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.

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.

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.

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.