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To soak up some of the free-floating wealth from well-heeled miners, drillers and claim-speculators, a Toronto stock-brokerage firm set up a branch office in Chibougamau, now handles $500,000 worth of business a week. The town's four hotels (a fifth is building) seldom bother to take down their "no vacancy" signs, and their barrooms are perpetually jammed around the clock with unshaven miners and prospectors just in from the bush, and ready to swing a rock-hard fist at the drop of an insult.
Chibougamau's No. 1 promoter is Randolph Pope Mills, of Montreal, president of New Royran Copper Mines and a major stockholder in most of Chibougamau's other more promising companies. Virginia-born Randy Mills first visited the area in the 1930s, never quite forgot it during subsequent years of promoting Labrador's famed iron mines and the titanium mines at Havre St. Pierre, Que. As he sees it, the boom has just begun. Arrival of the Canadian National Railways' branch line by year's end seems certain to give the bonanza a new lift. And out in the bush to the north of Chibougamau, a crew of college engineering students hand-picked by Mills are busily prospecting for new strikes. Said Mills last week: "I've waited 22 years for this boom, and it was worth waiting for. I've been paid back handsomely, thank you."
* Pronounced shi-boo-gum-moo, from an Indian word meaning "gathering place."