Cliff took his first job as a milk deliveryman in his local neighbourhood at age 13, earning $0.50 a day, working 7 days a week. However, the money was his to spend.

Cliff would start his day at 5 a.m. and be ready for the school bus at 8 a.m.. He would do this until he was 16 when he took a job working on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, earning $0.64 a hour, working 6 days a week. At 17 he got his first smelter job working in the Trail zinc-lead smelter complex, the largest zinc-lead smelter in the world at the time.

His family was quite comfortable as his father was a foreman in the Trail smelter complex but, due to the work ethics which he observed at home and on both Scottish grandparents’ farms and which were instilled into him, he became a very conscientious worker from a very young age. He realized that one has to work for rewards of any kind. This upbringing has stayed with him always and he has applied the same ethics and integrity to everything he has undertaken.

In 1890 the discovery of gold/copper ore on the face of Red Mountain by Joe Moris and Joe Bourgeois was the single most important event in the history of Trail and the Trail/Rossland area. The five claims staked by Moris and Bourgeois on Red Mountain in July of that year led to the rise of Rossland as the premier mining center in North America and the birth of the settlement we now call the City of Trail.

For more of Trail history, click on the picture below The Trail Smelter Landscape in Trail is dominated by the presence of the smelter The Sullivan Mine