OPINION | Yellowknife's Giant Mine: Memories of life, death, and riches

As cleanup crews prepare to dismantle the C-shaft headframe at Yellowknife's Giant Mine in the coming days, guest columnist Lee Selleck reflects on its history and significance.

Hundreds of Yellowknifers have inhaled the moist, muddy breath of the underground as they stood under the dark steel of Giant mine's headframe, waiting for passage to the black depths. The collar of C-shaft is likewise the main point of exit from Giant's rocky labyrinth, the point of freedom and sometimes escape.

Giant's tallest landmark is perched atop what was one of Canada's richest gold mines. The C-shaft headframe has been a perpetual symbol of the mine and life around it. Most riders in its steel cage elevator were men earning a rugged but lucrative living. Some helped build the modern city of Yellowknife.

Mineworkers in the 1950s scrounged lumber to build the earliest uptown private homes. For them, the headframe was a symbol of the city, its prosperity and its growth as well as a reminder of the friends and co-workers they rode with in and out of the mine. They were, in a sense, pioneers in Canada's post-war economic boom.

There has always been a dark side. For the Yellowknives Dene, the headframe was from the start a symbol of alienated land scarred by noise, blasting, and pollution. Waterborne arsenic from the gold-milling process poisoned Back Bay, andairborne arsenic on snowtook the life of a two-year-old boy in Ndilo.

Even so, it was a heady time for Giant. The city of Yellowknife grew around the Giant and Con headframes. Gold ore and mineworkers streamed up and down C-shaft. Men trusted their lives to the big hoist wheels turning, the cage riding on fat, twined steel cables. Hundreds of workers came and went, fell in love in Yellowknife, married, had kids, played hockey, curled, hunted, boated and snowmobiled, drank beer, built their lives here.

History of tragedy

Even in Giant's best times, the headframe saw tragedy. When you least expected it, ambulances and crews awaited the injured or dead at the headframe's base. For many, its looming girders morphed from a symbol of prosperity to one of unseen but lethal danger. Most of Giant's many casualties were mineworkers, but a female geologist also lost her life to a falling rock. Worst of all was the recovery of the remains of nine men, victims of a deliberate explosion on Sept.18, 1992, during a labour dispute that brutally fractured the city Giant had helped to build. For the victims' families, friends, many co-workers, and Yellowknife residents, the headframe took on an aura of incalculable grief and loss.

In 1992 and '93, the shadows of Giant's headframe marked a battleground, sometimes literally. The 18-month strike/lockout occasioned by far the worst strife in the mine's checkered history.

Passengers in the C-shaft cage were mainly strike-breakers, employed for the first time in a Canadian mine since 1957. There were Pinkerton's security and dogs, picket lines riven by minor and more serious flares of violence, and risky explosions in the night. Power lines were cut and shorted-out. RCMP snipers were secretly stationed in the hills overlooking the picket line and the gap between the public road and Giant's headframe.

There was a riot involving stun grenades, teargas and shots fired by police. There were serious injuries, very close brushes with death, charges and arrests. Hundreds of lives were radically changed, generally for the worse.

Taxpayer-funded clean-up

But where there is darkness there may eventually be light. Time and hard work by unsung heroes brought Giant's labour war to an end. After 1993, a workforce comprised of union loyalists and former strike-breakers travelled in the C-shaft cage together and laboured underground with no significant incident.

Even then, the end of Giant as a productive mine was in sight. Environmental liabilities grew as ore grades fell and costs rose. Royal Oak Mines' bankruptcy in 1999 resulted in Giant's headframe becoming a public monument, owned by the federal government which was now chiefly responsible for remediation and clean-up.

The taxpayers' tab will likely exceed a billion dollars and will continue to mount. Care and maintenance of 237,000tonnes of arsenic trioxide, to be frozen underground, will continue indefinitely.

Over seven decades, many many Yellowknifers and residents of Ndilo and Dettah have stood at the gates of Giant, or driven past the headframe on their way home or to lake country. They have seen the headframe glowing golden in the evening sun, seen it bleached and baked, or laden with long, heavy icicles in winter the frozen breath of the underground.

Our collective memories, my own included, are both cherished and mourned. The federal government has chosen to dismantle Giant's headframe, but we must remember all it stood for.