True Patriot Love - August 17, 2026


Why Drumheller Was Alberta’s Wildest Boomtown ft. Lothar Malberg, Bob Moffett & Jay Russell


Episode Stats


Length

42 minutes

Words per minute

169.8

Word count

7,137

Sentence count

211

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:29.000 top priority. Shop now at lesslethal.ca. Maybe this joke has been made before, but we just left
00:00:37.900 Vulcan and came to Drumheller, and those guys have got to be jealous of what Drumheller's got.
00:00:43.420 If this was named Vulcan, you would understand it because it's like completely another planet,
00:00:48.700 and we'll get to that a bit later on in the program, but we are in Drumheller,
00:00:52.560 which has a huge amount of history and with a lot of history comes a lot of legend and leaves a lot
00:01:01.700 of ghosts in the room and that's where lothar comes in thanks so much for joining me man i
00:01:06.860 appreciate my pleasure you i think are kind of iconic here in uh in town certainly for tourists
00:01:13.340 yeah uh yeah there's more than you and i talked about this on the walk over to the picnic table
00:01:18.080 here there's more than dinosaurs in drumheller and that's because it has a vast history here
00:01:24.300 in canada yes tell me a little bit about that well drumheller had a nickname up until somewhere
00:01:33.240 into the 30s called hell's hole and it wasn't just because of the heat we produced from coal
00:01:39.880 this was a not a nice town to live in it was rough and tough and so all across up
00:01:45.900 drumheller started in 1911 officially with coal mining and seven years later by 1918 we had that
00:01:53.660 nickname already across canada oh this was the worst town to live in in canada uh so it was 1.00
00:02:01.780 pretty rough and tough uh very historic though we've had all kinds of ne'er-do-wells come through 0.95
00:02:07.740 here butch cassidy and the sundance kid they spent a couple summers here in our area feels
00:02:13.660 like a place they would hang yeah yeah yeah absolutely not to mention then our coal mining
00:02:19.680 which is the one thing that kept drumheller alive during the 30s it's the thing that prevented
00:02:25.220 drumheller from becoming a ghost town oh that's and that's kind of where you come in but yeah
00:02:31.040 tell me how did it coal was the discovery of the century i would assume big time yeah and it was
00:02:38.880 everybody needed coal. Everybody. All of Canada predominantly got their coal from us. We shipped
00:02:47.660 it all across Canada. During World War II, we shipped hundreds of thousands of tons over to
00:02:52.520 England to fuel that war machine, to keep us alive. But it was coal that allowed Drumheller
00:03:01.880 to stay afloat through the 30s now you uh i guess the focus on for you is a lot of history because
00:03:11.100 you do the official ghost walk the guided ghost walk tour here in uh drumheller which i guess has
00:03:19.220 made you really have to absorb the history of drumheller very much so not just by reading i've
00:03:26.520 done a lot of reading but a lot of people bring their tour their histories to me or if they're
00:03:33.160 from drumheller and they come on the tour and i'm telling you a story they're not uh shy about
00:03:39.700 saying no no wait a minute that's one man's perspective but that's not the way that i
00:03:43.960 remember it wow that's a cool day at work i think for you it really is it's fun when that happens
00:03:50.200 because a history book can only tell you so much from one person's point of view yeah unless you
00:03:55.500 were really there you just have to accept the hearsay so it's uh i i keep the history
00:04:04.320 i do a reader's digest version of the history of the downtown of drumheller the guys that started
00:04:12.120 it some of the interesting stories around those individuals a couple stories that have been
00:04:17.660 forgotten that need to be uh pushed a little harder yeah there's a there is a political
00:04:24.240 content in there but it's for another time and so drumheller is is the most
00:04:31.620 the alberta government some years ago did a research project on the historicity
00:04:40.740 of the downtown cores of the small towns of alberta okay and when they were said and done
00:04:48.100 drumheller came out number one on that list having the most complete historical downtown
00:04:53.960 of all those small towns in alberta now what has kept it so partly pride
00:05:00.380 partly economics it's just cheaper to renovate than it is to tear it down and build new
00:05:07.260 often the bones are there most of our buildings in our downtown area are built out of brick
00:05:14.380 so they are solid they're not burning down anytime soon the interior might but not the outside now
00:05:21.120 you can retrofit those especially in a historic fashion now it's the way to it's the way to open
00:05:25.720 a cafe it's the way to open a restaurant right yeah so it's I think that's one of the big things
00:05:31.220 that has kept John Heller from changing a whole lot it's just it's all brick and it's great to
00:05:36.560 look at it is a beautiful looking little town and as I said to you I looked at your brochure and by
00:05:43.040 the way we'll make sure that you get Lothar's contact info as at the bottom in the in the
00:05:49.920 description but i look at some of the uh imagery in your brochure and i think to myself this really
00:05:55.060 was a wild west town and as you describe it as a hell hole sorry what was it hell's hole hell's
00:06:01.760 hole like not just a hell hole hell's own very own hole yeah uh so this really i think maybe i'm wrong
00:06:11.460 this feels like it was the wild west of canada oh very much so in fact the little town of wayne
00:06:18.260 where the Last Chance Saloon is just down the highway.
