- 1899–1942The years it shipped ore, on and off
- 3,163Tonnes of ore, in thirteen working years
- 2,505Ounces of gold
- 2,672Ounces of silver
- 20Men at its busiest, in 1935
Also known as
Yankee Girl · Yankee Girl and Boy
The old miners named the Yankee Boy’s levels by their height, and Frank still does: the 2800, the 2700, the 2650 and the 2600, his main portal. The old plans of the workings give the heights to the foot, 2949 at the trench on top and 2600 at the lower adit, and this page borrows them as its levels, going down in that order to the portal where Frank came in.
1899
The 2949 · The trench on top
The First Carload
Three claims lay side by side on a hill near Grand Forks: the Yankee Girl, the Yankee Boy and the Bell. Who staked them, and when, the record doesn’t say, but they are older than the railway. In March 1897 the Grand Forks Miner found two men on the Yankee Girl “shooting down the face of the cliff above the old workings,” hunting the place where the vein’s two stringers came together; a forty-foot tunnel had already been run. In 1898 a man named Beiger sold quarter shares in the Yankee Girl and the Yankee Boy to Lee Merson and P. W. McGregor. Early in 1899 the claims belonged to McGregor and Merson, whom a Toronto paper called their “original locators”; there was a shaft on the Yankee Girl, and water stood in it.
In February 1899 the two men sold the claims to Henry White, superintendent of the City of Paris mine. Two shifts went to work at once, driving a tunnel to tap the shaft and drain it, and a Columbia paper promised that when the tunnel was through, “a large crew will be put on.” That sale fell apart. By June, Merson’s half belonged to Ernest Spraggett, the Grand Forks lumberman, and Spraggett and McGregor held the claims together.
By September 1899 the Columbia and Western railway had reached Grand Forks, and its track was being laid on toward Greenwood. The claims changed hands again. In September Major R. G. Edwards Leckie, general manager of the Republic mine across the line in Washington, took a bond on them for Montreal investors, McCuaig, Rykert & Co. The deal was made, one paper said, after the claims had been “thoroughly examined” by a Leckie, and it named his younger brother Jack, a mining engineer at Greenwood. F. M. McLeod of Grand Forks, the owners’ agent, had a bond on them too, and on Monday, 16 October 1899, he loaded a railway car with twenty tons of Yankee Girl ore and sent it to the smelter at Trail. The shaft was down 100 feet by then, joined to a tunnel 100 feet long.
The papers, from Victoria to Toronto, called it the first shipment of ore from the Boundary country: “the first shipper from the Boundary Country over the new C. P. R. line,” the Toronto World said, and the Cascade Record thought it “made the event somewhat historic.” Only the Greenwood Miner hedged, heading its story “The First Shipment” but calling it “among the first” in the text. A month later a San Francisco mining paper reported that in the Hardy Mountain camp “the Yankee Boy group are the only shippers as yet.” By then two carloads had gone to Trail, with returns the papers called “very satisfactory,” and another test shipment was planned.
In the first week of December the Montreal men made it final. On 4 December they incorporated a company with its office at Rossland, Boundary-Republic Mines, Limited, a subsidiary of the Republic company, which was to take “the entire interest in the Yankee Girl, Yankee Boy, and Bell Mines.” Four days later Leckie paid Spraggett for the group, and on 9 December 1899 the claims were recorded in Leckie’s name.
The Cascade Record · 21 October 1899
“This formed the first shipment of ore by rail from the Boundary country, and made the event somewhat historic.”
The three claims · Crown-granted to Major R. G. Edwards Leckie
- Yankee Girl
- Yankee Boy
- Bell
The Yankee Girl and the Yankee Boy on 29 March 1900; the Bell’s grant came later
1900
The 2800 · The upper tunnel
The Smelter Down the Hill
On 29 March 1900 the province granted the Yankee Girl and the Yankee Boy to Leckie as Crown grants, a little under 52 acres each; the Bell, surveyed with them, got its grant later.
