Anyox is a quintessential example of a remote mine and company town, one that was serviced entirely by coastal steamships operating along the stormy BC coast; it produced copper concentrates for 22 years, from 1914 until 1935, from two of four known deposits. In spite of its isolation, the quality of life at the mine was surprisingly high; in fact, it was probably much better than that experienced by most of the employees before they arrived, or later during the Great Depression.

Anyox is now a ghost town, one of many that reflect the boom-and-bust scenario of British Columbia’s early mining history. These were remote, single economy company towns or public boom-towns that sprang up with the development of a mine and faded into obscurity when the ore was gone. In the case of remote mines, the mine owner was generally forced to provide most of the services to the community. Anyox is a classic example of a company town. For a quarter of a century (1911-1936), it existed as a world unto itself. It grew, it thrived and it died in relative obscurity despite the fact, that at its heyday, it had a population of approximately 2500 people.

Observatory Inlet (Fig. 2) was the traditional hunting and trapping grounds of the Nisga’a Indians of the Nass Valley. Their lore included reference to a golden mountain adjacent to the inlet, just the sort of lure to draw gold-hungry prospectors. In late May, 1889, John Flewin, Resident Mining Recorder for BC’s north coast, and Charles Todd, an Indian Agent for Northern BC, ventured into Goose Bay (now known as Granby Bay). Flewin discovered a piece of promising looking chalcopyrite float, a possible indicator that a copper deposit was not far away. In his words, "Subsequently I grub-staked two or three prospectors to prospect the Observatory Inlet country, not only Goose Bay but also Hastings Arm, and Maple Bay on Portland Canal (Fig. 2). Mr. Todd declined to go into the venture with me as he said, "even if we discovered a large body of ore it would be impossible to do anything with it for years to come, unless it was a gold proposition" (Flewin 1924). Flewin and Todd did not find the source of the float on that trip but Flewin was sufficiently intrigued to plan a return trip.

"In May 1900, in company with my eldest son, H.C. Flewin, and E. Donohue and an Indian named Albert Allen, I ascended Bonanza Creek, Goose Bay, where I had found the piece of float in 1889, and on the 19th of the month discovered and located the large body of ore on the "Bonanza" mineral claim at the junction of Bonanza and Mineral Creeks" (Flewin 1924). The news of a possible copper discovery caught the attention of copper baron Marcus Daly, from Butte, Montana, one of the founders of the giant Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Daly died in 1900 but his scout, M.K. Rodgers visited the property with Flewin in 1901 and negotiated an 18-month option with Flewin on behalf of Daly Estates for $45 000. Rodgers was later the guiding force behind the early development of the Nickel Plate Mine in the Hedley, B.C. mining camp.

Flewin returned to the area in 1901 with some experienced prospectors and discovered the Hidden Creek group of ore bodies (Fig. 3, # 8), which were also bonded to Daly Estates. Development work ensued that summer but the options were dropped after a visit by the Daly Estate geologist. Flewin had trouble raising more capital, but he was able to form a company, Hidden Creek Copper Co., in June 1905, which raised $50 000. Unfortunately, the company was forced to put the property up for sale by 1908. Rodgers, who had remained steadfast in his belief in the merits of Hidden Creek, and T. Hodgins, a mining financier who was also from Butte, purchased the property for $135 000. Rodgers and Hodgins "continued development work on a large scale until 1910" (Flewin 1924). Initial development work generated enough excitement to interest the Granby Consolidated Mining, Smelting and Power Co., which purchased Hodgins’ 80% interest in the property for $600 000, in spite its remoteness; Rodgers retained his 20%.

Granby was the largest producer of copper in the province. Its smelter at Grand Forks, fed by the Phoenix Mine, was one of the most efficient processors of low-grade copper ore in the world. With that mine nearing the end of its life, Granby needed to find a replacement. After searching throughout BC, Washington State and Western Canada, the company concluded that the Hidden Creek deposit was its best bet. In 1911, Granby christened the new community Anyox, an anglicized version of the Nisga’a word Anyoose, meaning "hidden water".

