George Black's Greatest Legacy
was his Strong Mining Law

by Jane Gaffin

(Information for this piece has relied on My Ninety Years (Martha Louise Black) edited and updated by Flo Whyard, Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, 1976; The Politics of the Yukon Territory 1898-1909 by David Morrison, University of Toronto Press, 1968; Yukon Places and Names by R.C. (Bob) Coutts, 2nd edition, 2003; Good Time Girls by Lael Morgan, Epicenter Press, 1998; Speakers of the Canadian House of Commons, Library of Parliament by Gary Levy; A Report on the Yukon Quartz Mining Act and Its Regulatory Regime's Impact on the Free Entry System of Mining Law by Jim McFaull, 2000; Gold Rush Diary of James McRae, Guelph, Ontario, February, 1898 to January 20, 1901, Yukon Archives 80/1 F-101.)

George Black was a dynamic, larger-than-life figure who left the comforts of his home in New Brunswick to join the Klondike gold rush. He climbed the White Pass, staked claims with a partner, set up a law practice in Dawson City and married the spirited, Chicago, Illinois-born Martha Louise Munger Purdy in 1904.

He was a brilliant lawyer with strong political aspirations. He was ambitious, clever, handsome, competitive, serious, an outdoorsman, a hunter, an Anglican, a Conservative, and a statesman of upstanding moral breeding.

As a public administrator and a politician, he demonstrated his true friendship to the prospectors and miners, who were always welcome guests in the Blacks' private home and when they occupied Government House.

In his estimation, a healthy mining industry was the ticket to guiding the youthful Yukon Territory to its pinnacle of economic potential. His finest legacy to the Yukon was to provide a secure free entry system of mining by writing what is heralded as the best piece of federal legislation ever produced in the House of Commons.

His Yukon Quartz Mining Act of 1924 protected free miners from bureaucratic interference for over seven decades. At that time, a socialist Jean Chretien government began tampering again with applying orders-in-council and overthrew the regulatory regime with a licensing system which once again gave discretionary powers to functionaries and ministers. Even so, Mr. Black's ingenious work was so thorough that the Yukon Quartz Mining Act never lost a court case.

During the peak of the Klondike gold rush and for 20 years thereafter, the Dawson mining recorder's office was infamous for the amount and extent of its bribery and corruption. Civil servants were paid low wages and, like the North West Mounted Police, could not and still can't, stake or own claims. It was an incentive to cheat.

If personnel in the mining recorder's office thought somebody had a good claim, they might refuse to record it. Then the government man would get a kick back in the way of an under-the-table finder's fee or he would be promised a percentage of the gold taken from the claim or whatever other agreement could be arranged.

James McRae, of Guelph, Ontario, vouched for the practice in his journal of Friday, September 2, 1898. "We found out after we came home that the government holds half of each unrepresented 500-foot claim, but they posted no notices to that effect before men went out to stake. It will be one chance in a 1,000 if we can get a claim recorded."

The next day, Saturday, McRae, wrote: "I went down to the Department of Corruption this morning and stood in line till nearly one o'clock but I could not get in. The office closes at one o'clock on Saturday to give the lads a chance to divide the spoils so they can go to church on Sunday and pray for strength to help them rob the public during the following week."

Political favoritism was rampant. Land was being provided to outside corporations to use for huge mining concessions while civil servants falsified mining records that duped prospectors and miners out of their rightful mineral claims.

On an application form, a miner had to describe the claim he had staked on a distant creek in hopes of recording the piece of real estate. Processing took a few days. When the miner inquired later, he expected the claim to be duly recorded in the mining recorder's ledgers. Yet he might hear that his ground had already been staked by somebody else.

Many claim owners lost their mineral claims in this method to those who paid bribes to the mining recorder or his agents to strike the original owners' names off the record books and insert their own.

The civil service was in control and could cook the books anyway it wanted. Just as residents had to pay a bribe, else endure a human chain of 400 to receive government mail or buy a bottle of government hootch, likewise, prospectors had to stand in line for days to reach a recording agent's wicket.

