When Viola MacMillan died of a heart attack on her way to the bank in the summer of 1993, her executors set to work clearing out her home. They found hidden in the attic a ghostwritten autobiography that she’d kept secret.
MacMillan was one of the most intriguing women in Canadian history. Born in 1903, the thirteenth of fifteen children of a farmer, she became a powerful leader in the male-dominated mining industry. It could be argued that she did more to grow the sector in this country than any other. But her rise to fame and glory was abruptly cut short when, at sixty-four, she was jailed for manipulating the stock of Windfall Oils and Mines, one of the junior companies in her stable.
The executors felt MacMillan’s story should be told, even if she did not. In 2001, ECW Press published the manuscript as From the Ground Up, to which I added an introduction and afterword. More than two decades later, Tim Falconer has taken a deeper and less...
Virginia Heffernan wrote Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness.
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