Black Pearl and Kate: A Groundbreaking Prospecting Woman

This is the story, written in verse, of the life and times of prospector Kate Rice and her important role in finding gold in the Snow Lake, Manitoba area, which has led to various mining projects in the area including one known as Black Pearl Exploration.

Kate was born in 1880 in the town of St Mary’s in Southern Ontario. She graduated from the University of Toronto with an Honours degree in mathematics and worked as a teacher for a few years. She was over six feet tall, and learned good bush skills and the Cree language, and went on to become a well-respected mineral prospector in Northern Manitoba. Most of her bush travelling was by canoe and on foot.

She took on a male prospecting partner, Richard Dick Woosey, who had served in the British army in India and in the Boer War, before moving to Canada. They lived together in a log cabin on an island on Wekusko Lake where they both fished, hunted, and prospected. He had a gold prospect that was sold but never made much money from this project. She had a nickel-copper prospect that International Nickel (Inco) optioned for $45,000 cash. One day in 1940, while having a haircut, her partner Woosey suddenly died from a heart attack. He was buried with a military funeral in The Pas, Manitoba.

She bravely continued alone in the north for several more years, before settling in a nursing home near Brandon Manitoba, where she died in 1963 at age 80.

In 2013, after this book was written, she would be inducted into the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and was honoured and respected for her challenges and successes as a prospector.