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Roads, Docks, Deaths. With ample capital and an assured market, the newly formed Iron Ore Co. of Canada pulled out all the stops to get Ungava into production. I.O.C. President Humphrey coined the slogan "Iron Ore by '54" and geared operations to meet it. A 17-plane airlift flying as many as 96 flights a day began lugging men and freight into the Ungava wilderness to lay out town sites, build power plants and dig ore pits. At a cost of more than 20 lives, a 357-mile private railroad was pushed across rivers and through mountains from Seven Islands northward to the mine sites.
Now the whole Ungava production is ready. Soon nine 100-car trains a day will be rolling down from the mines to the Seven Islands docks. Some ore will go by sea to Baltimore and Philadelphia. The rest will go in shallow-draft ships down the St. Lawrence to the steel mills of Cleveland and Pittsburgh and inland Canada. When the St. Lawrence Seaway is ready, oceangoing freighters can do all the carrying. By 1957 about 10 million tons of ore a year will be coming out of Ungava's veins, and the world's mightiest industrial nation need not worry about iron to feed its factories.