“Tell me,” said Doyle, “how did your stepfather earn his living?” In the cemetery, under umbrellas, they stood beside his grave and spoke in hushed tones. On the way they passed James Cawdor’s vacant house, Crannog, which had fallen into disrepair since his death the year before. After disembarking, they walked along a rough gravel road to the cemetery. Booth and Agnes took passage to Silver Islet aboard the coastal steamer Forest City. On June 25, 1914, a dark, drizzly, overcast day, Aunt Leone, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mr. During her teenage years, after her step-siblings moved away from Port Arthur and took up residence in southern Ontario, she served more or less as James Cawdor’s unpaid housekeeper. Throughout her life, she never forgot those who were kind to her, nor those who were cruel. And so she had no choice but to grow a thick skin. Her step-siblings, two older sisters (one of whom became my grandmother), resented her. And so from infancy onward, Aunt Leone faced an uphill battle. Unfortunately, the poor young thing did not survive her daughter’s birth. To prevent her baby being born fatherless, the mother married a gruff widower named James Cawdor. When her unmarried mother became pregnant, her biological father had fled to Africa, where, in 1874, he was murdered by Burundi tribesmen. My parents used to say that her feistiness was the result of her severe upbringing. I must tell you, Aunt Leone was a very persuasive person.
What she hoped to be able to do, she said, was persuade him to pay a visit to Silver Islet, since her late stepfather, James Cawdor, was buried in the cemetery there and she wished to contact him. After the lecture she introduced herself to him, bought a couple of his books, assured him she was a devout occultist. In later years Aunt Leone couldn’t remember whether Sir Arthur’s wife was with him on that visit. Booth’s secretary, a compliant young woman named Agnes. He was accompanied on that occasion by his publicist, Mr. It was at the Colonial Theatre in Port Arthur, after his initial talk, that Sir Arthur first met my great-aunt Leone. The sixty-five miners and their families were forced to go elsewhere looking for work, leaving their vacant houses to the mercy of the elements. Sadly, in 1885, thoroughly depleted, the mine was abandoned and the shaft allowed to flood, and Silver Islet became a ghost town.
Of these, during its boom years between 18, Silver Islet, thirty nautical miles east of Port Arthur, was by far the most productive, yielding several million dollars in profit and sinking its shaft to a spooky depth of 1,200 feet. For another, there were several abandoned silver mines in the area: Silver Harbour, Silver Mountain, Silver Bay, Silver Islet. For one thing, there was the old Colonial Theatre, in which he gave evening lectures on spiritualism and sold a few books. Still, our famous visitor stopped there, for a couple of reasons. Back then, before it amalgamated with nearby Fort William into the present dysfunctional metropolis of Thunder Bay, there wasn’t much happening in Port Arthur. Specifically, the town of Port Arthur, on the storm-swept shore of Lake Superior. In the summer of 1914, just before the start of World War I, Sir Arthur visited my great-aunt Leone’s neck of the woods, northwestern Ontario. In British Columbia he was particularly intrigued by the Silver King mine near Nelson, on the west arm of Kootenay Lake, which, like most deep-shaft silver mines, had run out of ore and had been abandoned in 1911. He was already familiar with the silver mines of Cornwall and had great respect for Cornish miners. What he liked to do was flog his books along the way, give talks on spiritualism and indulge his fascination with deep-shaft silver mining.
I’m sure he’d be gratified to know that the Arthur Conan Doyle Society of North America has its headquarters in Ashcroft, BC, a stone’s throw west of Kamloops.īetween 18, Sir Arthur toured Canada at least four times and on two occasions traversed the country by train from Vancouver to Halifax. It’s a known fact that he preferred Canada to the USA. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed Scottish novelist, spiritualist and creator of Sherlock Holmes, enjoyed visiting Canada. A seance to contact a dead miner at Port Arthur, Ontario, in 1923-conducted by Conan Doyle himself.
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