Billion-Dollar Empire

Along Lake Huron's rocky northern rim, where the Canadian Pacific railroad and the Trans-Canada Highway skirt the jack pine forest, blue smoke from smoldering brush fires hangs lazily in the hot, still air. In a raw new clearing the bright steel of a mine headframe cuts an angular pattern against the sky. From the smooth blacktop highway trucks laden with lumber and machinery waddle off toward mine sites deep in the bush. A scattered army of engineers, diamond drillers, airplane pilots, and hardrock miners is turning 900 square miles of lake-pocked wilderness into a billion-dollar empire: the Blind River uranium development.

Burst of Prosperity. The uranium rush burst two years ago upon the declining old lumber town of Blind River, Ont. (pop. 2,500) with the news that Toronto Promoter Joseph Hirshhorn (TIME, Feb. 21) had quietly staked 1,400 claims covering 56,000 acres of choice mining prospects. On the map, Hirshhorn's claims formed a giant Z with its horizontal bars 30 miles apart. Within weeks, other prospectors poured in feverishly to stake another 8,000 claims. Land prices soared; Blind River's four "beverage rooms" added new tables, took on hefty waiters able to cope with bush-happy prospectors with fat bankrolls and big appetites for excitement. Job seekers, claim speculators, boomers arrived on every train, sifted in through the fire escapes of the Harmonic Hotel to bed down in bathtubs and corridors after all the rooms were taken.

Blind River is past its early frenzy, but now it is pulsating with the deeper excitement of proved riches and the pell-mell drive to get them out of the ground. Geologists have declared that there may be uranium ore reserves of at least 150 million tons in the 900 square miles. Already the shafts are being sunk and mills built for four huge mines. One of them alone, Algom, will be capable of producing more uranium than all of the 600-plus uranium mines in the U.S.

Blind River's big camps:

P:Promoter Hirshhorn's Pronto Uranium Mines, from which the government-owned Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. contracted to buy $55 million of uranium concentrates. Pronto will start hoisting ore in September, for a while will be the free world's biggest uranium mine, with a daily capacity of 1,500 tons of ore.

P:Algom Uranium, another Hirshhorn company, which will top Pronto when it starts producing in 1956 at the rate of 3,000 tons of ore a day from each of its two mines, one at Quirke Lake and the other at Nordic Lake. With ore reserves reckoned by some geologists at 75-100 million tons,* enough for 34 years at the planned rate of production, Algom has contracted to sell five years' output to the government company for $207 million.

P:Consolidated Denison, south of Quirke Lake, which has a 6 square-mile claim, and indicated ore reserves comparable to those of Algom's Quirke Lake and Nordic Lake combined. Its contract with the government may well rival Algom's.

Model Towns. The old town of Blind River is neither equipped nor located to house and supply the 8,000 to 10,000 workers and families who will be needed when the mines and mills are all at work. For the families of the 2,000 miners who will go to work for Algom and Consolidated Denison, the Ontario government has set aside a lakeside site of 396 square miles for the new town of Elliot Lake, within easy commuting distance of the mines. The mines will be taxed to support the schools, hospitals and public agencies of Elliot Lake. The townsite has already been carefully zoned, should begin to materialize by 1956.

Algom, unable to wait, moved into Elliot Lake this year, and began building bachelor dormitories for its construction workers, can convert them later into apartments for families. "If uranium proves to be a long-range proposition," said one of Elliot Lake's planners, "we see no reason why this town shouldn't grow to 20,000." For Pronto's executive and professional staff Hirshhorn put up a community of ultramodern ranch houses along the shore of Lake Lauzon.

Hirshhorn also has drawn tentative plans for a second new model town along the shore of Lake Huron's Bootlegger's Bay. Hirshhorn stipulated, however, that his town will be built only if Blind River fails to provide essential services (schools, water and sewage systems, etc.).

So far, Blind River has not let Hirshhorn's proposition deter it from the more immediate business of making a fast boomtown buck. The town council turned down a plan for a general tax reassessment to provide revenue for urgently needed public improvements; all the improving underway is motivated by the familiar old law of supply and demand. Two of the town's hotels have built or are planning to build more bedrooms. Menard's department store, whose basement is given over to the only undertaking establishment in town, has prospered enough to plan a separate $30,000 funeral parlor.

On Saturday nights the improvised jail in the cellar of the Masonic Hall is often too small for the traffic (maximum thus far: 22 inmates, mostly overnight drunks). So far the town has attracted only transient prostitutes. "A couple of weeks back, two good-looking women drove into town in a big Cadillac," reported Police Chief Leo Trudeau. "They had one price for the motel and one for the use of the Cadillac, but they stayed on just long enough to do a fast business, and moved on before we got to them." Busiest of the boom enterprises is a broker's office (a branch of a Toronto firm), where residents have begun dab bling with growing enthusiasm in the stock market. One staff geologist at Pronto has made $100,000 tax-free in two months investing in uranium stock, and the town is full of taxi drivers, store clerks, and even high-school students who have parlayed modest stakes into four-and five-figure bankrolls. One of the brokerage offices' steadiest customers, Joe Hagger, sold his restaurant in order to play the market full time, recently built a new $30,000 house, and now plans to open a new business -- Blind River's first pawn shop. "I know it will be lucrative," says he.

* By comparison, the U.S.'s biggest uranium mine, Anaconda's Jackpile Mine in New Mexico, has ore reserves of only 5,000,000 tons.

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