That spring a commercial directory listed the mine with eight men, “shipping a car weekly to Trail smelter.” It was more hope than tonnage: a list of the Boundary’s shippers that winter credited “Hardy Mountain Camp—Yankee Girl” with 70 tons for the whole year, three or four carloads. But the ground looked good. In April “the rich paystreak has now widened out from 18 inches to two feet,” and by June a second, lower tunnel was being driven. Clarence J. McCuaig, the Montreal broker who had organized the syndicate that bought the Republic mine, was named in the Victoria papers as its new owner, and a ten-stamp mill was planned. No report ever records it built.
The winter had already taken away the young engineer the directory listed as general manager. In February 1900 Jack Leckie took a commission in Strathcona’s Horse and raised its West Kootenay troop, and in March he sailed with the regiment for the war in South Africa. He came home with the Distinguished Service Order. Both brothers would one day command the 16th Battalion, the Canadian Scottish, in the First World War, and the Major would end that war a Major-General.
In June 1900 the manager of the Trail smelter, W. H. Aldridge, toured the Boundary’s new rail spurs with the Canadian Pacific’s officials and named the mines that had shipped, or were about to, since the line was finished. The Yankee Girl, “near Columbia”, was one of them, in the company of the B.C., the Mother Lode and the Snowshoe.
That summer Grand Forks got a smelter of its own. Granby blew in its first furnace there on 21 August 1900, built to smelt the copper ore of Phoenix. The Yankee Girl shut down for a few weeks that September while a wagon road was built, and at the end of October it began sending its ore down the hill to Granby’s smelter. Its crew drove 600 feet of tunnel that year, and in the province’s report for 1900 it was the only property in the Hardy Mountain camp that shipped ore at all.
Then it stopped. At the end of 1901 the province’s report described the Yankee Girl as “a mine that for some time shipped ore to the Granby smelter,” and said it had been “shut down for nearly a year now.” In 1905 it was still idle, owned by “Montreal men”: their company, Boundary-Republic Mines, still held all three claims in 1907.
Frank · interviewed in 2023
“That’s when Grand Forks just really exploded.”
1919
The 2739 · An intermediate level
The Leasers
For almost twenty years nobody worked the claims. In 1909 mining men came up to look over “the Yankee Girl, on Hardy Mountain, which is a high-grade property,” the Canadian Mining Journal said, idle since “it was last operated by Major Leckie.” No work is recorded until 1919. Granby’s smelter ran on without them until that year, when Phoenix closed.
Then the leasers came. In 1919 J. Bailey of Eholt and J. R. Nichol took a lease on the Yankee Boy. Through that summer they broke out ore and sacked it by hand for shipment: galena and argentite, with a little tetrahedrite, in quartz. In the spring of 1920 the Grand Forks Sun called the Yankee Boy “a new shipper to Trail”, and that year W. Bailey and his partners shipped ten tons to the smelter. The province’s report for 1920 noted that the Granby smelter at Grand Forks was “being dismantled at the present time.”
In the autumn of 1924 George Mattocks of Grand Forks took a lease and bond from the owners in Montreal, but he couldn’t find the backers in town to work it. The province’s engineer sketched what was there: an upper crosscut and 360 feet of drift along the vein, and a lower crosscut that hadn’t yet reached it.
In March 1925 the Yankee Girl’s executive planned to put three or four men to work, and within two weeks five or six men were driving the lower tunnel on toward the vein. At a house-raising bee early that week, the bunkhouse was nearly finished. That year two Grand Forks men, Ab. Savage and Pat Byrne, were “underhand stoping the vein in the upper tunnel,” digging it out from the floor of the drift, and had “excavated and sacked about 17 tons of ore.” About eleven tons of sorted ore went out in 1926. In 1930 W. Lanskail of Republic, Washington, working for the owner of record, James Hutchinson of Montreal, the old company’s vice-president in 1906, sank a 50-foot winze from the upper tunnel and drove a crosscut from the lower one to meet the vein below. The ore came in narrow streaks that “required close sorting.” Three men shipped 21 tons to Trail, and the mine closed again before the lower crosscut got there.
