Something happened here. You sense it as soon as you see the smattering of wood frame houses  perched on the barren hills. This is a place of ghosts and memories. Walking along the twisting streets you can still feel their fading traces. Something wild, something ominous happened here, something that makes this little town of Cobalt different from any other town in Ontario. That something was silver. The chance discovery of rich silver ore in 1903 transformed a barren patch of bush into a mythic center for riches and adventure. Cobalt, grew up almost overnight. In cities like New York and Toronto it was looked upon as a gateway to wealth and excitement.

When word leaked out of the rich silver deposits found along Mileage 103 of the T&NO railway line, there were many who looked upon it as a continuation of the great Klondike adventure. Since the California gold rush of 1848, gold-rush fever had raged like a brush-fire over the far frontiers. Although Hollywood has rendered the wild west as a place of cowboys, in reality it was a boom driven by miners and prospectors.

What made Cobalt unique was that it was the first authentic gold-rush occurrence on the eastern part of the continent. Up until Cobalt, Ontario had paid little attention to the kind of gambling / boom-bust cycle that fed the prospecting booms of the west. Cobalt broke the mould of sleepy Ontario. The train brought in more than its share of adventurers, con-men and dreamers, people that locals call "characters", but what the settled communities would think of as unmanageable. No doubt, many of these adventurers assumed that when the boom was over, Cobalt would disappear like so many other gold-rush towns and it would be time to move onto new adventures. Spurned on by the incredible speculation boom started in Cobalt, prospectors fanned out across the north discovering rich ore bodies in Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Noranda, and Red Lake. But by then, the sense of the frontier was closing. The days of the wild-west mentality were gone. On the narrow streets of Cobalt, one kind of mining life came to an end, and another was born.

Cobalt was a town of dreams and tragedy, a place where idealism had to struggle against often brutal conditions. Land was scarce, the absentee mine owners often treated the town as its private fiefdom. Some settlers found riches, others only the choking dust underground or the threat of fire in the rough-hewn shanty streets. By 1920, the glory years of the camp were pretty much over The mines in Cobalt were very rich but the ore deposits were shallow. Unlike the gold mines of Timmins and Kirkland Lake where the major mines sometimes went well below 6,000 feet, the Cobalt mines were often no deeper than 400 feet. By the end of the World War I many of the mines had run out of rich ore. The large, ramshackle neighbourhoods became quieter places as the families packed up their bags and moved onto the new mining towns farther north.

Unlike, many of its sister communities in the far west, Cobalt didn't become a ghost town. The people who remained had the stubborn Cobalt spirit and they were determined to see their town survive.

Since the first boom, the mines have opened, closed, and reopened many times. There never is a shortage of dreamers and adventurers hoping to strike it rich in the hard rock that Cobalt is built on. The Cobalt Walking Trail is a chance for you to unearth some of the rich history in the Cobalt camp. This is a town that has forgotten more history than most towns will ever know. Any one of the three tours will give you a sense of what it means to live in the last of the wild frontier towns. After all, the Cobalt adventure isn't over, it has only just begun.