Bomihills

Dedication of Bomi Hills Project
January 12, 1952
Les Campbelldfamily copy

Ceremony and beginning of Bomi Hills Liberia

Address by
President W.V.S. Tubman

Our gathering here today climaxes in a most pleasing manner the several approaches made to the Liberian Government by individuals and companies of various nationalities, for the exploration and exploitation of the vast deposits of Iron Ore that has been embedded under those hills for a long time immemorial. Some of these approaches merely reached the negotiation stage and were broken off, while others progressed a little further to the point of exploration and extraction and shipment of samples of ore discovered
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Map showing Bomi Hills and many other parts of Liberia
Special welcome and thank you to Martin for sending this map to us.
I am going to tell you the story about a witchdoctor whom I saw myself.
My family had moved from the Holland to Bomi Hills, Liberia. I had only
been there for three months when my wallet containing about one hundred
dollars was stolen. Two more bachelors had previously lost some money too in
the same house and they had to report it to the local police. A few days
later a witchdoctor came by to see the three of us who had had our wallets
stolen. He asked us to explain exactly what had happened and we told him the
entire story. (more…)

Liberia Mining Company Bulletin
November 24, 1970

Thanks to Joellen McPhail we have a official company bulletin, It is full of facts about the company that we worked for so long ago. If you would like to read any page please click on the page and it will send you to a my briefcase where it will be much larger. Then when you have finished reading that page, click back on your browser and it will send you back to this page. Thanks again Joellen for all the wonderful things you have done for me and the website. (more…)

Focusing without Looking
By

Jungle Jim

As usual, during the dry and monsoon seasons, I would make many flights to numerous villages. On this particular day during the monsoon season I was scheduled to deliver eight boxes of dynamite sticks, (blasting caps were always flown separately for obvious reasons), to an iron-ore mine called
“Bomi-Hills,” 80 miles north west of Spriggs Payne airfield, my home base airfield in Monrovia, Liberia West Africa.

Keep in mind this is Bushpilot flying. The weather was not good. It about a 300- foot ceiling with visibility a half-mile and raining. Whichever Bushpilot felt like going up to check the weather, he would. Since my Piper Tripacer, with a 160-HP engine in it, was like a hot rod car, (loaded with dynamite), I said, I would go. I joked what a blast it will be if I crashed. At age 23, nothing bothered me. If the weather was not to bad on top I would rev the engine high and low two times, meaning it was not too bad, telling the guys to come on up. I would then be on my way to make my delivery. If the weather was very poor, and I have had to do this many times, I would head out over the ocean, which was nearby, and let down until I could see the water. I would hold an altitude of about a hundred feet, because to go lower would be to dangerous. One cannot judge too well over water just how close the water is. Maybe a seaplane pilot could, but I was a land pilot. I would then make a 180 back to the airfield and ever, and I mean ever so slowly, lower my altitude because, once you see the breaking white caps of the waves; then, and only then, could I push the nose down fast to get right down on top of them. I would then look for the car head lights my compatriots had so generously supplied. They were there but off to my left. Throttle back, bank hard left, careful not to dip the left wing tip into the ocean! For the occasional night landings, my friends would also put a car on the airfield with headlights facing me so I could line up easier. The other Bushpilots would also put a car on the airfield at the threshold with the tail lights facing the aircraft; the headlights shining down the airfield. Of course, I would also us my landing light if the bulb was not burn out. Parts were very difficult to get.

I gave them the roaring of my engine as I passed over the airfield, and I was on my way to Bomi Hills. There was one catch. I had no idea what the weather was like between me and Bomi Hills. This is where being a Bushpilot comes in. I am all alone there is no one to talk to about weather conditions. I must figure out myself if I can go on. Well, at first things didn’t look too bad: rain, broken cloud layers, visibility varied. After 20 minutes things started to look ugly. I lost visual contact with the ground and had to go IFR, on instruments. Rain got very heavy so I started climbing in the goo, thinking I could get above some of the clouds, but luck was not with me. It was looking real black in the direction I was heading and knew it was time to turn back. At 1500 feet I started a left downward spiral. I knew there was a railroad track below me. A Bushpilot will use whatever is available to navigate by…..Railroad tracks, beaches, mountain ridges, water falls, rivers, and even the white bark of a tree. That’s another story while I was flying a Piper Apache twin, also in monsoon weather.