00:06:21.240 It was a law unto itself until the mid-1970s.
00:06:24.680 What do you mean?
00:06:26.840 So there's a story goes, in the Last Chance Saloon,
00:06:30.620 in the wall are three bullet holes with a picture frame around it.
00:06:35.820 And the story is that around about 1972, 73,
00:06:38.960 there were a couple of young fellows from Calgary
00:06:41.040 that had come out for lunch.
00:06:44.240 And after lunch, they just thought that they would
00:06:47.480 ditched their bill came to the table and they just thought you know we just make a play for
00:06:55.140 the door who's going to stop us so they tried and at that time the guy running the bar
00:07:01.500 had a six six uh colt colt six gun okay behind the the desk and he pulled that out and he put
00:07:09.720 three bullets over their heads into the wall and he said pay your bill and don't come back
00:07:16.320 that that is a message that you don't forget yeah this is why across the country as i'm touring
00:07:24.880 i have yet to skip out on a bill i had it was instinctively in me to dash and dine
00:07:30.600 i'm sure something prevented me good uh now let's talk about the so the history is is quite vast
00:07:37.320 what it was coal mining what were some of the other businesses and industries and i'll get to
00:07:42.780 the ghost end of things in a minute but what were some of the the uh i guess adjacent businesses that
00:07:48.960 were in town i mean we hear about kingston in that same era was basically a brothel while they
00:07:54.120 were setting up our country right i could only imagine in the wild west it had some interesting
00:07:58.580 side businesses oh it did it had its share one of the big ones were the brothels again this was a
00:08:05.680 man's town. Five men to every one woman, roughly, was the makeup of the population. So we had about
00:08:13.760 50 brothels here in the valley from 1911 to 1950 when they closed. The two big prominent ones was
00:08:20.680 the house of Mary Roper and Fannie Rollins. Colorful ladies, we could do a whole podcast
00:08:27.700 just on them. So it's a story for another time. But those two ladies were really well-loved,
00:08:34.280 well-respected in the town by everybody so those ran like I say till 1950 then during prohibition
00:08:43.360 1916 and 1924 here in Alberta our town was pretty much run by Al Capone he had a bootlegging
00:08:52.120 business out of our downtown we had a tunnel system in our downtown core and so he took over
00:09:00.040 those tunnels and the booze would come in from BC, get re-bottled down here and then distributed
00:09:06.660 throughout Southern Alberta. So big business. It's so funny how people find a way to be lucrative
00:09:13.840 in every era, even if it doesn't show up on the books. Yeah. Well, it's interesting that there is
00:09:21.380 this kind of rich history here, which kind of, I think, leads into your realm, which is talking
00:09:27.200 about the ghosts that wandered these streets and what they meant to the town yeah so tell me about
00:09:33.680 the walk like what i by the way i've never been on a ghost walk oh my gosh no i really need to go on
00:09:39.300 one that's why i was excited to do this i i like to really do my research before i book a ghost tour
00:09:44.880 uh but what what can people expect so first and foremost my ghost tour is family friendly
00:09:51.420 so anybody anybody can come on it it's about an hour and a half to two hours depending on the
00:09:58.440 interaction with the with the group that's on the tour it's all on street level we don't go
00:10:03.860 into any buildings primarily it's a history tour but there are four or five ghost stories along the
00:10:10.380 way and the unique trait i guess of drum heller is it is purported to be the most actively haunted
00:10:23.380 town in alberta all right so we have ghost researchers that come here from all over the world
00:10:29.720 to check out stories and to do their experiments whatever whatever you want to call it because our
00:10:36.960 activity is so so constant and regular so if you're sensitive to that sort of thing this could
00:10:43.400 or could not be the best place for you yeah you might you might just be tuned in but what i think
00:10:49.400 what i think i hear here what i get most of all is context right you're given a context and the
00:10:56.600 beautiful thing is these stories and this you know activity in drumheller of the supernatural variety
00:11:03.760 brings to life the history it does it brings these souls back to our our current moment yeah
00:11:12.180 and it's a drumheller sits in a unique i think a unique situation with all of that
00:11:20.020 and it's so much of it is connected to our coal mining that and the spanish flu which hit us hard
00:11:27.180 in 1918 but the coal mining all of our coal miners for the first 20 or 30 years came from
00:11:34.700 eastern europe and you can see that when you walk through our cemetery and see all the names on the
00:11:40.840 headstones and so they're bringing with them their religions their personal pride their their
00:11:49.560 superstitions about death and dying and those that roam when the night is full.