During the wait, their claims would likely be turned over to the favourites who paid money to "jump" the queue and "jump" the prospector's claim by completing their devious business through back-room shenanigans.

Mr. Black's limited mining activities in the Whitehorse mining district and his wife's more extensive work with a Klondike mining syndicate made the couple indignant to the gross injustices and graft that deceitful government administrators were perpetrating on powerless small operators.

Mr. Black vowed to clean up the Klondike.

Elections were no different. Mr. Black noted that the first election in 1902, when Yukoners were entrusted to elect a member of the Dominion Parliament, ballot boxes were plugged with names of ineligible foreigners who were unaware they were committing fraud. Mr. Black had to change the mind of the returning officer who was refusing to release the voters' list for public scrutiny.

Mr. Black, who had attempted to secure mining properties at a local level, jumped into federal politics and won four successive elections. He went into action immediately as the Yukon's Conservative member of Parliament in 1921. Within days, he drafted and sponsored the Yukon Quartz Mining Act.

The act placed hardrock and placer mining on equal footing and provided legally secure titles to mining properties. The Hon. Mr. Black secured mining claims by ensuring they were no longer subject to any more unscrupulous orders-in-council.

Those documents, signd by a minister in a back room in Ottawa, were secretly removing a claim from one party and opening the land to another party. Nobody was the wiser until after the fact.

Parliament enacted Mr. Black's Yukon Quartz Mining Act in 1924. In the following few years, the Conservative parliamentarian advised the William Mackenzie King Liberal government (1921 to 1926) on the design of a fair system to levy taxes on hardrock mining's profits.

Mr. Black prepared a schedule that would realize substantial revenue for the government from Yukon mineral production without breaking industry's back. The system withstood the test of time and still remains in place.

George Black was born into comfortable social digs in Woodstock, New Brunswick, on April 10, 1873. He was educated in the small New Brunswick community of Richibucto, near Newcastle, and went to law school in the capital of Fredericton.

Criminal law and politics were natural outlets for the ambitious young man who had a gift for public speaking and possessed qualities as a leader and organizer. The year he came to the New Brunswick bar in 1896, he campaigned vigorously for the Conservatives and opened a law practice for a short duration in Woodstock.

In 1897, the 24-year-old criminal lawyer and several friends were bitten by the gold bug. They were swept up in the frenzy of the Klondike Gold Rush and were bent on stampeding into the Yukon District with a flood of other adventurers.

He collected what money he could and travelled the width of Canada. In the spring of 1898, the party reached Vancouver, British Columbia, where they bought eight horses and sleds from an outfitter and sailed up the Pacific coast to Skagway, Alaska.

The horses precluded taking the Chilkoot Pass trail. Instead, they scaled the White Pass, making many trips back and forth until they had lugged their year's supplies up and over the mountain into Log Cabin.

They sold the horses, save one, and moved on down to Tagish Lake where they camped, cut trees and whipsawed lumber. They built a flat-bottomed scow to haul their freight and a steam-powered boat. The woodburning pipe boiler and propeller were brought with the party from Fredericton.

The party may have consisted of four men. They split up along the trail. Some presumably went on to Dawson City to scout out the Klondike gold fields for good ground. Accounts indicate that George Black and Sam Lough, like many latecomers, lingered behind to prospect the bustling Whitehorse copperbelt during 1898-99. It is unknown if Mr. Lough was part of the original New Brunswick party or the two gentlemen met enroute.

In a desire of better rewards, the men then struck out northeast sometime in 1899, covering the short distance into the Big Salmon Range where Lough staked the Discovery placer claim and recorded the area's first quartz claims as Gold Buy and Red Cliff.

Most prospectors and promoters examined Livingstone's placer and quartz mining potential with the foolish idea that the area could soundly compete with the Whitehorse copperbelt and the Klondike gold fields.

The catalyst that perhaps sparked the Black-Lough combo's curiosity to investigate may have been Joseph Peters who had started placer prospecting there two years before the gold rush began. The Black-Lough pair was said to have recovered coarse gold from Livingstone Creek.