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Country Chop

10 cents worth of palmnuts, approx 7 cups
11/2 lbs of meat cut in cubes
2 dried fish, well boned
4 pieces of chicken
5 2 bouillon cubes, beef or chicken
1 onion, sliced or pounded
pepper to taste (hot)
seasoned salt to taste

Wash palm nuts well, cook until tender. Beat palm nuts in a mortar with a pestle. Wash beat up palm nuts (once separating nuts from chaff.) Strain the watery part and throw the chaff away. Season meat, fish and chicken together. Put meat and dry fish into a medium size pot half filled with water. Cook until meat
And fish becomes tender. (More water may be added.) Now add your chicken. When mixture is well cooked and dried add the prepared palmbutter. Let palmbutter cook on high then switch to a medium heat. When palmbutter becomes thickened or dry it is ready to serve.

Serve it with rice or fufu. Serves 4 people.
Plantian chips
3 or 4 plantains 2cups of oil
Peel very green plantains and slice very thin. Fry in deep oil until golden brown and crisp then drain on paper towel. sprinkle with salt. Keep in sealed containers. Stays for two weeks to a month.
Bonnie Pepper Soup
5 dried bonnies(dried fish) 1lg. onion
1/2 qt. water 2 pods hot pepper
1 tbsp tomato paste,
salt and pepper to taste.
Peel bonnies and pick bones out. Put bonnies into pot with other ingredients. Boil until bonnies are done.
Goat meat soup
2 lbs goat meat
2 tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato paste
2 med. onions
2 qts. water hot peppers to taste
salt and black pepper to taste stockfish and dried bonnies may be added if desired.
Cut up goat meat into pieces about 2-3 inches. Wash and season with black pepper, hot peppers and salt. Season with sliced onions. Let stand for 30-40 minutes to allow seasoning to soak in. Put in 2 quarts of water in the pot and add the well seasoned meat, few slices of onions, fresh tomatoes, and tomato paste and put on stove to boil. continue cooking until meat is tender. (more…)

Language spoken in Liberia
Abuse————Curse; verbally insult; ridicule. That teacher abuse me when I make  mistake
Ba————— Namesake; friend. Possibly derived from Kru.
Baboon———-    Chimpanzee. The true baboon does not occur in Liberia.
Bachelor girl——   Unmarried woman on the loose or away from home. Suggests Prostitution.
Bakwe———–  A dialect cluster of the Kwa or Kru-speaking peoples of southeastern  Liberia between the Cavally and Sassandra rivers.
Bambara———  Mande speaking peoples widely distributed throughout the savannah egion. Alternatively known as Bamana.
Band————-  Small groups of musicians who have formed a cooperative association To make money by entertaining.
Barbered———-    Hair cut; shorn. Man you got barbered
Bassa————— A Kwa-speaking peoples of central and coastal Liberia.
Beard-beard——– Reference to someone with a beard or moustache.
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The first foreign entrepreneur to respond to President Tubman?s Open Door Policy was that of Colonel Lansdell K. Christie of New York, a typical frontier American, restless in spirit and ambitious to succeed, who negotiated and obtained in 1946, a concession right from the Liberian Government to exploit iron ore deposits, mainly in the Bomi Hills area where the highest grade of ore containing about 66 percent iron content was found. For this purpose Christie founded the Liberian Mining Company. The history of this first major mining operation and the second major industrial activity in the country after Firestone Rubber Plantations Company began decades ago, when navigators along the northern part of Liberian waters began to report the erratic behavior of their magnetic compasses, and rumors began to circulate of the possible presence of iron ore in Liberia. (more…)