Montana Miracle

For the first time ever, the U.S. is well on the road towards self-sufficiency in chrome--the precious, tough, heat-resistant alloying metal which plates automobile gingerbread in peacetime but in wartime is needed for armor plate, high-speed machine tools and the long-lasting linings of steel furnaces.

Such was the sum & substance of the news around Jesse Jones's Metals Reserve Co. last week. It was lighted up by an Aladdin's lamp story:

The new chrome will be mined from a deep, winding, 28-mile vein tucked under wild & woolly Hell Roaring Mountain in southern Montana, where Blackfeet Indians once scalped roving Cheyennes and pioneer ranchers took out after rustlers. Owned now by Metals Reserve and operated on a cost-plus basis by Anaconda Copper, the Hell Roaring vein was discovered about 20 years ago. But it was never worked, because its chromite was mixed with too much iron ore. Since there were no other U.S. chrome deposits worth mentioning, the U.S. imported almost all it used from Africa, the Philippines, New Caledonia and Cuba.

But Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. with a tiny domestic chromite output (1940: 2,600 tons) and a stockpile of only 400,000 tons--barely six months' wartime supply./- So Anaconda engineers got busy, hacked a tortuous mountain road from Hell Roaring to the railroad 40 miles away, built a 2 1/2-mile overhead tram up an 8,000-ft. cliff, slapped together a mill, concentration plant and other buildings, created a water and power supply. Total time: nine frantic months. Total cost: $2,150,000 coughed up by the Government. A few months ago the first concentrates were shipped to waiting users; by year's end shipments will total over 50,000 tons of concentrates.

This is nowhere near present mine capacity; Anaconda has already started expansion aimed at tripling capacity. This week scores of tough-muscled shaftmen sloshed through water, mud and darkness to riddle new tunnels through the mountain, while above ground hundreds of engineers and carpenters worked pell-mell on plant additions.

Next year's shipments should hit 420,000 tons; the eventual peak is 500,000 tons--more chromite than any other country now produces and more than the whole world mined in 1932.

/-Peacetime U.S. demand was less than 500,000 tons annually, some 40% less than current needs.

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