Robert E. “Dutch” Van Tassel (B. 1935)
Dutch Van Tassell was born in Nova Scotia and attended Mount Allison University to get an undergraduate degree in geology. He had a summer job with Giant Yellowknife and returned there as a stope geologist after graduation in 1958. He left to work with Julian Boldy on a property 140 miles further north and then joined a new Giant Yellowknife exploration team in aerial surveying. He was briefly employed at Denison Uranium Mines in Elliot Lake, and then was hired by Falconbridge Nickel’s chief geologist Alan Archer as part of a United Keno Hill Mines (UKHM) exploration team.1)
The 20-year-old Van Tassel was to carry out the topside exploration. He had eighteen university students to guide the summer of 1962, starting the day after he arrived in Calumet. They had an overburden drill, the first time one was used in Canadian geochemical exploration, but no operator. In 1964, the overburden drill produced the first indications of the Husky vein system. In 1965, drilling results were good but not economical. In October 1966, UKHM managers announced that the company intended to close Elsa. Al Archer had quit in 1965 to open a private firm in Whitehorse. A flash fire from a leaky gas stove line at the No Cash mine in June 1966 ignited the lunchroom and trapped eight men in two different air pockets on the 200-foot level. Rescuers worked from the surface and an adit at the 500-foot level and they got to the men in six hours. Three miners and a diamond driller died from smoke inhalation. No Cash closed as did other mines and a management consultant was brought to Elsa.2)
In the 1950s, there had been a staking rush as silver, zinc, and cadmium prices soared. UKHM had a newly renovated concentrator mill and a fleet of twenty trucks that went twelve hours between Whitehorse and Elsa. The trucks rested for six weeks during break-up and freeze-up. In 1967, the drilling program was on-line again, and Dutch concentrated on the Husky veins. In September they found ruby silver in the core – an extremely high-grade sulphide mineral about 67% silver: technically known as pyrargyrite. Husky was the aorta to the vein system at UKHM and it eventually produced 60% of all of the silver coming from the company’s six mines or about 17 million tonnes of silver over its lifetime.3)
The drill was a proven performer, and the company bought a second one when the exploration program expanded in 1971. The overburden drills were a faster and more economical coverage of veins although they could only operate from April to October in sixteen-hour shifts. Dutch’s exploration program (1963-1969) extended outward to known vein areas that were close to the surface and could be open pit mined.4)
Falconbridge Nickel and Canadian Superior Exploration, a subsidiary of Superior Oil, financed a new exploration division. Dutch retained his consultant geologist position for Elsa and was also named Yukon exploration superintendent. He was set up in Whitehorse in March 1969, and spent his time looking over geology maps. He focused on the Williams Creek area, 130 miles northwest of Whitehorse in the Dawson Range. He hired geologist Dick Joy to ground-proof the area and they found copper ore. UKHM staked seventy claims and drilled in 1973 to find a rich copper deposit. Copper prices were low, and thirty-five years passed before the Minto Mine went into production. Dutch and Dick were flown in for the ribbon cutting in October 2007.5)
In 1982, when prices dropped and Yukon mines closed, Dutch joined his friend and former UKHM president Peter Munro (who had been appointed president of Dickenson Mines in Toronto). Dutch retired from Goldcorp in 1998 and he and Carolyn moved to High River Alberta in 1999 where Dutch became director to a number of junior mining companies. He was inducted into the Yukon Prospectors’ Association Hall of Fame in 2007 for his discovery of the Husky and DRF/Minto mines and for mentoring many young geologists and prospectors to their own careers.6)