Volume 2 - ElectricCanadian.com

THE ROMANCE OF BANKING 281ready-made building from Vancouver, which proved to be, andstill is, the most attractive in the town. Our troubles camewhen we started to put the building together. Every onewas prospecting and it was very difficult indeed to persuademen to do manual labour. In the evening I would get busy andhunt up possibly half a dozen men for work on the buildingnext day, but the following noon my foreman would inform methat the men thought they would go prospecting in the afternoon,so the next night I would have to go through the sameperformance, and always with the same results. At last indesperation we wired Toronto for carpenters and in this way wegot the building completed. By this time it was November 20,and in the meantime we were still living in the tent. AfterOctober 1 it was cold, the thermometer in many instances runningdown to from twenty-five to thirty-five degrees belowzero. In order to keep ourselves at all comfortable we used tosleep with coon-skin coats on, and fur caps pulled down over ourears, and on top of this all the blankets we could bear. In themornings, before we could wash, we had to wait until the waterin the pails could be thawed out, as it was always frozen solid.Almost invariably we had to eat our meals with coat, capand gloves on, and we had to be quick if we wished to eat ourfood while it was hot, for it very soon got cold. All this lasteduntil November 20, when we moved into our spacious andcomfortable permanent quarters, where we had our owndining-room, cook, and everything that was reasonable toexpect in a new country."That winter the sound of the hammer and saw was heardall day long in Cobalt because the snow was too deep for prospecting,and by spring a real town was in existence. Thechief relaxation for a good many of the prospectors was foundin the flowing bowl, and frequently the members of the staff ofthe bank had to show their prowess by throwing unwelcomevisitors off the premises. In 1906, the rush to Cobalt reachedits height and the investment in its mines or prospective mineswas estimated at a total of $75,000,000. The madness of