If a mining company had to face the challenge of building an entirely self-sufficient mine, concentrator, smelter and town in a remote site on the northern coast of British Columbia, the physical setting of Observatory Inlet was close to perfection. Beyond the quiet waters of the inlet was a wide square valley ringed by thickly forested hills, which in turn were surrounded by mountains. The combination of the rugged mountains and the region’s robust rainfall provided excellent potential for hydroelectric power generation and the harbour, which had exceptionally high tides, was ideal for accommodating deep-sea freighters.

During the development of Anyox, Lady Luck did not just smile on the company, she beamed. Everything the company touched seemed to have a hidden bonus and in one case, literally turned into a pot of gold. During the removal of a small island to widen and deepen the harbour, blasting exposed a quartz vein that contained enough gold to yield a profit of $3 million, enough to pay for the entire cost of building the town and processing facilities. This vein and several similar quartz veins nearby proved to be perfect flux, an essential ingredient in the smelting process. Later, a layer of bluish clay, encountered while digging sewers for the town, was recognized as the rare type suitable for lining retorts and furnaces in the smelter. Until that moment, Granby had been forced to import this clay from the eastern United States at great expense.

Development work began in 1911 on the orebodies, which cropped out about 2.5 km north of the wharf on Granby Bay (Figs. 3, 4), and between 190 and 275 m above sea level. "The mine was opened by six tunnels and fifty thousand feet of diamond drilling was done prior to and contemporaneously with the first tunnel work" (Dunn 1924). It was heavy, dark and dangerous work. "Initially, the miners used candles for light as they manoeuvred their heavy drills to tunnel into the ore bodies. In 1914, the miners switched to carbide lamps that they purchased themselves, while the company supplied the fuel. In 1916, lighter and more versatile drills were put into operation" (Griffin 2002). By 1918, 11 300 m of drifting and raising, and over 29 200 m of diamond drilling (surface and underground) had been completed (Bancroft 1918; Fig. 5).

The hub of the town was a broad wooden dock about 15-m wide and 400-m long that stretched around the waterfront like a giant veranda (Fig. 4). A 1923 newspaper clipping indicated that the Union Steamship Co. of B.C. Ltd. had a weekly sailing from Vancouver to Ocean Falls, Swanson Bay, Prince Rupert, Anyox, and Alice Arm, departing from the Union Dock at the foot of Carrall Street, Vancouver, every Friday at 9 pm. These ships, carrying passengers and freight, brought the outside world to the isolated souls of Anyox. The mine and docks were linked by 32 tonne steam and electric locomotives operating on three kilometres of railway. Up to 5400 tonnes of ore were hauled from the mine to the concentrator near the waterfront each day, in 75 ore cars, powered by the energy provided from the hydro dam and coal fired generators. "The docks were fitted with overhead travelling cranes and huge derricks as well as three travelling ore bunkers. They ran around the harbour wall to the coke plant where coal was turned into hot fuel for the smelter and the production lit the skies red each night as the coke came out of the furnaces" (Loudon 1973). The docks were large enough to berth three or four deep-sea freighters and coastal passenger vessels simultaneously (Fig. 6).

The need for power at any mine is great and a lack of affordable power has high-centred more than one mighty deposit in this vast country. Anyox was blessed with the natural attributes that made power generation relatively easy. Anyox Creek drains a catchment area of approximately 125 square kilometres and is fed by a combination of glacial meltwater and runoff from the mountains that rim the catchment basin. For its final few kilometres, the creek flows through a winding canyon that contains several rapids and waterfalls. To provide power initially, Granby engineers built a rock-filled wooden structure 52-m long and 40-m wide about 4.5 km upstream from the mouth of Anyox Creek (Fig. 3). The reservoir was capable of storing sufficient water to operate about 10 000 HP of water wheels, which drove various air compressors, blowers, electrical generators and sundry pumps. Granby later constructed a second larger dam of reinforced concrete to increase the capacity of the reservoir by about 28 100 acre-feet. This enabled the installation of an extra power unit consisting of a 5000 HP Pelton water wheel that was directly coupled to a 4300 KW generator. The dam was an Eastwood multiple-arched type (27 arches) with a length of 208 m and a maximum height of 42 m, which was built upon rock foundations (Fig. 7). The installation of four siphonic spillways to ensure rapid discharge of water during a flood was a notable feature. The powerhouse was built at the mouth of Anyox Creek on Granby Bay (Fig. 8). A steam plant, with a capacity of about 6000 HP, was also installed to supplement hydropower shortages due to low-water conditions during winter months. It was fired by coal gas generated at the coking plant, together with tar from the same source (Dunn 1924). After the mine was closed in 1935, the concrete arch storage dam was breached in several places to allow water to flow through and prevent the dam being overtopped.