00:11:58.920 They bring all of that folklore with them and it impacts the way they live and they interact with
00:12:04.340 each other. And in some instances, I think that it does have an effect if you believe in spirits
00:12:11.040 that they can linger after death. I think that that impacts some of those individuals that are
00:12:17.300 still here have you ever given thought and i would imagine it would be a an occupational hazard
00:12:23.180 have you ever given thought to what is this paranormal activity that we refer to as ghosts
00:12:31.160 is this another dimension in your mind is this a leap in timeline do their spirits
00:12:36.840 actually remain what's your what's your estimation what's your summation
00:12:40.940 without getting too
00:12:44.020 religiously philosophical
00:12:46.780 feel free
00:12:48.680 I have a world view
00:12:50.320 my world view is that
00:12:51.700 the world is not as it was
00:12:54.280 supposed to be, it's broken
00:12:55.700 all of creation is broken
00:12:57.740 everything that we see and don't see
00:13:00.560 and that we are made up of
00:13:04.220 three components, we have a soul
00:13:06.420 we are a soul
00:13:08.560 being, we have a spirit
00:13:09.700 and we live in a body
00:13:11.320 and those things
00:13:13.800 work together while we're alive
00:13:16.400 and what can happen at death
00:13:18.280 depending on how
00:13:20.480 you die
00:13:21.060 the spirit can be separated from the soul
00:13:24.160 and the body
00:13:24.700 I believe when you die your soul goes back to wherever it's supposed to
00:13:28.240 wherever it came from
00:13:29.140 and your body naturally decays
00:13:32.260 but the spirit has an option
00:13:34.200 either by choice
00:13:35.980 or just by
00:13:38.400 sudden happenstance
00:13:39.680 and can be left behind.
00:13:43.980 And it can or cannot have...
00:13:46.480 Spirits and ghosts are different in my worldview.
00:13:50.500 A spirit is an active or conscious part of us
00:13:56.440 that can remain behind.
00:13:58.220 We can interact with it, potentially,
00:14:01.740 if it chooses to interact with us.
00:14:04.380 It still has some personality from the person it was.
00:14:07.780 and sometimes it might still have a mission that it needs to fulfill or it just liked the place so
00:14:13.680 much it doesn't want to leave you needs to be existing in that plane yeah for me a ghost is
00:14:19.120 more like um it's like a memory uh cassette plate a cassette play easy for you to say yes
00:14:28.320 like a videotape put on replay yeah i've it's funny that you say that that's kind of the the
00:14:37.060 vibe that i get from the description that people have that they are going through a series of
00:14:44.420 motions over and over and over again and even if that spirit's not attached to it that energy
00:14:49.620 still remains in that space right yeah yeah and so to me that's what a ghost is you didn't know i
00:14:56.220 was so freaky deaky did you yeah i got ideas i got ideas well read or whatever yeah so so it's a
00:15:04.760 very different thing right a ghost is just something that that just keeps repeating itself
00:15:10.020 and is not aware of its surroundings right a spirit is i think that's what is so freaky to
00:15:17.980 people okay if i stayed here as a spirit i could get that i'm still here without a body i get it
00:15:23.900 But there's that realm of disconnect between the spirit and the real realm that we live in, the physical realm.
00:15:33.520 That's terrifying, I think, to people.
00:15:35.380 And that's what makes ghosts freaky.
00:15:37.680 I guess.
00:15:39.480 For me, I think the thing that makes them freaky is that it's paranormal.
00:15:47.940 Like the ghosts here in our town, from all the stories I've done, I've been here 33 years now.
00:15:53.280 And for all the research and people I've talked to, none of the ghosts here are here to get you.
00:15:58.720 Right.
00:15:59.340 And they're not here to go home with you.
00:16:00.780 It ain't Scooby-Doo?
00:16:01.840 No.
00:16:02.280 Oh.
00:16:03.060 They're stuck here because of deep, deep, deep, deep sorrow and sadness between coal mining and the Spanish influenza. 0.90
00:16:11.620 Right. 0.73
00:16:12.540 Those two things.
00:16:13.420 Tragedy, sudden tragedy.
00:16:14.720 Yeah. And there's so much sorrow tied to those moments within the mindset of the minors, predominantly minors, families or children, that it's just locked.
00:16:31.640 It's just stuck here. So much of it.
00:16:35.300 Well, let me ask you in closing, somebody wants to set up a tour with you.
00:16:40.760 I'm going to make sure that they get the contact info.
00:16:42.860 So what happens?
00:16:43.820 They just set up a date, and you say, okay, look, here's an ideal time and date to go.
00:16:47.780 Or is there a perfect time of day to do the ghost walk?
00:16:50.880 There's two ways to go about it.
00:16:52.500 We have the general ghost walk tour, which is every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday through the summer until September long weekend.
00:16:58.780 Okay.
00:16:59.860 You just show up at 745 with cash in hand, pay the tour guide, myself or Sonia Green, and then we go on the tour.
