COLUMN: Carillon Flashback April 22, 1960 – Hadashville prospector is first to cash in on lithium

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This article was published 30/06/2023 (752 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When Joe Wirth of Hadashville discovered lithium while prospecting in 1935 his friends laughed at him; for at the time, the metal was both useless and worthless. But Wirth got the last laugh, and before his death in April he had cashed in on his early discovery, and sparked a flurry of activity in the area of one of Canada’s richest lithium deposits.

The White Rose service station and coffee bar, at the corner of Highway 11 and the TransCanada Highway, is a popular stopping place for tourists along the highway on their way to and from Falcon Lake and Whiteshell resorts.

For Joe Wirth and his wife Kathleen, the discovery of lithium, and construction of the highway service station, was one chapter of a poverty-to-prosperity story which began when the Depression drove the Wirths from the city in 1934.

In Hadashville, Wirth secured a job cutting cordwood for 75 cents a cord, and it was while engaged in bush work in 1935, Wirth discovered deposits of a metal, he learned was known as lithium.

At that time, lithium was rated as a practically useless metal. However, in 1943, acting on a prospector’s hunch, Wirth filed a claim, which was to make his name a household word in the district.

Then came 1945, and the explosion of the first atomic bomb, and with it came an intense demand for lithium. A Toronto company, called the Whiteshell Lithium Corporation, made a $30,000 deal with Wirth, and the rest, as they say, is history. The deal proved sufficient to finance construction of Wirth’s new service station.

Anyone interested in taking a good look at a fragment of lithium should drop by at Wirth’s. A sample stands for exhibit on the counter there.

While Wirth may have been the first Manitoba prospector to make a worthwhile lithium find in eastern Manitoba, by 1956 his discovery began paving the way for permanent settlement of one of Manitoba’s sparsely developed beauty spots. The area rich in lithium is located between Lac du Bonnet and the Ontario boundary. In Canada, the biggest proven lithium deposits are divided equally between Manitoba and Quebec.

The Lac du Bonnet region has begun attracting both miner and tourist, and the provincial government pushed roads and power into the area to further its development. In June of 1955, the Manitoba Power Commission turned on power at Lithium Corporation of Canada’s Cat Lake mine, after completing a $100,000 branch line off the transmission system running to the San Antonia Gold Mines at Bissett.

A government road was extended nine miles into Cat Lake by the company and the province completed making an all-weather road for the first 42 miles out of Lac du Bonnet.

A branch road has opened up the beautiful Bird Lake for tourism, and will allow road access to nearby Bernice Lake, where about half the lithium ore is located.

On Sept. 5, 1956, newsmen visited the Lithium Corporation of Canada’s mine at Cat Lake, where the first of 400 tons of barrelled lithium ore were taken out and shipped to England where a new leaching process was being tried.

Less than a year after resident mine manager, J.A. “Andy” Easton snowshoed into the region to begin setting up a mining camp, newsmen were shown ultra-modern buildings, steel-sheeted dormitories with seven-inch thick walls, and shops and offices, where water and sewer lines make for a comfortable, efficient working site.

Lithium is an unusual substance with a variety of uses. Less than a third the weight of aluminum, and at the opposite end of the atomic weight scale to uranium and plutonium, it is used as a source of atomic energy. New rockets are using it as a fuel; it is one of the primary ingredients of the hydrogen bomb.

Its commercial application includes its use in lubricants (allowing oils and greases to remain almost consistent throughout wide temperature ranges). It is used in ceramics, air conditioning, medicines, as a purifying agent in producing sound aluminum, lead and alloy castings, in paints; it’s used as a flux in aluminum welding at a time when aluminum structures, even bridges, are beginning to be accepted.