Two years later the province’s survey of the gold deposits of British Columbia gave it one line: “On Hardy mountain, near Grand Forks, the Yankee Boy and Girl claims have produced small tonnages of gold quartz.”
The Minister of Mines · 1925
“Ab. Savage and Pat. Byrne, of Grand Forks, are underhand stoping the vein in the upper tunnel and have excavated and sacked about 17 tons of ore.”
1934
The 2699 · Frank’s 2700
Spokane Money
Then the price of gold went up. In its report for 1933 the province said the new world price had “enormously increased the profit chances” of gold mining, and across British Columbia old prospects and shut-down mines were opening again.
In 1934 the province’s half-year review carried the news in a line: “A deal is reported to have been consummated on the Yankee Boy group on Hardy mountain near Grand Forks.” The Royal Development Company of Spokane had taken an option on the three Crown grants, and on new claims staked around them, from the James Hutchinson Estate. That year the Department of Mines drew a plan of the workings. The new men pushed the lower adit in to meet the old winze from above, drove two sub-levels off the winze, and found the vein cut off by a fault partway down it. A picked sample from the winze assayed 9.70 ounces of gold to the ton.
In 1935 the Yankee Boy worked all year. A crew of twelve to twenty men worked “for the Reigel Bros. and the Royal Development Company, of Spokane,” the report’s spelling, and that April the Riegel brothers incorporated their own company at Grand Forks, Riegel Mines, Limited. Their superintendent was D. M. “Mickey” MacKay. The crew drove the No. 1 level and the two intermediate levels west to the fault, stoped both intermediates, and pushed the No. 2 adit west to the same fault. It was the mine’s biggest year: 824 tonnes of ore by the province’s table, and 502 ounces of gold. All through 1935 “Yankee Boy, Grand Forks” turns up in the Trail smelter’s published receipts, forty or fifty tons at a time.
In 1936, as Riegel Mines, Limited, with MacKay as manager, the company let leasers work the mine until October, when everything was “suspended for an indefinite period.” That year’s 389 tons (353 tonnes) yielded 460 ounces of gold and 382 of silver. At most nine men worked it. That February the Montreal company of 1899, Boundary-Republic Mines, voted to wind itself up.
Frank · in the museum, 2023
“Here’s a cool picture of the crew from back in 1934 sitting outside the portal where we are right now.”
Photograph to come
The 1934 crew, outside the portal
The Department of Mines · 1934
“A deal is reported to have been consummated on the Yankee Boy group on Hardy mountain near Grand Forks.”
1937
The 2600 · The lower adit
Hand Steel
Riegel Mines tried once more in 1937, with Clyde B. White as manager and then Oscar Thompson; that year the same men were also running the old Providence mine at Greenwood. Eight men, seven of them underground, drove 540 feet of drifts. Then the company “abandoned the property and removed all equipment from it.”
What was left belonged to the leasers. Late in 1937 four of them, led by Wilhelm L. Schwarz of Grand Forks, “worked out a few shoots of fairly high-grade ore, conveniently accessible from the surface,” and shipped 362 tons to Trail. They kept at it. In 1939 five men, every one of them underground and drilling by hand, mined and shipped 463 tons. In 1940 Norman Cunningham of Rossland, with four men and a plant big enough to run one drill, tried washing and screening an old dump to make it worth shipping. In 1941 John and Steve Klemens trenched the hillside to find where the vein went, shipped ore from shallow cuts, and sorted more from the old dumps.
In 1942 John and Steve Klemens sent 135 tons to Trail, “mostly sorted from old dumps.” It was the last ore on the record. That year the province’s report said the gold mines had “suffered more than any other in the industry”: men had gone to the war or to better-paid war work, equipment was restricted, and most of the gold mines that closed in those years were, in its words, “war casualties.”
