Murray Edmund Watts, a combination of adventurous prospector and mining engineer, is probably best known for his work in the Arctic, where he made a number of major ore discoveries, revealing much about that vast land inside Canada’s Arctic Circle.
Jules Timmins’ finest hour, and his claim to mining fame, occurred when he brought into being the iron ore fields of northern Quebec and Labrador, in one of the greatest projects in Canadian mining history.
Karl Springer, a highly successful mine-finder, has amply proved in his career as a prospector that not only could he find the mines but that he could provide the inspirational leadership and drive to make them pay. As well, he has done pioneer work, particularly with the helicopter, in the use of aviation in exploration and mine development.
It was not for nothing that The Northern Miner, the weekly journal of Canada’s mining industry, in 1977 chose Stephen B. Roman as its first Mining Man of the Year.
A lawyer by profession, James Y. Murdoch, who became first president of the fledgling Noranda Mines in 1922, at the age of 32, was one of the greatest its builders Canada has ever produced. Not just a mine-builder, but a nation builder.
Thayer Lindsley, the father of such mining giants as Falconbridge Ltd., Ventures Ltd. and Frobisher, has been described as the greatest mine finder of all time.
Gilbert LaBine helped shape the course of world history when in 1930 he discovered pitchblende at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories. With his discovery there of the ore that yields radium and uranium, LaBine pushed Canada into the atomic age. He was probably one of the few Canadian prospectors of that time who could have identified the pitchblende mineral.
Like another great Canadian mine-finder, Gilbert LaBine (now, too, enshrined in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame), Franc R. Joubin also made his name and enduring reputation, in uranium. For it was Joubin who found the vast Blind River area uranium field in northern Ontario, today the site of the major operations of uranium miners Denison Mines and Rio Algom at Elliot Lake.
The claim to Canadian mining immortality for Herman H. “Spud” Huestis came with his introduction to the world of the large tonnage, low-cost Highland Valley copper deposits in British Columbia, several hundred miles northeast of Vancouver.
An eminent economic geologist, known internationally for his many contributions to mineral exploration on nearly every continent of the world, Duncan R. Derry was one of the Canadian mining industry’s leading spokesmen.