The small settlement of Livingstone sprang up to service the miners. Access was a 40-mile winter trail over Lake Laberge and a 16-mile wagon road from Mason's Landing on the Teslin River.

If pickings had been rich as some accounts indicate, Mr. Black and Mr. Lough surely wouldn't have pulled up stakes so soon and shoved off for Dawson. About 1901, Mr. Black chose or was forced to hire on as a steamboat deckhand to earn his passage down the Yukon River to Dawson City. He and the crew didn't get paid, a fairly common practice of the day and one for which workmen had no recourse until Mr. Black came along.

In Dawson, he presented his barrister credentials from the New Brunswick bar and paid a government fee for admission to the Yukon bar.

"We sued in Admiralty Court," he related in 1955 about taking the riverboat case to court and winning. The sheriff sold the boat and cargo under the Seaman's Lien Law and paid all wages, he added.

Then more steamboats began appearing on the Yukon River than commerce could bear, he explained. Many owners were not able to pay wages.

Mr. Black, who had earned a reputation as the Yukon's first Admiralty Court lawyer, was retained by other boat officers and crews to collect their wages on a contingency basis.

He said the work netted over $3,500. Undoubtedly, the money earned from a fledgling law practice was what bore the "fortune" he was rumoured to have acquired during the gold rush rather than from his early-day prospecting endeavors.

It is further speculated that he likely performed some pro bono legal work since he didn't like seeing decent folks short-shrifted by insolvent entrepreneurs or swindlers.

Thus began his criminal law practice in the Yukon's capital. He subsequently became famous as a defense lawyer and a politician. When elections were rigged or tainted, Mr. Black exposed the crooked returning officers and corrected the corrupt practices, as he likewise did setting things straight in the mining recorder's office.

Due to scurrilous practices of people doing deeds dishonestly when it would have been easier to do them honestly, Mr. Black acquired extensive experience dealing with inadequate federal mining law, which the well-like lawyer later rectified in Ottawa. Besides introducing legislation to protect titles to mining claims, he also introduced the important legislative changes to the Yukon Act to give Yukoners trial by jury.

Until he was elected member of Parliament in 1921, Mr. Black was very busy as an elected member of the Yukon Council from 1905 to February, 1912. One of his claims to fame was introducing the territorial Miners' and Woodsmens' Lien Ordinances to protect workers.

As was the case with riverboat crews, miners and timber cutters often didn't see any pay, either. They would be left high and dry, like one of his German-born clients recalled.

Fritz Guder, who had recently landed, wasn't paid for his first job cutting and hauling timber in the Klondike. The owners might simply abscond with the profits, never to be seen again. Or, the owners, who would borrow money to finance camp and equipment, might have creditors lining up to seize their gold and wood productions to pay the delinquent loans. Nothing was left over for the little guy.

Mr. Black stepped up to the plate to protect the ordinary working stiffs. Due to his work as an elected councillor and later as Commissioner, wages took precedence over another person's property and production as security that the obligation to the workers would be met first.

Mr. Black, who was defeated as the Conservative candidate in the 1909 federal election, managed the campaign for his friend, Mr. H. Stevens, in the 1911 election.

The federal Conservatives were returned to power (1911 to 1917) under leadership of Robert Borden who rewarded Mr. Black as a party faithful. He was appointed seventh Commissioner of the Yukon Territory (eighth if acting Commissioner Zachary Wood 1902-03 is counted).

Mr. Black served in the territory's highest-ranking and most-influential public position from February 1912 to 1916.

Undoubtedly, a few government employees were quaking. Commissioner Black had extensive experience and was quite well-apprised about mining and claim-recording practices of the day as well as the salaried workers who were left without the price of a meal.

Continuing goals he had initiated while sitting on Yukon Council, his distinguished term as Commissioner was marked with profound changes to the civil service. Further, he fought graft, did his best to secure titles to mining properties, protected wage earners, and also built and improved a network of roads for miners and loggers.