00:17:08.100 if you can't make thursday friday or saturday or you want just me or you want to do a tour for the
00:17:15.320 cemetery then you would contact me either texting through my phone number or facebook messenger or
00:17:23.220 email and we would then organize to set up a time and a date that's good for you and me
00:17:30.560 and then i'll take you privately lothar mom i'm gonna do his name properly okay
00:17:35.960 Lothar the see I can't do it Lothar Malmberg why can't I make that happen I know Lothar Malmberg
00:17:47.300 is your ghost tour guide here in uh Drumheller but also a really good source of kind of putting
00:17:54.240 the history of Drumheller into a context that'll make you enjoy the experience I think a lot more
00:17:58.900 yeah like I think if you come to a place and you understand how it got to the moment where you
00:18:05.100 arrived you're ahead of the game you're going to really enjoy yourself a lot more a lot more here
00:18:10.360 in town yeah both are thanks man i appreciate this thanks mike all right this is a national
00:18:15.960 historic site just outside of drumheller alberta and i'm going to recommend that you make this part
00:18:22.300 of your trip we're at the atlas coal mine museum which is incredible first of all the setting is
00:18:28.660 remarkable. And I always recommend, and this is a really particular recommend, that you take a look
00:18:35.720 at the history through the eyes of what's still available in the museums across the country.
00:18:40.400 This is outstanding. And to put context to where you are and how we ended up here,
00:18:45.340 this is a good way to do it. And to that end, Bob Moffitt joins us. You're not just a tour guide,
00:18:50.760 but you lived the experience here. Yeah, I came to the mines in 1952,
00:18:59.260 so we were still using ponies and loading coal by hand, or at least in the mines that I worked in.
00:19:06.640 They didn't send you to the fancy mines? You had to use the hands and ponies?
00:19:10.300 You got her. So, Bob, let me ask you something. In that experience,
00:19:15.060 did you grow up in this area and find yourself in the mining industry?
00:19:20.760 I was born here in Drumheller, and I'm a fifth-generation coal miner.
00:19:27.220 Wow.
00:19:27.880 It seems like it was in your blood.
00:19:30.580 And so the skill set associated with that, I think, is probably maybe still used to some degree today,
00:19:39.680 if not automated a bit more or updated a bit.
00:19:42.220 But what was a day of mining like here in Drumheller?
00:19:46.860 Well, you started down the mine at, in my case, I went down at 8 o'clock,
00:19:53.920 rode in for pretty near three miles in one of the coal cars,
00:19:58.100 keeping your head down because you never knew when a timber was going to crack
00:20:01.960 and maybe lower itself, and you did like to come out with your head on.
00:20:06.580 That sounds fair. That sounds like a fair day's work.
00:20:08.780 Get back in there, and I worked for contract miners.
00:20:13.540 So the faster I went, the bigger the tips were on payday.
00:20:17.260 Right.
00:20:17.660 So I would help my miners load coal.
00:20:21.000 I would help them drill for the dynamite.
00:20:23.320 I would help them timber.
00:20:24.680 I helped them do everything, not only for the extra money that might come along,
00:20:30.220 but I served in an apprenticeship there that couldn't be beat.
00:20:36.000 Yeah, it sounds to me like you got to put your hands on everything in the process.
00:20:39.300 I did.
00:20:40.640 Paint a picture for me.
00:20:41.820 What was Drumheller like at that time?
00:20:43.920 Oh, my God, it was beautiful.
00:20:46.020 There was still a lot of the mines working.
00:20:49.180 You take payday.
00:20:50.800 They were smart with the mines.
00:20:52.960 Half the mines paid on this Friday and the other half paid on that Friday, which was good.
00:20:58.860 We didn't want everybody partying together on the same day.
00:21:01.920 No, but to walk down the street, you would thread your way through groups of people.
00:21:07.660 So it was, I don't know, it was just the atmosphere was, it was excitement.
00:21:14.020 It was like a heyday here.
00:21:15.360 Yeah.
00:21:15.900 But not only that, in that era, let's take a look back to the Depression.
00:21:21.140 This coal mining operation and many like it, how many were there in this area?
00:21:26.480 Mines?
00:21:26.860 Yeah.
00:21:27.360 Over the years, 139.
00:21:30.180 139 mines.
00:21:31.000 Now, during the Depression, this would have been one of the saving graces for the West.
