mines report that noted that the Yellowstone Mining Company of Victoria was now working the Queen, the Emerald is said to have shipped 223 tons in 1923. As the ‘20s matured and the Emerald was reported as “drilling” in 1926, CM&S was watching with interest as the Victoria Syndicate drove tunnels into the HB. Aware that the Mine had already given up 3500 tons of zinc, 1300 of lead and some 14.7 thousand ounces of silver, the Company bought the property in 1927 as a reserve.
        The year 1927 saw lots of activity in the region as the prices of lead and zinc rose towards their 1928 levels of £21 and £25.3 per ton, respectively. Near the HB the Aspen group began installing plant and developing a mine, the Black Jack, the Mortgage Lifter and the Lucky Boy, among others, were registered, F.M. Black of Vancouver was working the Kootenay Belle, the Queen group was being developed and Reno Gold Mines, Limited, had succeeded in gathering 17 claims into its portfolio and was picking into the Reno-Donnybrook. The next year, 1928, CM&S bought the galena-laden Silver Dollar near Salmo, Reno Mines struck a fine vein of gold-rich ore and Salmo Consolidated Mines, Limited, which had been formed in 1926 to acquire expired claims, was taken over by C.R. Blackburn of Toronto after it had collected an array of Sheep Creek claims.
        In 1929 Reno Gold installed a 30 ton per day cyanide plant and in the last six months of the year gathered $37,000’s worth of gold. At the Emerald the Radiore Company of Canada was carrying out an “electrical survey” to determine the extent of the lode. The results must have been encouraging for when the great forest fire of 1934 consumed the mine’s surface plant, the owners promptly rebuilt. Even as it collected 41 Crown-granted claims surrounding the Emerald, slipping market prices for base metals pushed Iron Mountain, Limited, towards insolvency during the ‘30s. Ironically, it was rescued by those very metals which from the start had compromised the worth of the Mine’s ore, tungsten and molybdenum.
        As the World slid into war in the early days of September, 1939, activity at the Emerald was intense. The tools of modern warfare demanded new alloys in which the two metals were vital, and on August 17th, 1942, the federally owned Wartime Metals Corporation bought the Emerald, contracting CM&S to build a mill on site to concentrate the tungsten. CM&S had its subsidiary, West Kootenay Power, construct a substation to energize the mill which was brought into operation on August 1st, 1943, grinding an average of 200 tons per day. For reasons known only to the strategists of the time, Wartime shut down production on September 10th, never to work it again. Early in 1947 the wholly-owned Canadian Exploration Company (Canex) subsidiary of Placer Development Limited paid nearly a million dollars for the operation and commenced converting the old Wartime mill to extract the tungsten from 260 tons of ore per day. Milling began on June 12th of 1947.
        With the on-set of the Cold War, tungsten again became strategically important, as did most of the base metals. Having identified lodes of exploitable ores on the Feeney, Jersey and Dodger properties, Canex decided to expand the scope of its operation and closed the mill on January 12th, 1949, to convert it to concentrate zinc and lead as well. Processing at 300 tons per day began again that March.
        On May 1st of 1951 Canex paid the Canadian government the last instalment on the purchase of the Emerald. In a bit of creative financing, the Government then bought back the Mine, plus the adjacent tungsten-rich Dodger property, contracting Canex to mine and mill the ore with the aid of a new 250 ton tungsten recovery plant. When drilling revealed the potential of the Jersey and Feeney claims, Canex significantly increased its mills’ capacities, installing crushers and floatation cells in the old mill to refine the process. At the same time the company opened a pit mine on the Jersey, some 1100 metres south of the Emerald, and began to load out the lead-zinc ore. On October 1st, 1952, Canex bought the Government out.
        Rather than commute daily from Salmo or Erie, workers had early on opted for staying in a camp near the mine. Crude at first, as Canex committed its fortune to the operation the camp improved into a little settlement of 150 dwellings called “Jersey” after the mining property on which most of it perched. By the 50s it was equipped with all the modern conveniences necessary to attract workers and their families.
        By 1956 Canex had streamlined the operation to the point that seven huge conveyors moved ores from the mines into the mills. The tungsten concentrates were delivered to the U.S. government to be added to strategic stockpiles, presumably, while lead and zinc concentrates went to the Bunker Hill refinery in Kellogg, Idaho, and the Anaconda smelter at Black Eagle, Montana, respectively.
        The Feeney ran out of economical tungsten ore in 1955 and was shut down. The Dodger was mined out by 1957 and on July 31st, 1958 the Emerald and the tungsten mill quit. Solely on the strength of the Jersey’s lead-zinc ores, Canex worked on, sending 407 tons of concentrate to Kellogg in 1964, 417 two years later. On September 1st, 1971, however, operations ceased. When no-one stepped in to take over the project, the mills were salvaged and on September 29th and 30th of 1973, the Ritchie Brothers auctioneers sold what they could of Jersey town, the remainder being crushed and removed, the site reportedly now “reclaimed.” As interest in the site again waxes at the turn-of-the-millennium, little remains.
        In 1946 CM&S came back to the HB and began explorations. Tunnels were punched into the lode and in 1950 a crew of 36 sent 2900 tons of ore to Trail by truck, nearly doubling that the next year with the help of the first diesel-powered mining locomotive to run underground in B.C. A 1,000-ton mill was completed in early 1953 which by 1958 had been fine-tuned to intake 38,000 tons per month. In 1964 the project’s 121 men living in HB Camp or commuting from Salmo dug and processed 478,000 tons, sending the concentrate to Trail by tractor-trailer. On November 1st, 1966, Cominco shut the operation down.
        
The “Skyway” to Creston