“In my grade twelve year, my mother and brothers moved back to Zeballos. My mother lived with Slim Beale who had worked in the Privateer Mine for years. He then started his own charter boat business delivering liquor orders and groceries from Zeballos to Tahsis and other outlying logging camps. Slim also operated the water taxi from Zeballos to Gold River for several years. My mother, Iona Setso, was the postmistress in Zeballos for many years. Zeballos is where I met my first wife, Joanne Dupas, and our first child, Denise Setso, lived her first year in Zeballos.

“Zeballos was a booming place while the mine was running; I think there were two or three hundred employees in the iron mine. There was a tramline from the bottom of the mountain to the top, where the mill that refined the ore was located. They had two ore cars running up and down; one came down full and the other went up empty.

“At the age of seventeen, I beach combed for Slim Beale. Then I went to work at the Zeballos Iron Mine, which was the only mine operating at that time. I was approximately twenty years of age, started out working on the road crew, graduated to the shop as mechanic’s helper and was later trained as a CAT operator. I also drove ore truck and the man-haul crummy to the top of the mine and back.
Dave Setso (on right)

“It is hard to recognize now, because there are so many trees, but there were thirty-two switch-backs from the bottom to the top of the mountain.

Looking at it now it is hard to believe there was a mine there.

A big ore pile accumulated where the Japanese boats came in. The pile was like a big cone and there were three cintrons that the ore used to drop through onto the conveyor that ran out to the ship.

I was an underground mechanic for six months though I did not really like it; I preferred the outside, operating equipment or driving a truck. I got about five hundred dollars take-home pay per month, which was pretty good.
“I drove the crummy with the crew in the back from the bunkhouses all the way up the mountain. I would not go near the portal because there was a huge mountain of solid rock above it, with a little shifter shack on top; that is where we went underground. I saw a big crack up there and thought ‘you know, this rock could come down one day, and I am not going to be parked under it with the crummy.’ So I made the guys walk over a hundred yards more; they really bugged me about it for a long time. The miners would drill all day and then load the holes and set off the blast after all of the guys had gotten out of the mine.

Henry was the last one in there to set the blast off and we were waiting for the blast to go. All of a sudden, the blast went off and a big rock started moving. It came down and wiped out the shifter’s shack and everything in its path; it just looked like a rockslide. In the meantime Henry was on his way out of the portal and a big timber came down, hit him across the back of the neck, and he was found dead.

“I got so accustomed to driving the crew crummy up and down the mountain that after a while if I had a certain truck I could make every corner. Sometimes I would have to stop and back up on two, but those two…. if you opened the back door, it was straight down because the back end of the box hung over the end of the truck. Sometimes I would be talking away to the shift boss beside me and forget to take it out of reverse; I would give it a little shot and it would jerk back, and you could hear the banging in the crummy! I will not tell you what they were calling me! It sure woke everybody up.

“Over the years several guys lost their lives underground. One guy was drilling in an open pit-face; he had an air-track drill machine with a compressor behind it and it started running away on him towards a cliff. He hung on to the hoses trying to stop this thing but he could not stop it - it pulled him over the edge. He went down with the machine.

“The ore trucks, called Oshkosh, hauled the ore down to the crusher. Every once in a while they had to get dynamite taken to the top of the mountain, so they would line the box with sheets of plywood and load four or five hundred cases of dynamite into the Oshkosh. I would drive it all the way up to the top where the powder shed was. In order to stop the dynamite from falling off the truck I had to back up all the way from the bottom to the top. I had to maneuver all the switchbacks in reverse.

“Once in a while we rode the tramcar down if we wanted to get to the bottom in a hurry. Guys going home early could go down to the crusher where the winding room was for the ore cars and the operator would let the guy sit on top of the ore. The operator would stop it just before the dump and the guy would hop off. He sent his helper, Alphonse down it once, and then forgot about him and dumped him in the bin!

“During my time at the Zeballos Iron Mines the employees were paying union dues but were not certified by any union. Two unions fought for certification. One of the unions bribed the miners to get their votes by buying them free beer.

“The Zeballos Iron Mine closed down and re-opened as Falconbridge Nickel. The price of ore dropped several times and they would shut the mine down with no notice at all; just come along and say ‘the mine is shut.’ Falconbridge Nickel was the last owner of the mine. They shut down in early 1968.

I worked at several different mines after leaving Zeballos in 1968. I moved to Campbell River in 1970, drove freight truck for Johnson Terminals and then went on to work for Gretsinger and McDonald as a truck driver in the open pit mine at Westmin. At this time they had not gone underground. I then moved on to work several months at Utah mines in Port Hardy. In 1972 I went to work in the forest industry for MacMillan Bloedel at Menzies Bay. I was there for twenty-eight and a half years and they paid me to leave! They were giving out severance packages and buy-outs so I took one. I am now happily retired and still reside in Campbell River.”

 
Dave Setso , 2006