The gracious and popular Blacks resided in the quite palatial and ornate Government House, which Mrs. Black contended belonged to "the people". Despite advice from on high, the unpretentious Blacks opened the door to all, regardless of their social class.

One such guest who lifted Dawsonites' eyebrows was the wealthy Gertie Lovejoy, a knock-out blonde entertainer with a diamond lodged between her two front teeth. Men adored Gertie and loved her off-colour ad-libs. They showered her Palace Grand stage performances with gold nuggets.

"One of the most unusual of early Dawson matches was that of hard-partying 'Diamond Tooth' Gertie Lovejoy to C.W.C. Tabor, the well-respected dean of Dawson's attorneys, and Gertie's subsequent attempt to enter Dawson's polite society," wrote Lael Morgan in her book Good Time Girls.

"Gertie was invited to tea at Government House by Martha Black, the wife of Tabor's colleague George Black, who had been elected (sic) to head the territorial parliament," added the author, drawing on a few observances from another guest, Laura Berton.

"Gertie was a demure little woman, quite pretty and very self-effacing. She had little to say but when she did speak the famous diamond could be seen glittering between her two front teeth. Tongues wagged furiously all the next day."

Life was agreeable for the Blacks until the middle-aged Mr. Black's illustrious career was rudely interrupted by the First World War. He was getting twitchy watching droves of men leave Dawson to enlist while he sat idly by.

His wife was braced for the expected news that finally came from him in the spring of 1916. "George has just come in and told me he was to enlist--that he cannot stand it any longer, seeing our men go away, while he sits in his office and we have the comfort of this beautiful home..."

He tendered his resignation to the minister in Ottawa which was seemingly accepted only as a leave while he carried out his patriotic calling.

He was designated Captain of the Yukon Infantry Company he had organized. The recruitment letter, dispatched from the Commissioner's office and basically shaming every able-bodied man to join, garnered an overwhelming response of 275 volunteers who were ready to follow him overseas.

The contingent left on the sternwheeler Casca from Dawson on October 16, 1916, a date likely flirting with freeze-up. The spunky Mrs. Black went, too. Subsequent to hard bargaining with the Department of Defence, Mrs. Black was granted permission to go along as the sole woman in the company of 3,500 soldiers shortly before the troopship sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, harbour in January, 1917.

In England, the infantry regrouped and trained under the banner of the 17th Canadian Machine Gun Company before going to the front under another moniker.

On the road to the Battle of Amiens, France, in August, 1918, a few months before the November 11 armistice, Captain Black was wounded with a sniper's machine-gun bullet and a piece of shrapnel.

He was treated in a London hospital then moved to another facility to mend, which he did. At war's end, he was stationed in Rhine, Germany, with the Army of Occupation.

Finally, their wartime commitments were fulfilled. The Blacks returned to Canada in 1919 and settled into Vancouver where Mr. Black opened a law practice. But he couldn't resist politics. In 1920, he ran, albeit unsuccessfully, for the British Columbia provincial legislature.

It was fate. Late the next year, 1921, the federal election was announced. The Conservatives invited George Black home to run as their Yukon candidate. He snowshoed, ski-ed, walked, dogsledded, drove a motorized tin buggy and used any other handy conveyance necessary to get around the territory and shake hands with every constituent he could find.

He fought a hard-won battle and was first elected as the Yukon's Conservative member of Parliament in 1921. Undoubtedly, it was the miners on the creeks and in the Keno silver camps who were instrumental in putting the popular candidate into office.

As the value of the Klondike claims had increased so had the extent of the corruption, which was reported to be finding its way into the Minister of Interior's Ottawa office.

Accusations were widespread that the minister was open to bribery from big corporations that were trying to gain large hydraulic mining concessions overtop of pre-existing placer claims legally held by individual miners.

When the federal government had finally reacted to the gold rush, Ottawa had reduced sizes of creek claims, imposed hefty royalties on gold production and reserved every alternate claim for itself.

