When gold was discovered in the Rossland mountains above
Trail in the early 1890s it lead to a local gold rush and an influx of thousands by 1895. The gold was associated with copious amounts of copper, silver, lead and zinc, leading one of the
Montana Copper Kings,
Fredrick Augustus Heinze, to build a smelter down the hill from the mines, in Trail. This was in 1895, and by 1898 Heinze had sold his smelter to the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), primarily because the CPR was interested in the small railway line which was associated with the smelter. The CPR formed the Consolidated Mining and Smelter Company (
COMINCO) and operated the smelter for many years, as well as buying many of the mines, both in Rossland and elsewhere, which supplied its smelter.
120 years later, though now owned by
TECK, "Canada's Largest Diversified Resource Company", the
Trail Smelter and associated infrastructure continue to be the economic lifeblood of the city of Trail and Tadanac remains the beautiful, upscale community it was envisioned to be when created in the 1920s.