00:21:35.780 not only was it providing fuel but it was providing a huge amount of money and a huge
00:21:40.380 amount of work for people not really okay what happened bob well nobody was burning any coal
00:21:47.960 or using any electricity if they could help it makes sense you if i could chop down a tree
00:21:54.920 instead of paying the two dollars for a load of coal and the miners that were working
00:22:00.500 unless they were on contract they were getting like 270 a day right so two dollars and 70 cents
00:22:09.080 very different from the mining standards of today what uh so what did that mean at the time then
00:22:15.940 because i think that i mean i was always under the impression that it was mining in this area
00:22:20.940 that made it made a difference to uh keeping the west afloat uh towns like drumheller might not
00:22:26.620 even existed at that time what did you do in that era when it slowed down well you started
00:22:33.680 leaving town yeah but the sad part about it is is during that depression ottawa was buying coal
00:22:43.100 to heat ontario homes and they were buying it from pennsylvania no i knew that was going to happen
00:22:51.920 why some things never change Bob I'll be honest with you it sure blazes it was bad here so uh
00:23:00.480 now roughing that out when is it I guess my next question is what makes this area so rich
00:23:07.020 for coal mining how how did this become the era of coal mining and there used to be a
00:23:13.900 kilometer thick ice
00:23:17.420 pack over your head here.
00:23:21.180 That means that when it melted, we had a lot of water.
00:23:25.660 And this was an ocean at one time, a sea, all the way from
00:23:29.600 Mexico up to Inuvik.
00:23:33.360 A sea. With lots of vegetation that
00:23:37.300 rotted and came down and was compressed. And it took
00:23:41.460 about 30 feet and I'm not using meters for you 30 feet of this vegetation compressed to make one
00:23:51.000 foot of coal that's incredible how how deep below the ground are you digging for coal
00:23:58.360 well we only went down like 100 feet below your feet here
00:24:03.240 uh i understand there's seven seams of coal down there so you could we could supply coal for
00:24:13.400 forever right and how far down did you did mining here go they were only we only went down 100 feet
00:24:21.640 below the valley floor and and so how many more feet do you figure are there below then well
00:24:27.820 there's supposed to be six more seams of coal down there and that's 100 feet as a seam yeah
00:24:32.380 No, the seam is 8, 10, 12 feet thick or 4 feet.
00:24:38.480 They actually mined coal in some places at 32 inches.
00:24:44.960 Really?
00:24:45.500 A miner was in there picking it out and kicking it back to his partner who loaded it in the car.
00:24:53.000 Incredible.
00:24:53.480 So what was the guys that you worked with, I guess, in the mine, what were the jobs that would be on a daily tour in there?
00:25:04.540 Oh, they worked in the tipple. You were up there picking the rock out of the coal.
00:25:10.540 They called it bone, but it wasn't bone. It's rock, clay, rock, throw all that stuff out.
00:25:17.480 You had people loading timbers and hay, sending it down to the horses.
00:25:23.840 If you happened, that'd be a horse mine.
00:25:27.220 And you had electricians, carpenters, machinists, clerks, and timekeepers.
00:25:36.800 There was work for everybody here.
00:25:38.100 There was a lot of work.
00:25:39.100 This mine, I believe it was 265 people worked at this particular mine.
00:25:45.240 That's a pretty significant portion of the population here at that time.
00:25:48.600 When you close a mine like that, people have to scatter all over to try and make a living.
00:25:55.360 So now I would imagine mining in the area no longer a thing.
00:26:00.220 It's done.
00:26:01.720 When did it finish?
00:26:03.720 Well, 79 was the last year they mined.
00:26:07.360 They pushed coal through this tipple till 84.
00:26:11.740 But that was it.
00:26:13.140 And even the strip mining that's not far from here shut down.
00:26:19.340 What did that do to Drumheller at the time?
00:26:21.400 Oh, it killed us.
00:26:23.020 Yeah.
00:26:23.820 Businesses going out and, you know, going bankrupt and people just moving out.
00:26:30.180 I don't know what happened here this last year, but there's been about eight new businesses move into town.
00:26:36.980 So maybe there's hope.
00:26:38.380 Well, there's a new mine in town and that's tourism.
00:26:41.640 I mean, that's the one thing that I think Drumheller has that you can never take away.
00:26:46.880 The most unique landscape I've seen anywhere in the world.
00:26:50.000 Oh, yeah.
00:26:50.220 It's great.
00:26:51.140 It's incredible.
00:26:52.260 What has created this landscape?
00:26:54.080 Is it that same process of glacial melting?
00:26:57.620 Glacial melting, and it must have been some terrific heat to meld it to the extent that it carved this valley out, right?
00:27:06.760 it's incredible how the landscape is you can see that it's a product of movement that there was
00:27:14.180 something here that oh yeah you can see the prehistory here it's very visible yeah so i think
00:27:20.440 maybe tourism has added to a new uh breath of life oh tourism is great we got uh we got the
00:27:27.920 museum in and people started to realize gee whiz maybe we should be looking at other areas like the
00:27:35.960 swinging bridge and the hoodoos and the atlas mine right well that's a great point i mean
00:27:42.360 that tourism is the reason this mine got saved and really i'd like to put a point on it that
00:27:48.360 it was mines like this that made the west a developing place see there was no timber out
00:27:56.980 here no there was nothing to burn but buffalo chips and the buffalo were all dying so right
00:28:02.760 Yeah, so essentially it was by necessity that the West kept warm through and powered many things.