The problem persisted until the miners staged a revolt. In the government's inimitable fashion, the royalty was reduced in half to 10 percent, creek frontages were increased and miners were allowed to stake 10-claim-size blocks. The catch was that the Crown reserved every other claim block for itself.

Then an order-in-council opened these hugh tracts to hydraulic and dredging concessions which required lots of bucks to operate and could only be floated by large corporations. The only way to obtain these coveted rights was to meet personally with the Minister of Interior, Clifford Sifton, presumably to grease his palms before he granted any requests.

When the Dawson miners got rip, roaring angry, they demanded statue rather than regulations which was allowing orders-in-council to favor hydraulic and other concessions over their mining claims.

Mr. Black was elected to go to Ottawa with the expressed instructions to eliminate injustice by re-writing the federal government's mining law in order to bring it in line with other British mining law so their claims would have an enforceable legal security of tenure as property.

Although British common law of a free entry system of mining dated back over a thousand years, it had no provisions for dealing with corrupt bureaucratic interference encroaching on the operation of mining claims. By the same token, the common law couldn't deal with mining recorders and the Minister of Interior taking bribes that broke claim ownership of miners.

This corruption was another rendition of what flowed from the Australian gold rush almost 50 years before the Klondike and had produced the Victoria Mining Act of 1855.

Australian miners had been abused with a licencing system that had led to bribery and corruption from public officers. It sparked the Ballarat Miners Rebellion in 1854, which the British military quelled by massacring miners at the Eureka Stockade (Star. May 22/02).

The positive spin off from the bloody tragedy was the restoration of free miners' right in all subsequent British mining law. The Crown was forced to abolish the licencing system due to the excessive bureaucratic authority it wielded over miners and which had led to absolute bureaucratic graft and extortion.

George Black didn't waste any time delving into his assignment. The result of his work was enacted into law in 1924. Once enshrined, it would be hard for the government to amend the act.

Thus, miners were protected from the arbitrary discretions and whims of ministers or government officials who might lean toward interest of big-city based corporations who had quicker access to Ottawa and heavier clout as lobbyists (bribers) than did distant Yukon miners.

The Yukon Quartz Mining Act of 1924 contained such strong provisions for legal security of tenure that there were virtually no further problems with bureaucratic interference over mineral claims until the 1990s.

"The federal government found that the Act gave so much security that virtually the only way for federal offices to interfere with the operation of a quartz claim was through expropriation," wrote Jim McFaull in A Report on the Yukon Quartz Mining Act and Its Regulatory Regime's Impact on the Free Entry System of Mining Law.

Entire generations of free miners grew up and grew old operating the most legally secure claims in the world for over the 75 years following Mr. Black's re-write of the Act, added Mr. McFaull, whose paper cites lawyer Barry Barton's Canadian Law of Mining, 1993.

The first element of the system is the right to 'enter', which is defined as the right to go onto and occupy land.

"The free entry system, also called the free miner or location system, permits the mineral operator to enter lands where minerals are in the hand of the Crown and obliges the government to grant exploration and development rights if the miner applies for them," continued the report.

"If the applicant has met all the prerequisites for a claim or a mining lease, the Minister has no discretion, but instead has a duty to issue the disposition (Barton, p. 151).

"The use of Crown land during the exploration phase is entirely unrestricted in many jurisdictions. Of this pattern, the Yukon is perhaps the clearest example.

"The Territorial Lands Act explicitly declares that nothing in it shall be construed as limiting the operation of the Yukon Quartz and Placer Mining Acts (Barton, p. 153).

"The second element of free entry is the right of the miner to stake a claim in order to secure mineral rights in priority over other miners, so that an interesting mineral can be explored without disturbance.

"The right to a claim is usually declared in clear terms, which confer upon miners an entitlement to stake, and oblige the mining recorder or like official to record it so as to deny the government any discretion over the creation of claims. It is often part and parcel of the right to enter and use Crown lands (Barton, p. 155)."