The Minister of Mines · 1939
“Five men, all working underground, were employed, using hand-steel. Practically no development-work was done, but 463 tons of ore, mined and shipped to Trail, yielded 345 oz. of gold and 315 oz. of silver.”
1942
Below the 2600 · Eighty years of quiet
The Long Quiet
Then the hill kept the mine to itself. In 1945 the province’s geologists, summing up the gold veins along the lower Granby River, called it “the most productive vein in the area,” one that “strikes eastward across greenstones and varies from a few inches to a few feet in width.” In 1968 a Granby geologist mapping the Ironsides pit at Phoenix used the old Yankee Boy to trace a fault he hoped would guide new prospecting. In 1982 and 1983 geologists took soil samples on the surface of the Yankee Girl claim, and in 1988 Redding Gold Corporation ran magnetic and electromagnetic surveys over the ground. Its 1989 prospectus found that almost all the old stoping lay inside the Yankee Girl claim. No one is recorded working underground again.
Underground, the timbers rotted, the portal caved, and the workings filled with water. In the main level, Frank came up against a great plug of rock.
Frank · at the plug, 2021
“This has been plugged off since the ’30s, we think. Nobody alive that we know of has been past here.”
The province’s geologists · 1945
“The most productive vein in the area, the Yankee Boy, strikes eastward across greenstones and varies from a few inches to a few feet in width.”
Now
The 2600 · Frank’s Yankee Boy
The Main Portal
Frank · at the portal, 2026
“When I purchased this mine in 2021, there was nothing here. The mine was completely collapsed and flooded.”
In 2021 Frank Schlichting bought the property, and with it a mine “completely collapsed and flooded.” He calls the main portal the 2600 level, the name the Department of Mines gave the lower adit on its plan of 1934. From it he went 900 feet in and 400 feet up through four levels, and hauled out more than 3,500 ore-car loads to do it. The whole story is on The Yankee Boy Story.
What the old-timers left, he found where they left it: drill steel and an old ladder; muck sheets they shovelled from; oil cans, one still readable, Shell X-100 Motor Oil; tobacco cans and a whiskey bottle; dynamite boxes rotted past reading and the boxes their blasting caps came in; names written on the rock in carbide-lamp smoke; and, by an old chute, a count the crew kept of their loads.
Frank · stacking the waste rock, 2024
“What the miners did with the rocks is called gobbing… and we use it… today for the same reason.”
What the old-timers left
Photograph to come
Names in carbide-lamp smoke
Yankee Boy · Names written on the rock in carbide smoke Photograph to come
The load count by the old chute
Yankee Boy · The crew’s own count of their loads Photograph to come
The oil can
Yankee Boy · Shell X-100 Motor Oil Photograph to come
The muck sheets
Yankee Boy · Muck sheets, shovelled from for a century Photograph to come
The old ladder
Yankee Boy · The ladder the miners left behind
He opened a museum beside the portal, and on 1 May 2023 the first visitors went underground. There were two seasons of tours. The mine has been closed to everyone, Frank included, since May 2025.
Film No. 404 · Just over two hours
The Yankee Boy Story
Rebuilding an Abandoned Mine: the whole rebuild, told as it happened, from the first wheelbarrow to the last ladder. The history moments are a few minutes each; the buttons below start the film at them.
Jump Into the Film
Frank and the record
What He Found, and What the Record Says
Set beside the province’s old reports, what Frank found underground keeps landing where the record says it should.
-
Matches
The 2600
“I’m standing here at the main portal of the Yankee Boy mine, the 2600 level.”
In 1934 the Department of Mines drew the workings and wrote 2,600 beside the lower adit.
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Report, 1934
-
Matches
Four Levels
“This mine has actually got four levels. So, there’s two main levels.”
In 1935 the miners worked “the No. 1 adit-level and two intermediate levels below it”, and pushed the lower adit in beneath them: two main levels, and two between.
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Report, 1935
-
Matches
The Big Shaft
“This is a three compartment shaft… So ore came from here from the number two and the number four levels.”