There were two distinct parts to the town: the flats adjacent to Hidden Creek and the slope to the west (Fig. 4a). Most of the mine workers, primarily single men, lived in two very large bunkhouses, located on the flats between the smelter, machine shop complex and the mine. These bunkhouses were "home" to 300 men. There was a separate bunkhouse for the Chinese workers who cleaned the bunkhouses, ran the laundry and worked in the mess hall. There were also three, five-family apartments, twenty small one-story houses and 12 two-story, five-room houses. According to Dolmage (1922), the payroll included 284 labourers from over 15 nationalities in 1922, before the concentrator was built. They earned between $3.25 and $6.40 per day.

The high side of town (Figs. 4a, 9a) was where the white-collar workers lived. The top brass had the largest homes, while those involved in running the business aspect of the mine, the shop keepers, and plant workers, lived with their families in row upon row of two-story houses, all virtually identical (Fig. 9d). The lack of individuality was made up for by the fact that the level of accommodation provided by Granby was far superior to anything that the workers could have afforded to buy in a major centre such as Vancouver.

The crusher, concentrator, smelter and their auxiliary repair shops occupied the south side of the valley, along with the hydro and steam power plants (Figs. 4a, 10a). "The blacksmith shop had a crew of 10 while the machine shop, reputed to be the most up-to-date on the BC coast, had a crew of 35 machinists and helpers" (Loudon 1973). The calibre of the craftsmen employed at Anyox was extremely high and, in terms of apprentice training, the machine shop was considered one of the finest industrial schools on the west coast. "Certainly the machine shop was huge even by today’s standards. It had 13 lathes and two planers, an 18 tonne overhead crane, a shaper and a milling machine. The shop manufactured 90 % of the parts required by the whole Anyox operation. The tradesmen who ran it were drawn from the industrial complexes of England, Scotland and continental Europe mainly and they knew themselves to be masters of their craft" (Loudon 1973).

In 1914, the blast furnace of the 2000 tonne per day smelter was ‘blown-in’, signalling the start of production. The smelter, with its 50 m tall stack, dominated the landscape (Fig. 9a, top left). Because of the rich grade of the ore, the metallurgical process consisted of partial pyritic smelting without previous roasting or concentrating (Dolmage 1922). Blister copper (copper in the range of 99% purity) was produced by blasting air through the molten copper to remove impurities and drive off most of the sulfur as sulfur dioxide. The richest ore near the surface was mined first and as the average grade gradually dropped, Granby built a concentrator (mill) in 1924 to remove some of the gangue minerals prior to sending the remainder to the smelter. In the early years, another product called ‘pyrite ore’ was also shipped to market.

The blister copper was initially barged to Seattle and then transported by rail to the Nichols Chemical Company in New York for refining (Dolmage 1922). Later, Granby production was shipped to a new smelter/refinery complex built at Tacoma, Washington. The Anyox smelter also processed custom ore from other deposits on the coast of British Columbia and southeastern Alaska.

The coking coal required for Granby’s smelters at Grand Forks and Anyox was shipped in from Fernie, in the southeast corner of BC, and from Union Bay on Vancouver Island. In 1919, an extended strike by union workers at the Fernie coal mines halted coking coal shipments to the Phoenix smelters. This interruption to production at the Anyox smelter was the impetus behind Granby’s decision to expand into coal mining. In 1917, Granby acquired the Cassidy Coal Company, south of Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and operated the Granby No.1 Colliery until 1932. Peak production was in the early 1920s.

The smelter produced sulfurous fumes that literally killed all vegetation in the inlet as far away as Alice Arm (Fig. 2). The tips of the silver grey skeletons of the trees are still visible today above the verdant green of the returning forest. Seeing the effect the fumes had on the vegetation, just imagine what they did to the lungs and cardiovascular systems of the workers in, and the residents around, the smelter. The men who worked in the smelter were dubbed "gas-eaters", a term heavy with implication as to the severity of their working conditions. At times, the gas was so intense, that the men who operated the loading cranes were unable to work more than two hours at a stretch. At the end of their shifts, they emerged covered in dust, spitting and coughing up yellow sulfur.

