Sir Harry Oakes
his story . . .
Accounts of Harry Oakes' life tell of a man whose passion burned so bright it consumed him. . .
. . . a man whose quest for riches stripped him of civility, hardened him beyond normal men and gradually, as his search spanned mountains, oceans, deserts and time, the touch of Midas cramped around his heart, until he was murdered, burned in his bed.
At the beginning his send-off couldn't have been more heartwarming. Harry's brother Louis promised to send $75 a month from his fledgling lumber business to his younger brother. Harry's sister Gertrude also made a similar promise to send as much money to Harry as she could spare from a secretarial job in New York. Mrs. Oakes, too, dipped into her savings on several occasions to help her son.
Young Harry Oakes packed up and headed for Seattle in 1897 and did not return again to walk the woods of his boyhood home in Sangerville, Maine for 14 years; not until 1911, one year before he would realize his fortune on the shore of Kirkland Lake.
His cryptic and infrequent notes to family members during his world-wide search told them only that he continued, and indeed he did, enduring hardship and disappointment.
Harry Oakes went first to the Klondike in 1898 where he witnessed a waning gold rush, rich men with no food to eat. His first job as a medical assistant in Skagway, Alaska lasted about a year.
Between 1899 and 1906 Sir Harry prospected in Dawson City, was shipwrecked off the coast of Alaska, taken as a prisoner of Russia's Tzar, and returned to Alaska where he had his first bonanza and went bust.
In 1910 he bought maps of northern Quebec. Ontario, up to this point, was notoriously "undermined" and did not generate the same gold rush bonanza as other hotspots.
On June 19, 1911, with only $2.65 in his pocket, Harry Oakes, now 36-years-old, stepped off the train at Swastika.
He was just 7 miles from the fortune he would claim as his own. Here the tally of injustices grew.
"Gold has a mind of its own. You should know that better than most men. Gold is a woman. All the gold in the world is waiting for just one thing, for the right man to find it."
Roza Brown to Harry Oakes from:
The Life and Death of Harry Oakes
Geoffrey Bocca
Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1959
Harry seized his chance on January 8, 1912. After midnight a group of claims near Kirkland Lake came open. The prospector who had originally staked them had not done sufficient work on them required to keep them active. With the Tough brothers, George, Tom, Bob and Jack, to pay for the claims Sir Harry led the way on a trek through the snow-covered bush at minus 50 degrees.
The hardened men beat out the only other contender for the claims, William H. Wright, by a margin of about 3 hours. In the bitter cold they drove metal stakes into solid rock, using rags to hold onto the pins as another man hammered. When they were done Harry owned half and the Tough brothers among themselves the other half.
Their first mine was the Tough-Oakes, the second producing mine on the main break in the Kirkland Lake camp. It was later renamed Toburn.
In the first 13 months of production five shipments of high grade ore were transported from the property - "the last load averaged an astounding 24 ounces of gold per ton. Compare that to the property's overall average (from 1913 to 1953) of 0.48 ounces per ton and one gets a good indication of how fabulously rich those first shipments of ore really were."
The Kirkland Lake Story
Andre Wetjen and L.H.T. Irvine
Highway Book Shop
p. 11 pp. 4
But the real riches lay in the ground close to the lake, as Roza Brown claimed she and Sir Harry had discussed. Sir Harry still searched for his one man mine.
On July 30, 1912, two months before the first ore was shipped from the Tough-Oakes, Harry staked two water claims beneath the southern bay of Kirkland Lake. In September of 1912 he registered the transfers of two more claims adjoining the properties in his own name. William Wright, however, wasn't going to be beaten by Oakes again. Wright managed to get the claim immediately west of the four Lake Shore claims the month after Oakes declared his hand, forcing Harry to relinquish 200,000 shares of Lake Shore stock for the ground.
In later years, as Sir Harry begged for money to develop the Lake Shore Mine claims, he entered into a legal wrangle with the Tough brothers over shares being sold by a mutual agent in England. The battle lasted several years and nearly broke the bank before the Lake Shore Mine ever got started. Eventually Harry was awarded $40,000 in damages, but he was never a man to forget. He sent copies of the decision to friends and business associates to make them aware he had been vindicated.