In 1934 the lower adit was joined “with a raise to the bottom of the winze from the No. 1 level”: one opening from the lowest level of the mine to the highest.
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Report, 1934
-
The record adds
Not on Any Map
“We come to here, which is the number two shaft… Now originally this wasn’t on any maps.”
The province printed two plans of the workings, in 1924 and 1934, both before the lower adit was pushed on. In the three years after the second, the adit was driven “westerly to the fault”, and the miners drove 390 feet of drifts in 1936 and 540 in 1937.
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Reports, 1924 to 1937
-
Fits
The Track Was Gone
“You can see they had tracks in here. They pull the rail up.”
In 1937 the company “abandoned the property and removed all equipment from it.”
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Report, 1937
-
The record adds
The Quartz They Left
“The vein’s here and the quartz is sitting here. They never took any of it.”
The veins ran “from 2 inches to 2 feet”, and the ore “required close sorting”. One drift was “abandoned for the present owing to the narrowness of the lead”.
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Reports, 1925, 1930 and 1931
-
Fits
Hand Steel
“We were just leaving and we found a piece of drill steel.”
In 1939, “Five men, all working underground, were employed, using hand-steel.”
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Annual Report, 1939
-
The record adds
Water
“The mine was completely collapsed and flooded.”
The first work on record, in March 1899, was draining it: “A tunnel is being driven to tap the shaft to run off the water.”
Frank, in The Yankee Boy Story · Columbia Review, 11 March 1899
The ledger
Every Year the Province Counted
Tonnes of ore mined each year from 1899 to 1942, from the province’s own production table. Thirteen working years in forty-three. The best year was 1935, the Spokane year: 824 tonnes, and 502 ounces of gold. The last 122 tonnes, in 1942, came mostly from the old dumps. The old reports count short tons and the table counts tonnes, a tenth larger, so 1936’s 389 tons are 353 here. Point at any year to read it.Touch the chart and slide along it to read any year.
1935 824 tonnes mined, the biggest year, under the Spokane men
- Tonnes mined
- The biggest year
- 3,163Tonnes of ore
- 2,505Ounces of gold
- 2,672Ounces of silver
- 13Years that shipped ore
Every year’s figure, as a table
| Year | Tonnes of ore | Ounces of gold | Ounces of silver |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1899 | 14 | 12 | 9 |
| 1900 | 63 | 98 | 59 |
| 1920 | 9 | 31 | 22 |
| 1926 | 10 | 20 | 17 |
| 1930 | 19 | 48 | 31 |
| 1935 | 824 | 502 | 590 |
| 1936 | 353 | 460 | 390 |
| 1937 | 328 | 251 | 339 |
| 1938 | 366 | 239 | 264 |
| 1939 | 420 | 345 | 315 |
| 1940 | 446 | 224 | 324 |
| 1941 | 189 | 94 | 125 |
| 1942 | 122 | 181 | 187 |
The figures are the province’s BC METAL table. The Annual Reports print slightly less silver for 1936, 1937 and 1942 (382, 332 and 184 ounces), and 135 tons for 1942. In 1925 ore was mined and sacked but none was shipped.
BC Geological Survey, BC METAL: historical metal production, mine MM00946 · MINFILE 082ESE189, production detail
The names
The Men on the Record
No man is recorded as killed at the Yankee Boy in the province’s reports, 1899 to 1942. These are the men the record does remember: the ones who owned, bonded, managed, leased and worked it.
The list is not complete. The company crews of 1935 to 1937, twelve to twenty men at most, are counted but not named, and so are most of the leasers’ partners. If you hold a name that belongs here, write to Frank.
The Edmonton Bulletin · 7 July 1937
“Jouppila is a miner at the Yankee Boy mine near Grand Forks, B.C.”
P. W. McGregor
1898–1899
Owner with Lee Merson; one of the two a Toronto paper called the claims’ original locators.
Lee Merson
1898–1899
Co-owner until June 1899, when he sold his half to Spraggett.
