"Gold is for the mistress—silver for the maid—
Copper for the craftsman, cunning at his trade."
"Good!" said the Baron, sitting in his hall,
"But Iron—Cold Iron—is master of them all."
—Rudyard Kipling
Wealthy and influential men from all over Canada and the U.S. gathered last week in the fishing village of Seven Islands, on the bleak north shore of the St. Lawrence River. U.S. Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, Quebec Premier Maurice Duplessis, and Newfoundland Premier Joseph Smallwood flew into town. A cruise ship brought 275 presidents, board chairmen or top executives of six major U.S. steel companies, U.S. and Canadian banks, insurance and trust companies and mining firms. The visitors assembled on Seven Islands' rain-drenched waterfront. A button was pushed, and rumbling machinery dumped carloads of red rock into a freighter's hold. When the hold was full, the ship sailed for Philadelphia to deliver to U.S. steel mills the first iron ore from Canada's remote Ungava iron fields, as rich as and perhaps vaster than the once great Mesabi Range.
The pushbutton ceremony climaxed one of the great hands-across-the-border industrial ventures of modern times. As long as half a century ago, geologists were sure that iron ore lay buried beneath the lichens of barren Ungava, but there seemed no practical and profitable way of moving it from the subarctic wilderness. In 1942 Jules Robert Timmins, Montreal gold-mining magnate, decided to take the challenge. Last week, as he watched the first boatload of Ungava ore leave for the U.S., Jules Timmins, 66, could claim success. "It is the realization of [my] dreams, hopes and plans," he said.
Iron Pockets. It took twelve years, more than $250 million and a labor force that grew to 7,000 men to make Timmins' dreams come true. He raised more than $10 million just to survey the property to prove that the ore was sufficiently high-grade (50% or more iron content) to be attractive to steelmakers. Here and there, like almonds in a chocolate bar, prospectors found pockets of some of the richest iron ore ever mined in North America. They were able to block out 400 million tons assaying nearly 60% iron.
Once he had proved he had a commercial ore body, Timmins had to sell it to the steel industry. He had already formed a partnership with M. A. Hanna Co. of Cleveland and enlisted the help of Hanna's then president, George Humphrey, to promote the Ungava project in the U.S. Steelmen in the U.S. were beginning then to realize how seriously two world wars had depleted the U.S. Mesabi Range. Humphrey and Timmins managed to convince some of them that Ungava could be a new Mesabi. Six steel companies (Republic, Armco, National. Youngstown, Wheeling, Hanna) agreed to finance the project and buy Ungava ore.