Mirrors of Stone:
Fragments from the Porcupine Frontier
by Charlie Angus and Louie Palu
Charlie Angus and photographer Louie Palu both have childhood memories related to the old-world practice of mounting a photo of a deceased person on the tomb-stone. Now they have together produced a book, Mirrors of Stone: Fragments from the Porcupine Frontier, published by Between the Lines.
The stories presented here are those of ordinary people living work-a-day lives, not the great and well-known nor the participants in well-publicized events. Most of these people were immigrants and most were connected with mining in the Porcupine, which was a mining and also a multilingual frontier. Mirrors of Stone delves into the many ethnic cultures that thrived in the mining areas of Northern Ontario from the 1920s to the 1960s. The stormy history of hard rock mining camps has never fit into the comfortable clichés by which Canada tells its story. Angus unearths the dark sides of this history —the wild tales of bootleggers, mobsters, and prostitution rings— and in so doing opens up new ways of seeing Ontario's history and culture.This book reflects on the life and death of the people who made up the Porcupine area during the early part of the twentieth century.