Henry White
February 1899
Superintendent of the City of Paris mine; bought the claims, in a sale that fell through.
Ernest Spraggett
1899
Grand Forks lumberman; owner with McGregor from June, and the man Leckie paid in December.
F. M. McLeod
October 1899
Of Grand Forks; the owners’ agent, who shipped the first carload to Trail.
Major R. G. Edwards Leckie
1899–1900
General manager of the Republic mine; bonded and bought the claims for Montreal, and took the Crown grants.
Jack Leckie
1899–1900
His younger brother, a mining engineer at Greenwood; general manager, until the war in South Africa.
Clarence J. McCuaig
1899–1900
Montreal broker, of McCuaig, Rykert & Co.; named as the new owner in April 1900.
J. Bailey
1919
Of Eholt; the first leaser, with J. R. Nichol: ore taken out, none shipped that year.
W. Bailey
1920
Of Eholt; with his partners shipped the ten tons to Trail. The Grand Forks Sun’s “Bert Bailey”, shipping in October 1919, is one of the two.
J. R. Nichol
1919
Leaser, with Bailey.
George Mattocks
1924
Of Grand Forks; took a lease and bond, and couldn’t raise the money to work it.
Ab. Savage
1925
Of Grand Forks; stoped the upper tunnel with Pat Byrne and sacked seventeen tons.
Pat Byrne
1925
Of Grand Forks; with Savage in the upper tunnel.
James Hutchinson
1930–1934
Of Montreal; the owner of record, and in 1906 the old company’s vice-president.
W. Lanskail
1930
Of Republic, Washington; manager, with three men.
D. M. “Mickey” MacKay
1935–1936
Superintendent in the biggest year, then manager for Riegel Mines.
Clyde B. White
1937
Manager for Riegel Mines, in its last try.
Oscar Thompson
1937
Manager after White; then the company left.
John Jouppila
1937
A miner at the Yankee Boy, the one named in print.
Wilhelm L. Schwarz
1937–1939
Of Grand Forks; led the four leasers of 1937, and the five of 1939 with W. M. Schwarz.
W. M. Schwarz
1939
Leaser, with W. L. Schwarz: 463 tons by hand steel.
Norman Cunningham
1940
Of Rossland; leaser, with four men and one drill; washed and screened an old dump.
B. Borisinkoff and N. Boris
1941
Leasers with Schwarz and the Klemens, by the province’s production table.
John Klemens
1941–1942
Of Grand Forks; leaser with Steve Klemens; trenched for the lost vein, and shipped the last ore.
Steve Klemens
1941–1942
Of Grand Forks; the last ore on the record, 135 tons, mostly from the old dumps.
Names and years from the Annual Reports of the Minister of Mines, 1900 to 1942, the Boundary newspapers of 1897 to 1925, the Edmonton Bulletin of 7 July 1937, and the province’s BC METAL table
The Yankee Boy Record
Take the Whole Record With You
One PDF, made to be printed and kept. It carries this page’s story with its photographs, the year-by-year entries from the province’s reports, and the MINFILE record for the Yankee Boy.
- Part 1The story of the Yankee Boy, 1897 to today, with the photographs
- Part 2The ledger, 1899 to 1942, year by year, and the men on the record
- Part 3The Annual Reports’ entries, 1900 to 1942, and the MINFILE record: summary, capsule geology, production, bibliography
The Yankee Boy Record · PDFComing soon
Record card
- MINFILE No.
- 082ESE189
- Status
- Past producer
- Names on the record
- Yankee Girl · Yankee Boy · Bell
- Shipped ore
- 1899–1942, in thirteen years
- Commodities
- Gold, silver; lead, copper and zinc recorded
- Camp and division
- Hardy Mountain Camp · Boundary Country · Greenwood Mining Division
The provincial record, last edited 20 February 2008, as extracted 20 October 2026. MINFILE’s own production report holds 1936 only; the province’s BC METAL table holds every year, 1899 to 1942 · BC Geological Survey
Questions
Five Questions People Ask About the Yankee Boy Mine
When Was the Yankee Boy Mine Worked?