A temperature inversion in 1926 created a fortnight-long fog that trapped the gas at ground level. An epidemic of nosebleeds was attributed to the trapped gas. Many residents stuffed newspaper around the doors and windows in an attempt to keep the toxic fog from filtering into their homes. The furnace discharge was very visible in the winter after a fresh snowfall. A favourite winter thrill for the town’s youngsters was to light the snow on fire. The housewives planned their washdays based on the direction of the wind and remained vigilant in monitoring it, in case it shifted and drenched the clean clothes with black soot. There was no such thing as a garden, nor was there any wildlife in the vicinity as there was neither sustenance nor cover.

As shocking as it is today to conceive that such environmental destruction took place unchecked, it must be remembered that environmental regulation was not a consideration in those days. If one good positive comment can be made regarding the environmental legacy of mines such as Anyox, it is that it provides a good measuring stick by which to judge how far the industry has come in terms of minimizing its impact on the environment. Mining operations today should not be judged on the practices of a previous era.

Everyone in Anyox lived with a constant dread of fire. The combination of the dead forest that embraced the inlet, the wooden plank road system that was necessary to traverse the spongy muskeg, and the muskeg itself, which was prone to spontaneous combustion in the summer, created a real, and twice-realized, fire hazard. Fire buckets, which had round bottoms to prevent them from being stolen for home use, were hung beside 200 litre water drums along all roads and paths. The first fire, in 1923, caused heavy damage, including the loss of the powder magazine, which blew up in a spectacular explosion that had the townspeople fleeing to the harbour. The town was rebuilt quickly with little interruption to production. However, the next big fire drew the curtain on Anyox in 1942 - but more on that later.

Despite its remoteness, Anyox was a fully equipped town with all the modern amenities available at that time. It had two hospitals – a small emergency hospital near the mine and a much larger one in town that was the best equipped and most modern on the coast north of Vancouver, including three doctors, eighteen beds and modern x-ray equipment (Fig. 9b). Medicare was provided through Granby. Medical and surgical care cost $1/month for single men and $2/month for a family.

The spiritual needs of the community were also met. There were Anglican and Catholic churches (Fig. 4a) as well as another that served both the Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. The community also had a rather large cemetery, its white crosses brightening one section of the otherwise bleak hillside. When there was a funeral, the coffin was carried through the town by pallbearers or on the town’s one flatbed truck. The mourners walked behind the coffin to the cemetery - a reflection of the European heritage of much of the population.

Graves of veterans were distinguished by cement helmets, which were commissioned by the company. When the call came for men to fight in WWI, Granby sent 400 workers. Many of those who survived returned to Anyox and their former jobs; those who had lost limbs were given light duty jobs.

All the homes, shops, bunkhouses and administration buildings had electricity and the streets of Anyox were brightly lit on dark winter nights. The residents of Anyox used a unique style of light bulbs in their homes. In an effort to prevent pilfering of light bulbs by workers, Granby had the word "Stolen" stencilled on the glass bottoms of all the light bulbs purchased for company use. Some households blatantly displayed the bulbs with the incriminating word while others went to some effort to sand the evidence from the glass.

The quality of life, apart from the fumes from the smelter, was quite high in comparison to the outside world. Granby paid the taxes for its employees so residents enjoyed a tax-free life, something most of us just dream about. The houses all had bathrooms and indoor running water, luxuries at the time. The town boasted its own movie theatre, newspaper, telegraph office, post office, a three-story general store, butcher shop, liquor store, and 45-room hotel (Fig. 9c) with a three-room library annexed to it. The schools attracted good teachers and offered classes from Grades 1 to 11, which was the matriculation year in those days. The residents enjoyed a wide choice of sports (Fig. 11) including ice hockey, tennis and a nine-hole golf course that was laid out on the smelter slag (which had not a single blade of grass). In 1934, there was also a taxi service, a government agent who served as a mining recorder, a branch of the Bank of Commerce, a Customs office, a drug store, a cafe, a pool hall, two insurance agents, a dentist and an optometrist, a barber shop, two Masonic Lodges, two Oddfellows Lodges, and an Elks Hall (Sun Directories 1935).