Further to sealing those provisions listed and additional attributes into mining law, Mr. Black was nominated by Prime Minister Robert B. Bennett to referee the House of Commons when the Conservatives were returned to power in 1930.

After every general election, all MPs, elect from their own, a Speaker, who is expected to act non-partisan while sitting as the most senior official.

It was evidently customary for the Speaker to keep a pistol in his chambers. The story goes that Mr. Black, a veteran hunter and marksman, would take out his .22 handgun to do his civil duty. He would pop off rabbits caught dining on the Parliament Hill shrubbery. He is alleged to have dispatched six destructive creatures in a day and called journalists to report the news in the press.

While serving a four-year tenure in the prestigious role, the aging Mr. Black was still burning the candle at both ends as though he were a younger man. He also could have been under financial strain during the Great Depression like most Canadians and worrying about hanging onto his acquisitions. He probably was worn down with nagging aches from his war wounds.

All tallied, he sounded mentally and physically exhausted and finally did collapse with a nervous breakdown.

He disappeared to England and was committed to a psychiatric hospital shortly before Parliament resumed in January, 1935. Prime Minister Bennett wrote a letter of resignation and sent out a secretary to find Mr. Black to sign it.

Nothing was said about his condition. The press surmised and discreetly reported that the Speaker was indeed suffering nobly from war injuries. While Mr. Black was undergoing treatment, the 1935 election was called.

For sure, Mr. Black wasn't going to run this race, so his 69-year-old wife did. This was a long shot. Only one woman, Agnes McPhail, had ever been elected to Parliament.

Martha Louise Black traipsed around the Yukon the same as had her husband shaking hands with every elector she could find. She won in the Yukon as an Independent Conservative, but in Ottawa the Liberal Party, under leadership of Mackenzie King, was given the mandate once again to govern the country.

Mr. Black was released from hospital sometime in 1936 and spent several years recuperating in Vancouver. Mrs. Black was having to commute long distance under tedious and tiring travelling methods between Ottawa, Vancouver and the Yukon.

She claimed to be only keeping the parliamentary seat warm for her husband whom she considered to be the better representative. When the 1940 federal election rolled around, she was glad to step aside. Mr. Black was returned to Parliament twice until he "retired" in 1949.

He re-opened his law practice in Dawson. But when placer mining slowed and the population had dwindled, the capital seat was relocated in 1953 to Whitehorse, a transportation centre with river, railhead and the Alaska Highway at its doorstep.

The Blacks moved to Whitehorse, where Mr. Black opened a law office and bought a house on First Avenue and Jarvis Street. The couple carried on despite their ages. Mr. Black was 80 and his wife was seven years his senior.

What the heck? Mr. Black couldn' resist politics. After sitting out only one election, he contested the 1953 federal race but lost to Aubrey Simmons of Carcross.

Mrs. Black died in Whitehorse on November 1, 1957, and is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery on Wood Street. She was 91.

Mr. Black died in Shaughnessy Hospital in Vancouver on August 23, 1965. He was 92. Funeral services were held from Christ Church Cathedral with burial in Forest Lawn Cemetery.

Over the years, the Blacks have been commemorated in several ways. The highest point in the Big Salmon Range (NTS 105E), mapped by Dr. Hugh Bostock of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1935, was named Mount Black to honour his friend. The landmark is at the headwaters of the South Big Salmon River in the Livingstone Creek area.

A Dawson-based ferry, transporting vehicles back and forth across the Yukon River, is named for George Black. Black Street in downtown Whitehorse is named for the esteemed couple. In September, 1997, the Canadian Post Office issued a postage stamp to honour Mrs. Black.

George Black's name is engraved in the base of the prospector statue that stands watch over downtown from the corner of Main Street and Third Avenue. He was inducted into the Yukon Prospectors' Association's Hall of Fame in 1988.

Possibly Martha Black should have been the one inducted for her Klondike mining activities and George Black inducted into the Honour Roll in recognition of his vision and wisdom to legally secure tenure on mining properties which was definitely the salvation of Yukon prospectors.

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