00:28:10.240 The rail system, I imagine, was heavily impacted.
00:28:13.100 Oh, unbelievable the number of rails that ran.
00:28:16.100 I saw a map from 1920 or something like that.
00:28:22.240 You couldn't believe the rails that were from one place to the other to the other.
00:28:28.020 and coming into centers like Drumheller became a center.
00:28:32.580 Right.
00:28:32.800 I mean, at one time, you went north of here for banking
00:28:36.520 and west of here to buy groceries.
00:28:39.960 My grandfather came up here and opened the first grocery store.
00:28:44.620 Oh, is that right?
00:28:45.440 Yes.
00:28:45.920 And when did he do that?
00:28:47.080 What year was that?
00:28:47.560 It was 1915.
00:28:49.200 People were buying from other places.
00:28:53.140 But he came up from Arkansas.
00:28:54.900 He closed the store there and came into Drumheller.
00:28:57.040 they ran it for a year and sold it and then he he was work he was well over six feet he was
00:29:04.420 working in a mine for that first year and as soon as he had money to buy a dray system he
00:29:11.960 he went into that business get enough of the ducking for all day long yeah that's a large
00:29:18.160 so let's talk about that what are some of the physical realities of working in a mine then
00:29:22.960 Well, if you go into our shower house here, if you're anything over 5'8",
00:29:29.700 you kind of watch out.
00:29:31.040 You don't hit your head on the nozzles.
00:29:34.800 And people say, well, everybody was short.
00:29:38.700 What for?
00:29:39.840 Well, I said, look at it this way.
00:29:41.580 They worked 10, 12, 14-hour days, six days a week, went to church on Sunday,
00:29:47.520 had very little food, didn't know what the heck fruit was.
00:29:51.600 Right.
00:29:52.400 You know, you don't get very big.
00:29:55.460 That's the truth.
00:29:56.880 A generation, even the generation that came after mine and my kids' generation,
00:30:03.080 these kids are getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
00:30:04.880 We're supercharging them, I think, you know.
00:30:07.820 But I can't imagine at that time.
00:30:09.920 And this is something I've noticed visiting other museums across the West,
00:30:14.300 is that, yeah, humans were a different size in that era.
00:30:17.820 Well, my son, who was short-earned me, was with me in Battleford,
00:30:21.820 and they have a Northwest Mounted Police Museum there.
00:30:25.140 It's an old fort.
00:30:26.740 And we're going through it.
00:30:28.840 He said, geez, Daddy said, those bunks are even too short for me.
00:30:32.360 And I said, I just mocked them up.
00:30:35.060 And then we saw a recruiting poster, minimum height, 5'2".
00:30:40.560 That was for the Northwest Mounted Police.
00:30:43.820 That's incredible when you think about it.
00:30:46.000 And now you see some of the cops on boots are pretty big individuals.
00:30:51.220 Yeah.
00:30:52.380 What are some of the things here at the site that you think people take away?
00:30:55.920 You've done a tour and you see the looks on their faces and you think,
00:31:00.060 I imparted this on them.
00:31:01.680 What do you think people take away more than anything from the Atlas Mine?
00:31:06.820 It's just an education, a realization of what people went through to build this country.
00:31:15.440 That's what I think they take.
00:31:17.920 It's like, holy moly, I don't think I could have done that.
00:31:21.820 yeah yeah but i tell them yes you could have because if you got as hungry as those pioneers got
00:31:28.980 you'd find a way yeah it's interesting that we don't realize that we're doing that every day we
00:31:35.060 find you know we're trying to find ways to save the environment trying to find ways to
00:31:39.380 make water better available yeah we're doing the same thing but when we look back through the eyes
00:31:44.320 of history and actually get individuals who can reach into that history and tell us those stories
00:31:49.780 you see that we are pretty amazing as canadians and we'll continue to be oh yeah this we're
00:31:57.040 fantastic people i think so i mean i don't want to brag but if you're watching this and you're
00:32:02.360 not from canada we're pretty fantastic well bob is anyway look i really appreciate your time on
00:32:07.860 this man and uh my pleasure i congratulate you on keeping together an incredible site
00:32:14.800 that I encourage families and travelers from far and wide to come in and understand better
00:32:20.300 how this West was really won. And we are getting tours from Australia and Denmark and around the
00:32:27.860 world. That's incredible. All the way from Ontario, for goodness sake. And even from Ontario.