On and off from the 1890s to 1942. Its claims already had old workings in 1897, and its first carload of ore went by rail to Trail in October 1899; it shipped to Granby’s smelter at Grand Forks in 1900; leasers and small companies worked it in 1919–20 and again from 1924 to 1930; and from 1935 to 1942 it shipped every year. The last ore, mostly sorted from the old dumps, went out in 1942.
How Much Gold Came Out of the Yankee Boy?
About 2,500 ounces of gold and 2,670 ounces of silver, from 3,163 tonnes of ore, by the province’s record of historical production. The best year was 1935.
Who Owned the Yankee Boy Mine?
P. W. McGregor and Lee Merson in early 1899, then Ernest Spraggett of Grand Forks with McGregor. From December 1899, Montreal owners: the claims were granted to Major R. G. Edwards Leckie, and their company, Boundary-Republic Mines, Limited, still held them in 1907. The reports name James Hutchinson of Montreal, the company’s vice-president in 1906, as owner in 1930–31, and his estate in 1934; the company wound up in 1936. In the 1930s came the Royal Development Company of Spokane, on an option, and Riegel Mines, Limited, of Grand Forks. Most of the ore in its last years was mined by leasers.
Why Did the Yankee Boy Close?
Its owners gave up on it in 1937 and took the equipment out, and leasers worked what was left until 1942, the year the province reported gold mines closing all over British Columbia for want of men and equipment. Restored by Frank Schlichting from 2021, it has been closed to everyone, Frank included, since May 2025.
How Is the Yankee Boy Connected to Phoenix?
In 1900 its ore went to the smelter Granby built at Grand Forks for the copper of Phoenix. The greenstone its veins run through is the Knob Hill Group, named for Phoenix’s own Knob Hill. And in 1968 Granby’s geologist at Phoenix used the old Yankee Boy in tracing a fault he hoped would lead to new ore. The Phoenix record →
Sources and records
The Annual Reports of the Minister of Mines, British Columbia, 1899 to 1945 · BC Geological Survey, MINFILE 082ESE189 and the BC METAL table of historical metal production, mine MM00946 · BC Department of Mines Bulletins 1 (1932 and 1934) and 20 (1945) · The Grand Forks Miner, 1897–98; the Cascade Record, Columbia Review, Greenwood Miner and Boundary Creek Times, 1899–1900; the Phoenix Pioneer, 1900; and the Grand Forks Sun, 1919–25 (UBC Library Open Collections) · The Rossland Weekly Miner, the Daily Colonist, the Victoria Daily Times, the Toronto World, Montreal’s Exchange News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1899–1900; the Mining and Scientific Press and the Engineering and Mining Journal, 1899; the Canadian Mining Journal, 1909; the Edmonton Bulletin, 1937; the BC Gazette, 1899–1939 (Internet Archive, Canadiana and the Library of Congress) · Henderson’s British Columbia Gazetteer and Directory, 1900–01 · The Directory of Directors in Canada, 1906 · Redding Gold Corporation’s prospectus, 1989, and the Granby Mining Company’s exploration report of 1968 (BC Property File) · Armory and Lineages of Canada, 1915; The Canadian Encyclopedia · Granby Mining Company, 1974 · Mining Camps of British Columbia (Toronto, 1900), for the two photographs of 1900 · Frank’s film The Yankee Boy Story, 2026 · Photographs of the mine today: from Frank Schlichting’s archive.
Where Frank’s film and the record disagree (the year the claims were staked, the last year the mine was worked), the page follows the record. Updated 20 October 2026.
The record isn’t finished
Did someone in your family work the Yankee Boy, or the Hardy Mountain claims? A photograph, a letter or a name would help this record.
Letters from a Retired Madman
One Photograph. One Story. Once a Month.
Frank picks one photograph out of the archive and tells the story of the day it was taken.
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