But Sir Harry's true true reward of his gold, the toughness of spirit he learned in finding riches, had no place in a world which honored gentler men. Men who could let the past go.
He did not forget a single injustice, real or imagined, that he had suffered over the previous twelve years. Everyone who had laughed at him or refused to believe in him he regarded with deadly detestation. He started his crusade of vengeance against Jimmy Doige. He remembered how Jimmy Doige had made him look a fool when he tried to buy some overall on credit, and issued orders that no man in his employ would be allowed to patronize Doige's store. Doige saw his business decline and ultimately dry up altogether. Doige left town a ruined man, and Oakes watched him go with pleasure. No pangs of conscience affected him. But some years later he heard that Doige was on his last legs. `Serve the bastard right,' said Oakes. `Tell my secretary to send him a cheque for $10,000.'
The Life and Death of Harry Oakes
Geoffrey Bocca
Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1959
Everybody who had ever put a finger into the Lake Shore became rich. Bill Wright had 250,000 shares, and was vice-president of the company. Louis Oakes was rich. Gertrude Oakes was rich and Harry persuaded her to come to Canada to be his secretary-treasurer and personal assistant. Harry's mother was rich. Ernie Martin who had first discovered Number One vein was given shares worth $100,000. Charlie Chow, the China man who had accepted Harry Oakes' shares instead of cash, was rich. It was a true Horatio Alger epic of success and courage, and worth in itself a permanent record in the story books of adversity. The tragedy of the Harry Oakes story is that it did not end there. It merely closed a chapter. Other chapters were about to open, making the story less noble and more terrible.
The Life and Death of Harry Oakes
Geoffrey Bocca
Weidenfeld and Nicholson 1959
Harry Oakes story is perhaps a story in which the self-made man was really out to own himself, to honor the loyalty of others in the only way that had any meaning to himself - by making them rich.
Was the price he paid worth it?
Even then, as he continued to teach himself geology, and eagle-eyed anything new that might gain him understanding of the earth's mysteries, Sir Harry knew he would not fail. He had the unfailing belief of his family. Distrust and hardship kept a vein of hatred alive in him which he mined for passion. Harry never gave up.He also learned that a prospector was only as good as his claim, that finding gold wasn't enough. He set out to develop whatever he found into a one man mine.
All the while, Sir Harry changed partners frequently, never, perhaps, understanding camaraderie, mentally tabulating the list of people he would remember for their unkindness, and others who deserved reward.
From Alaska, Harry found himself on passage to Australia, working as a purser to pay for the voyage. In Australia the Outback burned as harshly as the north country snapped its cold. But nothing in that great continent.
Then to New Zealand, where, for the first and only time, Sir Harry appeared to give up. He first took a job as a surveyor for the New Zealand government. He also farmed flax, doing well enough after two years that he had 30,000 pounds, just enough, he thought, to go at it again.
Harry moved north in the world again and began prospecting the Death Valley in California, but for him it held nothing.
By 1906 Harry was back in Alaska, spending the years between 1906 and 1910 there and in the Belgian Congo.
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Read the online book of Sir Harry. Illustrated with lots of photo's from his early years to his tragic death in the Bahamas.
1874 - Born on the 23rd of December in Sangerville, Maine.
1898 - He made his way to Alaska at the height of the Klondike Gold Rush in hopes of making his fortune as a Prospector.
1931 - He donated a 16-acre parcel of land, formerly a farmer's field.
1932 - He funded a make-work project and supplied tools to build a park.
1935 - He took British citizenship and for tax reasons lived in the Bahamas.
1939 - He was created a Baronet as a reward for his philanthropic endeavours there and in Britain.
1943 - He died on the 7th of July in Nassau, Bahamas.
compliled by (not written by) Stan Dickinson, using various sources from the Internet. Photo's from many sources, by donation, and Internet.