Back this week – in our look at Timmins history – to prospector Charles Auer, as he headed to this area in 1907, before the gold rush.
The Timmins Museum has his journals. Director-curator Karen Bachmann reads an entry from July 24th of that year, when he rode from Englehart to MacDougall Chutes, which is now Matheson, on a contractor’s train actually laying the track.
“Between seemingly unnecessary stops and running off the track four times, we took from 9:30am to 11:00pm to make the Chutes. We were provided with lunch and reading material and managed to pass the time quite comfortably, except when the train would go off the track, which generally shook things up a bit, though being far from dangerous, as the train never went fast enough to break any speed limit laws.”
After the all-day train trip, Auer still had to walk a mile-and-a-half to The Prospectors Home to stay the night.
Bachmann reads from his journal, that he met other prospectors who had given up.
“This doesn’t sound encouraging, but from what they have to say, they didn’t find anything impossible, simply a very hard trail and particularly bad when mosquitoes are numerous, as they are very bad now.”
As mentioned earlier, Auer’s first gold discovery was on Nighthawk Lake, and he later established the Mattagami Heights housing community on the Mattagami River.