In 1937 Tony Stubbs (1914 – 1979), newly graduated from the Commerce Department of the University of Alberta, was hired by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company to work in the office of a new mining camp in the Northwest Territories. Tony had grown up on a fruit ranch at Okanagan Mission near Kelowna, British Columbia. His parents were Kathleen (1885 – 1957) and Robin (1882 – 1957). He had three siblings, Mary (b. 1910), Archie (b. 1912), and Dick (b. 1915).
These letters from Yellowknife span the period from July 1937 to October 1939, during which time Yellowknife and the Con Camp grew from a collection of tents, building supplies, and heavy equipment into a bustling town and a producing mine.
The letters from Yellowknife are bracketed by two additional letters which function as prologue and afterword to the story. The first letter was sent in 1936 from a fraternity house in Edmonton, where Tony was in the midst of final exams. The last letter in the sequence was sent from Vancouver in 1940, where he had just started work with his new employer Helliwell-MacLachlan, the accountancy firm who were the Con Mine auditors. Tony became a partner in Helliwell-MacLachlan, established their branch office in Vernon, BC, and ran it until his retirement.