00:32:33.880 Wow. They led us over the border and here we are. Bob, thank you so much. You're welcome. I
00:32:38.580 appreciate this thank you this is jay russell and he's my connect to bob by the way bob stole my hat
00:32:45.440 he did steal your hat yeah it's all right it doesn't matter there's nothing i can do everybody
00:32:49.420 knows there's nothing there uh but listen i appreciate you taking the time because you
00:32:54.360 really are the connect that i have here and that's because you run the place right so tell
00:32:59.880 me a little bit about what the experience is i'll tell you as we approached we both got excited
00:33:05.260 because this felt like real genuine wild west uh settling the west kind of era and it's
00:33:12.460 a visual beauty man well in a lot of ways drumheller is the wild child of alberta because
00:33:19.540 it was one of the last communities to develop uh early 20th century uh 1911 is when it first opened
00:33:24.080 up and there was nothing here there's no infrastructure and so by the end of 1911 there
00:33:29.120 was nine mines and hundreds of men with no infrastructure by 1916 there was 12 000 people
00:33:34.520 here and that is a boom that was a huge boom and there was a huge crisis here there was a housing
00:33:40.520 crisis men and women were living in the hills digging holes to the sides of the hills i don't
00:33:45.400 know if you saw our miner shack but that would be graduated up from the hill that's just a one room
00:33:49.640 shack built a mud straw manure and you put a coal stove in it and you're warm for the winter
00:33:54.200 uh so it was wild here and the strikes were wild the accidents were brutal the working conditions
00:34:00.320 were considered the worst in north america in 1919 and from there we developed into uh well it had
00:34:06.800 nicknames it had hell's hole i've heard that devil's row yeah uh naked city and then later
00:34:12.340 on payroll town and wonder town of the west so as the 1940s rolled on and miners started getting
00:34:18.140 to work year round then they had a little bit more money in their pockets and were able to
00:34:21.740 establish themselves and that's where the more modest homes came in like houses with bedrooms
00:34:26.300 and the yards plumbing eventually came in and children were able to go on to college and
00:34:31.480 university well here bob he's from five generations of miners in town that's right so i mean it it
00:34:37.660 probably uh you know in that time his ancestry was in the hills likely oh it was yeah yeah yeah
00:34:45.220 yeah and bob's ancestry like many of them came to work in the mines so they had experience elsewhere
00:34:50.940 in Clay's Bay, Nova Scotia, Bob's family, and they came over roughly a hundred years ago to
00:34:56.400 Drumheller to work in the mines here. And that's the case with many of these guys. Some of them
00:35:01.000 were, many of them were Eastern European, but they had experience in the mines of Pennsylvania
00:35:04.660 and West Virginia and were recruited up to work in Alberta. So at one time in about 1931,
00:35:12.060 about 26 languages were spoken at the Atlas Coal Mine. Oh my goodness. And only a third of the
00:35:17.120 miners identified as canadian isn't that something yeah and they built a community out of it and you
00:35:23.380 know like it's kind of interesting to think because that was almost like the canadian model wasn't it
00:35:28.280 well absolutely we saw that in other industries whether it was building the rail or you know
00:35:32.540 whatever to to settle this country we brought people from other countries to make that possible
00:35:38.380 their skill set their labor their ability to weather the uh the the harshness of settling
00:35:45.280 So it's just interesting to see that we started as sort of a multicultural society from our industries out.
00:35:53.820 In a way, yeah.
00:35:54.740 Yeah.
00:35:55.060 Yeah.
00:35:55.420 And, like, they knew about the coal here for some time, but it took a little while for them to develop it.
00:35:59.880 And, well, ironically, the guy who discovered the Albertosaurus, Joseph B. Tyrrell, was also the guy that was here working for the Geological Survey of Canada.
00:36:08.760 And that same day that he discovered the dinosaur, he discovered North America's largest coal deposit.
00:36:14.180 If you don't have a whiskey at the end of that day, I mean, how much lottery can you hit on one day?
00:36:21.380 Jay, tell me what people experience when they come.
00:36:24.140 Because I see families, a couple obviously people retired and enjoying their travels across Canada this summer.
00:36:32.200 Let's give Canadians an understanding of why it's important to come here and what there is to do.
00:36:36.980 Okay, well first off, I'll let you know what there is to do.
00:36:39.240 You might be able to hear it in the background.
00:36:40.440 There's a train rolling by.
00:36:41.420 We can't see it.
