For someone who has been retired since 1989, Michael Barnes has no intention of slowing down.
The author of 48 books and counting, most about Northern
Ontario, Barnes has had a long and varied career that included
a bus conductor, a bush cook in Ramsey, and a beer thrower in
Wawa.
He has also been a CBC freelance broadcaster and newspaper
columnist, both for a time in Sudbury. But his "real job" was a
public school teacher and principal working in locations across
the north and finally ending up in Kirkland Lake.
Born in 1934, Barnes immigrated to Canada in 1956 after seeing a newspaper ad for desperately needed teachers in the wilds of Northern Ontario.
He found himself in the isolated community of Biscotasing -a
faded lumber and railroad village-living in a tiny shack with
no electricity or water.
As he said, "You only got running water if you ran to the
well!"
That lasted for only one year and his next move was to
Sudbury, a community that was booming at the time.
He also got his driver's licence here and remembered that
the city had a reputation for bad drivers saying, "If you could
drive in Sudbury you could drive anywhere."
It was when he finally settled in Kirkland Lake that his
first book on Roza Brown, a gold camp pioneer was published. He
has lived in or around mining camps for most of his adult life,
and so it was only natural to start writing about these
exciting events.
Fortunes in the Ground is one of his best known books about
the three great mining camps of Cobalt, the Porcupine and
Kirkland Lake. It not only highlights the winners and losers in
those great discoveries, but also includes the ordinary people
who came and pioneered Northern Ontario.
As Barnes said, "There is a romance to mining. You get caught up with the characters. You walk the same streets.
Many of these places were hard-working and hard- drinking
towns.
"Most people today have forgotten that in the late 1950s,
Northern Ontario was still very isolated, a frontier populated
by a variety of characters from many different backgrounds."
Another book, Great Northern Characters presents the stories
of  25 men and women of Northern Ontario, some who may not
have been considered successful by their fellow citizen, but
were certainly fulfilled in their own opinion.
Archie Belaney (Grey Owl), Jack Englehart, Charlie Chow,
Sandy McIntyre, Viola MacMillan, and Allan Roy Dafoe are only a
few of the pioneers covered in this book. Do yourself a favour
and Google those names to get a great understanding of Northern
Ontario history.
Barnes remembers one important detail from those days, the
incredible amount of wealth - gold, silver, nickel and lumber -
that was shipped south. To him, very little of that wealth was
returned to the north.
He has also written six children's books with engaging
titles that include, The Sudbury Moon Chase and Monster from
the Slimes.
 The second book is about children playing near the red
slime pipes in Kirkland Lake where strange noises and smells
are the starting point of an adventure-filled mini-novel.
In 1995, he received the Order of Canada for his
contributions to Canadian history. He just finished a book, The
Scholarly Prospector, on Don Mckinnon, one of the two men who
discovered the incredibly rich Hemlo gold deposit located near
the town of Marathon.
Barnes is just starting another book under the auspices of
the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada that will
chronicle mineral exploration in Canada since the Second World
War. The book, More Than Free Gold takes up the story where
Arnold Hoffman's popular work Free Gold left off in 1946.
Barnes says, "This will fill a gap in the story of Canadian
resource history and these men want the facts to be retained
for future generations."
Often called the "Pierre Burton" of Northern Ontario
history, Barnes once met the man at a writers' union social
function. Barnes' daughter introduced him to the famous author
as "the "poor man's Pierre Burton."
Burton supposedly replied, "How nice, just as long as he
stays that way!"
Barnes is currently retired - I use that word loosely - in
Haliburton,  where, true to form he has authored three
books on the central highlands of Ontario.
This has been very beneficial to the local economy as there
is little industry in the region other than tourism. He spent
six months observing the wolves of the Haliburton Forest before
writing a book on that subject.
"Northern Ontario gave me a good living," Barnes says.
"I met many great people and characters. I tried to pay back some of those gifts I received from the north by writing about this wild country and lonely land that few Canadians, especially southern Ontarians know so little about."
Stan Sudol is a Toronto-based communications consultant/policy analyst who writes extensively on mining issues.[email protected].