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The Story of Police Flats Leitch Collieries
William Lemond Hamilton was born on a farm near Russell, Ontario
in May 1868. In his teens he worked in logging camps up the
Ottawa river during the winter. In the spring of 1889 he turned
all but $19.00 of his earnings over to his father and bought a
ticket to Brandon, N.W.T. William found work at the Experimental
Farm there.
Early in 1892 William headed further west, this time with a
team of oxen and a wagon loaded with necessary pioneer
equipment. He located and staked out a homestead near the
present town of Alameda. He built a sod shack and set about
breaking land. In the fall he drove the team of oxen some forty
miles to where coal was being dug out of the side of a valley
and obtained fuel for the winter. At this time William resolved
the dream he had had as a boy of becoming a miner must be made a
reality.
When farm work was finished in the fall William would go back
to the mine and Isaac Cockburn would give him a job for the
winter. William qualified to become pit boss at the mine, then
manager, he became first a shareholder and finally owner of the
mine. The community of Coalfields grew up around the Hamilton
mine.
In the meantime William married Ellen McNeil who had come
west from Brussels, Ontario and was teaching school at Estevan.
William built a substantial home on the side of the hill high
above the mine, the Eagle's Nest and here their daughter Jessie
was born. A daughter Evelyn joined the family.
In 1905 the mines were sold and Hamilton moved his family to
Medicine Hat. Immediately, Jack and Bill Kerr who went with him,
set out with a team and prairie schooner to check riverbanks and
ravines for coal outcroppings. Men like this had to have a sixth
sense for locating coal, oil or other minerals, for they had
virtually no technical equipment. After locating several
prospective locations, at least one of which was later worked,
and after covering wide areas of the western prairie, Hamilton
opened a mine on flat, undeveloped prairie, where Taber now
stands. His wife and children moved out to be with him one
summer, living in a tent, while the new mine went into
production, increased its tonnage, prospered and was sold
promptly in the summer of 1906. W. L. (Billy) Hamilton as he was
known, again moved farther west to prospect for coal in the
foothills. In April 1907, a third daughter, Helen, was born and
the family was moved to Lethbridge.
This then is the background of William Hamilton, pioneer
prospector, and entrepreneur miner; when he arrived in the
Crowsnest Pass to risk his last dollar in an area where roads
and bridges had yet to be built, and railway stations were far
apart. Telephone and other lines of communication were at their
beginnings, slow and inadequate.
This article is extracted from Crowsnest and its People:
Millennium Edition (Coleman, Alberta, Crowsnest Pass Historical
Society, 2000. The Heritage Community Foundation and
the Year of the Coal Miner Consortium would like to thank the
authors and the Crowsnest Pass Historical Society for permission
to reprint this material.
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