There is a mining museum at Rossland, B.C.  The museum has a web site:
        http://www.rossland.com/museum/
 For a very detailed history of this historic mining town, I recommend
Jeremy Mouat's excellent book, "Roaring Days: Rossland's Mines and the
History of British Columbia" (Vancouver, UBC Press, 1995).  I think that
it would be more useful for readers of this page for me to give a brief
history of hard rock mining in southern British Columbia.
 Unlike Europe, where mines date back to before 1000 A.D., no mining was
done in British Columbia until a century and a half ago (hard rock
mining only a little over a century ago - and I was mining half a
century ago). Although gold and other minerals had been known earlier to
representatives of the Hudson's Bay Company, little was (or could be)
done about them until the first gold rush of 1858.  The placer miners,
requiring few tools to extract the gold and no sophisticated
transportation to carry it away, built a few ramshackle towns and left
as quickly as they came. By the 1860's the population of the province
was little different than it had been before the rushes.  Many of the
towns were destroyed by the miners themselves to obtain materials for
building other towns.  There is a story from Fisherville that even at
that town's height, miners burned down the building housing the
government offices merely to get at what they imagined was pay dirt
beneath it.
         Although Margaret Ormsby in her history of the province states
that the hard rock mining boom began in 1896; by that time, three
different companies had built five different railways into various
areas.  The last two of these were completed to Sandon, B.C. in 1895.
 The mining boom really began in 1886 when miners from the US pushed
northward into British Columbia to locate the Silver King Mine in
Nelson, B.C.  There had been some earlier interest in the outcrops of
what later became the Blue Bell Mine at Riondel, B.C., but successful
development of that body would have to wait for later technological
developments.
         When the Northern Pacific Railway was completed across the US
in 1883, and Daniel Chase Corbin constructed a railroad into the Couer
d'Alenes of Idaho, miners from the US flocked into the area.  I would
contend that the Canadian Pacific Railway (which was completed in 1885)
had little to do with the boom.  I have yet to find any Canadian mines
developed by that time from which experienced miners could have come.
Ormby, takes the 1896 date, because that was when the Spokane investors
sold out to "British" interests.  Ormsby seems to feel that the mines
then became "Canadian".  In fact the same British interests also bought
out the mines of Idaho and Montana, and this did not make those mines
"Canadian".
         People with no mining experience seem unable to visualize the
miners as they were.  In the 1890's and early 1900's ( even into the
1920's), southern British Columbia was similar to sites of our present
"far northern"construction.  The men were highly mobile and were looking
for very high wages ($2.50 to $3.00 per day were very high wages at that
time).  They were willing to go into a remote area and work very hard
with the view of returning to "civilization" and living it up. They were
not just similar to the miners south of the border, they were, in fact,
the same men.  As late as the 1940's, when things were much more
settled, we still had "tramp miners" moving from mine to mine.
         Like the mines of the western US, much of the population came
from Europe; Welshmen, "Cousin Jacks", Finns, Germans, etc. (Only a
small percentage were born in the US).
        To the miners of southern British Columbia, Spokane, Washington,
and Nelson, B.C. were the main centers.  Even after the completion of
the CPR, frozen lakes cut the area off from the rest of Canada for much
of the year.  Rossland, especially, was known as an "American" town.
When the Rossland mines closed down in the 1920's, some of the miners
tranferred to the Sullivan Mine at Kimberley, B.C.  One, especially,
became a close friend of my father, and Bill told me about his
experiences.



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