00:36:42.020 we have a variety of guided tours on site and so we have a we have where you can explore the
00:36:46.980 surface of the mine on your own takes about 45 minutes to an hour to see that uh if you come
00:36:51.340 on weekdays we have bob moffitt and of course our fifth generation coal miner who takes tours we all
00:36:56.560 just met him what a fantastic guy yeah amazing man uh so you get and where else can you get a
00:37:02.340 90 year old fifth generation coal miner who's a gifted storyteller can i tell you something
00:37:06.000 my first experience with bob was watching him jump over a fence he's 90 i don't coal mining
00:37:15.280 can do something for a person's body apparently well bob is the kind of guy just never quits he
00:37:20.060 always works and he's always finding himself uh something to do he's industrious and uh we've
00:37:26.100 never ever had a moment where we're thinking geez bob's not doing anything he's always doing
00:37:31.620 something i can see that so yeah no as part of the experience people like bob specifically yeah
00:37:36.980 a great perspective and a great uh scene center exactly and then we also have the guided tours
00:37:42.440 so we've got the guided train tour we have guided tours into our tipple that's canada's last wooden
00:37:46.440 tipple that's a tipple what does a tipple do exactly well it's an ore sorting plant it's a
00:37:52.020 processing plant so basically the coal came down from the mine and they had these giant shaker
00:37:56.060 screens in there and they shook the screens sized the coal into about five different sizes they put
00:38:00.580 the chemical treatment on it and one thing they did here to make their coal look unique well what
00:38:05.100 color is coal black of course but at the atlas coal mine when you bought it it had orange specks
00:38:10.360 on it it looked like it was already on fire oh and that was its branding oh i was going to take
00:38:15.400 off my shirt but i won't but it says wildfire coal and that was the brand of coal that they
00:38:19.180 sold fascinating so they just added a little bit of color just i guess spray paint on it as it went
00:38:24.060 by or something yeah they blessed the coal they had a paintbrush and powder paint and just sprinkle
00:38:28.160 it as it goes by puts these orange dots in the coal makes it look like it's already on fire
00:38:31.840 that's a fantastic marketing ploy huh it was and it was one of the best-selling brands of coal in
00:38:37.120 alberta at the time and they ran with it uh they they hired a monoplane and a barnstorming pilot
00:38:43.540 and the plane was called the lady wildfire it went through all of alberta saskatchewan manitoba
00:38:48.400 we go to midway stampedes chautauquas give kids rides create
00:38:52.740 buzz yeah they wow they knew their marketing way back then so you get to go up to the tipple
00:38:59.640 and see this sorting uh scenario exactly do you get to walk up the uh the uh i guess what do you
00:39:06.300 call that a ramp a that's a gantry again that's a gantry you bet and so we have uh the guided
00:39:12.200 tipple tour you take a secondary gantry up this way into the tipple and there's all kinds of
00:39:16.120 stories machinery in there it's a an amazing tour if you ask me but if you want the uh the one that
00:39:21.820 everyone wants that's the underground tour and that one is a hike and so that one you climb up
00:39:25.740 the primary gantry that skinny building here right and you go up to where it connects to the hill
00:39:29.560 and then you venture out onto the what the miners call the chicken run and then you take the miners
00:39:35.360 trail which is built 1936 all the way up to the mine portal and so from from that spot there it's
00:39:41.020 about 16 stories gaining elevation for you so it is a hike but those who take it are rewarded you
00:39:47.500 get to go underground turn the lights off shovel a little coal here's some stories see the coal
00:39:51.240 i'm doing that before i go oh i can't wait okay that's exciting uh and then of course you have
00:39:56.680 the train that you mentioned uh on site there are all the the operating buildings i guess uh behind
00:40:03.240 us as we made the entry there seems to be like a a little uh village of uh company houses yeah yeah
00:40:09.960 yeah so there's actually quite a few things to see and do so um when you come to the parking lot most
00:40:14.840 people go to the gift shop that's it looks like a company store that's what it was for a while
00:40:18.440 and you get oriented there but then there's the company houses the company houses have exhibits
00:40:22.580 in them so they're mostly interactive for kids so there's an art interactive there's a lunch
00:40:27.220 interactive um and then uh the there's buildings on site when you do the self-guided you can go
00:40:32.480 into the wash house you go to the lamp house go to the front door of the supply house mine office
00:40:35.980 so there's a lot of things to see and this site was basically shut down in 1984 and became a
00:40:41.180 museum in 87 so right away locally people had a vision for how important this was to maintain as
00:40:48.260 part of the part of the i guess context historical for drumheller yeah yeah um at that point of course
00:40:57.020 the town was in economic uh downturn and the tiro opened up in 1985 and valley knew there was some
00:41:03.720 tourism already happening already it's been there since 1950s but they realized that we could really
00:41:09.040 make our economy go with this and so drumheller around the 80s started really turning things
00:41:13.740 around in terms of tourism and the local visitors or sorry the local residents here realized yeah
00:41:19.060 this is our heritage and we're proud of our heritage and and there is something about it
00:41:23.560 and we did get nationally designated this was part of building of canada it was drumheller coal that
00:41:28.600 helped heat the homes cook the food run the trains of western canadians make electricity
00:41:32.960 without drumheller coal at that time in canada's history the economic prosperity we take advantage
00:41:39.400 of now may have been greatly delayed or maybe never even happened at all yeah all right well
00:41:44.920 listen i'll tell you what we're going to give people a look around and i'll make sure that
00:41:47.960 people get the uh contact information in the description of the audio and video version of
00:41:54.480 this uh visit that we've had uh you'll be able to make contact understand a little bit more
00:42:00.060 jay thanks man i really appreciate this