Yes, Anyox had it all, including labour disputes. The first, in 1916 was relatively minor but the second, in the winter of 1933, marked the beginning of the end for Anyox. When the price of copper plummeted, along with everything else, during the Great Depression, the company insisted on a wage reduction. The miners responded with a strike. This shook the town to its roots. As told by Peter Loudon (1973), a student in Anyox at the time, "We were all milling about in the schoolyard waiting the bell which would line us up to march into classes. Suddenly all the fooling around stopped and there was a strange silence. All the kids were looking up the plank road to the mine. All our lives previously that road had been barren of anything or anyone because only the jitneys appeared to use it and that was later in the day. But the road was filled with men, hundreds of men. They were wearing their hard hats and walking purposefully in a tight body. They weren’t talking but you could hear their feet pounding the boards. You could smell their determination as they headed past us toward the beach. None of us had seen anything like it. It was so ominous that some of the kids verged on tears, scared without knowing why. At that very moment everything changed for us in Anyox."

The town had two policemen, a BC provincial police constable and a company security officer. These two likely felt quite vulnerable so, after that first peaceful yet ominous march of men, they requested assistance from Prince Rupert. A police launch with a staff sergeant and seven constables arrived, followed by an additional ten officers and an inspector. Again the miners, unarmed, marched down the plank road to the docks but this time they were confronted by the armed police. After some pushing and shoving the police gave way and the march proceeded. The police arrested those men thought to be involved in the fight as well as an additional group of men suspected of being troublemakers. These men, upward of 300, were ordered to leave town but others also left in a show of support.

Shortly after the dispute, Granby posted notices that headquarters had ordered the mine closed but made it known that should a sufficient number of men return to work, the mine would continue production. Most of the remaining workers chose to return to work. Hungry men, idled by the Depression, began arriving in the town, having heard that jobs were available. It came as a complete shock to the townspeople, who had been relatively insulated from the harsh economic reality, to see men, hardened by life on the road, arriving to take the place of the deported miners.

The curtain call for the mine came in the form of a massive explosion, reputed to be the largest man-made mining explosion in history at the time. Faced with shrinking reserves, Granby conceived a plan whereby several separate, large masses of low-grade ore would be blasted into the existing stopes beneath what was known locally as the ‘glory hole’ (Fig. 12). This was a large opening at surface that was created as early as 1918 after the original outcrop of the No. 2 orebody was mined (Bancroft 1918). The blasted ore would be hauled to surface through a series of new drifts driven at the deepest level of the mine. While this is common practice today, it was novel in 1934.

Preparations for this explosion began several months in advance. Those who lived near the mine were instructed to prepare their homes for the impending shake, rattle and roll. Homes within a 2.5 km radius were evacuated, the classes at the school were cancelled for the morning, the hospital was evacuated and the patients moved to nearby homes. The hospital was not within the danger zone but it was situated beneath a steep rocky hillside and there were concerns that it would be swept away if a landslide was triggered.

At 10 am on November 27, 1934, the whistles blew and the citizens of Anyox collectively held their breath. "… A cloud of black smoke shot into the air above the mountain and we heard the boom roll down the valley, a disappointing boom really. There was no apparent surface damage" (Loudon 1973). The much anticipated explosion was considered anticlimactic in light of the build-up to the event. Classes resumed and the people went back to their houses, but, "At about 3 o’clock that afternoon, those of us who were day-dreaming in class while gazing out the window, saw a terrible thing. To our eyes it appeared as if the whole side of the mountain suddenly fell in on itself. Actually, as we learned later, one intention of the blast was to join two open-pit mines or glory holes, as we called them. The overhang around the top edge of the glory hole closest to the school caved into the hole. The air filled with dust and small debris where the cave-in took place and it was a far more satisfactory sight than the explosion had been. It looked finally as if a giant had carved a huge wedge out of the mountainside" (Loudon 1973, p. 98-99).

