A Canadian Terhune Family
from The Summit-Rossland, B.C 1994
American Generation
West to BC
Photo Album
There's a romance to gold mining. Kind of like gambling, there's the lure of the big strike just around the corner.
Rossland's steward of gold mining is Roger Terhune. When Rossland Museum and Gold Mine Tour opens this weekend for the 27th straight year, Terhune will be there, though he's there even when it's closed.
With an old pot-bellied stove for heat in one of the sheds, Terhune spends a part of most days tinkering and fixing displays or building new ones. But the man with the full mane of bright silver hair has been around the place a lot longer than even that.
"The mine used to be my playground," he said, I lived near the mine and as a kid I used to watch the miners going up every day - I used to know them pretty well."
Terhune reminisced about growing up 500 metres from the Centre Star Mine back in the days when Rossland was the Golden City and pulling the dream mineral out of the ground. As a kid he'd sit back and watch the trains roll into town, and pull up at the station on Second Avenue where the fire hall is now.
"I used to love the place. Living back then was a hell of a lot better than is now... I shouldn't say it was better... they didn't have cars in those days. They had to walk in, work 10 hours, go home and milk the cow. It wasn't better living, It was tougher really."
Born in Kempt Shore on the Bay of Fundy back in Nova Scotia, it was mining that brought Terhune out to B.C. as a child. His dad was a miner and moved the family to the province when Terhune was two. He quickly followed in his dad's footsteps. Though you had to be 18 to work underground, he always managed to get surface jobs while he was in High School. Then in the 1930's when Cominco leased out parts of the LeRoi claim to miners, father and son worked together.
"It takes a father to teach you how to do things. I learned pretty well."
In his twenties, it was time to move out into the world outside Rossland. Like a scene out of It's a Wonderful Life, his bags were packed and he was ready to head up to the Columbia School of Mining. But something came up.
"This is when I fell in love." The object of that was Christina, better know as Chris.
"She's a beautiful gal and she's stuck by me for 55 years."
Terhune spent 10 years working the lease - five with his father and five with another partner. That's why he's one to the few people you can walk through the gold mine tour with and have pointed out the stopes he worked on.
He spent a number of years with Cominco in exploration. That search is something Terhune planned to fill his retirement with.
"I retired as soon as I could because I was always going to find my own mine. I had a lot of fun, it was interesting," he said, "It's pretty hard to find your own mine but you can dream."
Just like the way life seems to work out, something came up back in 1967 to keep him from chasing the mine and the dream.
"I got involved in this place (the museum) and I didn't get a lot of prospecting done."
He did get plenty done though. When Rossland Historical Society started, the entrance to the mine was filled with rotting timbers, there was no museum building, and the historical town site was Rossland's garbage dump.
"It was an eyesore. The Rossland Historical Association had two tiny rooms at the Court House."
The first thing built was the current main room of the museum. It's slowly been added onto in the past quarter century, tripling in size.
"The museum tunnel happened to be close by. We started that same year. The underground was quite a mess, it needed new timber, it had to be made safe," he said. The first five years it was all volunteer work and it took that long to make the underground look respectable."
Terhune's work continued though. He's still working away at the mine, putting the finishing touches on the labour of love. He spent last summer getting a replica of a mine's inspector's office built.
Though he never really got the chance to find his own mine, he agreed that he might have found it by accident back in 1967.
"I'm happy with the way things turned out. What would I do with a million bucks today?" he laughed, "This solved the problem. I didn't have to climb those mountains any more."
