Biggest Since Mesabi?

For centuries the wind, sweeping down over vast, unknown Ungava* in northern Quebec, had covered nature's riches with a deep mantle of snow. Hungry caribou foraged for lichen. A few thousand Eskimos and Indians trapped beaver, hunted seals. The white man had crossed Ungava on foot only three times, had flown in briefly to prospect for minerals--and had not even scratched Ungava's bountiful surface.

Yet the prospect of opening up the north land had long been tempting. Twice in the '20s and early '30s get-rich-quick speculators started rushes to neighboring Labrador in a fools' search for gold. Then, along the border between Ungava and Labrador, more serious prospectors uncovered an iron belt which looked like one of the biggest in the world.

In 1938 the Labrador Mining & Exploration Co. got a concession to 18,000 square miles in the Labrador ore fields. Three years later big, rich Hollinger Consolidated Gold Mines, Ltd., of Ontario, took over and began exploring both sides of the border.

The company flew in diamond drills and other equipment at a cost of 73-c- a pound for shipping, spent $10 million just prospecting. Last May its chief geologist, Dr. J. A. Retty, cautiously reported progress: nine finds of high-grade iron ore bodies in Labrador, 15 in Ungava. Said the trade journal Northern Miner: "The most important iron ore discovery in America since the finding of the Mesabi range."

$300 Million Cash. Last fortnight the Quebec Government gave Hollinger an exclusive 20-year concession to explore and develop 3,900 square miles of Ungava directly across the border from its Labrador concession (see map). Hollinger and a U.S. associate, the iron mining firm of M. A. Hanna, agreed to spend upward of $300 million.

Next spring the company will punch a $70 million railway line from Seven Islands on the St. Lawrence northward along the Moisie River. This will provide a lifeline to Ungava, will cut shipping costs on materials to build a townsite and possibly an airfield. The company's chief handicap: Ungava's early freeze-up and late thaw limit mining operations to about three months a year.

* Eskimo for "far away."

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