The quantity of explosives needed for the blast had been estimated but this was a new experimental technique. As it turned out, the miners had seriously overestimated the amount of powder that was required. The resulting blast not only shattered the intended mineralization, but also the newly constructed tunnels and crackled the surrounding rock to the point that it would never again support new tunnels. The resulting huge pit, which is commonly referred to as the ‘glory hole’, is actually the surface expression of the caved underground mine (Fig. 12). The blast, which was intended to prolong the life of the mine and community, ironically, was the death knell for both.

Outside Observatory Inlet, the world was being strangled by the Great Depression. The bottom fell out of the copper price and Anyox, being a single economy town, was bereft of a buffer. Forces beyond Granby governed the future of the town. The company kept the operation going but finally succumbed to the influences of the depressed global economy. By early 1935, close to 50 million kilograms of unsold copper, the equivalent of three year’s worth of production, sat in a huge, coffin shaped stack near the harbour. Mining operations ceased on July 31, 1935. One thousand people were laid off and 2500 people became virtually homeless overnight in one of the most desperate periods of modern history.

Granby dismantled and shipped out most of the machinery from the mine, mill, machine shop, powerhouses, and town, including kilometres of rails and the steam and electric locomotives that for years had trundled back and forth to feed the mines. A skeleton crew of about 15 men and a few family members stayed behind, while everyone else departed with what furniture and keepsakes they could carry. For the children who knew only the security and safety of Anyox, it must have been terrifying – even more so for their parents as they set forth into a future that would remain bleak, harsh and desperate until the economy began to recover with the onset of World War II.

The town of Anyox went out in a blaze – perhaps not a blaze of glory, but it was definitely an impressive, all consuming blaze. In early July 1942, after a particularly heavy thunderstorm, a lightning strike about six miles west of town ignited the tinder dry forest of dead trees. Another lightening strike hit three miles northwest of the town and the two fires raced down the valley. The forest burned, the muskeg burned, the wooden plank roads burned, the houses burned – the inferno devoured the town. The skeleton crew of men was simply not up to the task of fighting a fire of this magnitude and they and their families were forced to flee to a waiting barge and watch helplessly from the sanctuary of the inlet waters. When it was all over, the town of Anyox had been wiped from the face of the earth.

Today, the inlet has healed from its former stature as an environmental wasteland. The hills are once again clad in thick forest, the waters abound with seals and salmon and wildlife has returned and is thriving in the undergrowth. There is little evidence of the town, the mine and the lives lived there, although every year, spring bulbs burst forth, their vibrant colours, a tribute to the tenacity of nature.

The mineralization at Anyox belongs to a class of ore deposits called volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) deposits. These deposits are formed by submarine hydrothermal activity that precipitates sulfide minerals at or near the seafloor, mainly as sedimentary layers. Volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits are actively forming today in modern oceans from vents that are generally called "black smokers" because of the darkly coloured sulfide particles entrained in the discharging hydrothermal fluids. Volcanogenic massive sulfide deposits are found throughout the rock record and are valuable sources of copper, lead, zinc, gold, and silver.

As a deposit type, these ore bodies have been tremendously important in the economic development of Canada with important mines and mining districts in Bathurst, New Brunswick; Noranda, Québec; Kidd Creek, Ontario; Flin Flon, Manitoba; and Brittania and Anyox in British Columbia, to name a few. Although this deposit type has been mined for decades in Canada and world-wide for centuries, the progression of scientific thought on how VMS deposits formed is relatively new, having been strongly influenced by the discovery of active seafloor hydrothermal systems in the late 1970s using submersibles. Reviews by Sangster (1972), Solomon (1976) and Franklin et al. (1981, 2005), amongst others, discuss VMS deposits and the evolution of ideas on how these deposits form, and the current thinking on genesis.

When Anyox was in production, VMS type deposits were unknown. They were generally considered to be in large structurally controlled shear zones or a replacement of a favourable host rock, and genetically related to granitic rocks. As a result, the bulk of the historic work at Anyox was done without a modern understanding on how these deposits formed, which naturally influenced how exploration and development proceeded. However, from the perspective of the mine geologist and engineer, these questions were academic as their job was to mine sulfides and produce copper. How and where these deposits formed were questions that could not be answered until better analytical methods and submersibles became available, many decades later.