'Barren Lands' delivers wild ride

If you ever wondered how Canada's diamond mining boom got its start, then taking the time to read "Barren Lands: An Epic Search for Diamonds in the North American Arctic" by Kevin Krajick is a good idea.

Published in 2001, this nonfiction treatise on the subject is technical enough for professionals and yet simple enough for laymen. In 388 pages, Krajick, a prizewinning journalist, transports the reader like some literary "Dr Who", through 464 years of diamond exploration in the Arctic and elsewhere around the globe.

From the adventures of early French navigator Jacques Cartier to the intense machinations of the international DeBeers cartel, Krajick sets a breakneck pace through a niche of history seldom explored. In telling the real story behind the advent of Canada's diamond mines, he crafts an intriguing, but believable "rags to riches" tale that is hard to put down.

The book's central figure, Chuck Fipke is the prospector mainly responsible for the discoveries that led to development of BHP Billiton's Ekati diamond mine in the Northwest Territories and a modern-day mining exploration rush unprecedented in Far North history.

Krajick sweeps the reader along with Fipke from his earliest days as an explorer to the aftermath of striking it rich.

He also shares countless asides along the way that bring to life people and places that otherwise would remain shrouded in time. Consider, for example, the tenant farmer in Wisconsin who found a wine-yellow stone while digging a well. His wife kept it on a shelf for seven years and when he died took it to a jeweler who told her it was a topaz and paid her one dollar. It turned out to be a 15.37 carat diamond. Or the 4.25 carat beauty found by a little girl in a pile of dirt beside her home in Shelby, Ala.

The author of Barren Lands recounts the adventures of countless heroes, villains and hapless hunters whose close encounters with diamonds earned them at least footnotes in history. There's the Utah college student who conducted his search for diamonds from a wheelchair and the young men that Fipke sent to Arkansas to slog through swamps and briar patches on the trail of one hunch after another.

Krajick also manages to slip in numerous observations, seemingly with scant effort, that add up to a meaty introduction to the mineral geology of diamonds and how a general understanding of that geology evolved through the centuries.

Writes Krajick: "Chemists had by now analyzed countless whole-rock samples from pipes both barren and diamondiferous, hoping to find some compound useful as a diamond tracer. … The task was complicated by the wild assortment of xenoliths and minerals, many of which chemists subjected to separate analyses. These included green diopsides found in T.G. Bonney's xenolith of eclogite decades before. But even if chrome diopside was associated with diamond - not proven - it was useless. It quickly disintegrated in weather and thus was rarely found outside a pipe."

Krajick also opens a brief window on how various stakeholders, including environmental groups, reacted to the discovery of diamonds near Lac de Gras in the Northwest Territories.

Best of all, he captures the flavor and spirit of the Canadian Arctic in ways reminiscent of John McPhee's "Coming into the Country." Some critics say he did it with considerably more skill than McPhee. I won't make the comparison, but I will attest to the presence of magic - the kind that for me, created a rush of "déjà vu" replete with the sights, sounds and smells of a blustery late summer day on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

As a journalist covering the mining industry, reading this book gave me a fresh appreciation for how unsophisticated I am about diamond mining, and the mining industry, in general.

More importantly, "Barren Lands" made me regret my lack of exposure.