Canada: ONTARIO: Rainbow’s End

The wooded south shore of Ontario’s Mackeith Lake swarmed with prospectors, mining engineers, drillers, bulldozer drivers, government geologists, get-rich-quick investors. The lure: gold. Ontario has had many a gold strike, big & little, and this latest, made by a lucky prospector in his fifties named Burke, looked as if it might be a big one.

Lean and leather-tough Joe Burke has spent 40-odd years hunting gold. As a $250-a-month prospector (employed by Toronto’s Rush Lake and Berwick Mining Companies), he was in the Mackeith Lake country last June with a young Indian helper named Maynard Bromley. One hot day they worked their way through the virgin timberland around the lake, scrambling over fallen firs and through heavy underbrush. Ahead they saw a mound heavily covered with northern moss.

Burke casually struck the mound with a pick, heard a ping and felt rock beneath. He and Bromley pulled away the moss. Said Burke later: “I was pretty excited. Free gold in flakes.”

Burke and Bromley kept the news to themselves, staked all the claims the law allows (nine each) before rushing out to Sudbury to register their find. When they did, they carried a first sample of ore that assayed $665 a ton, and an estimate, based on preliminary probing, that their gold-bearing mound was an outcrop of a 3,500-ft.-long vein.

By last week more than 1,000 claims reportedly had been staked in the area. Twenty men were at work on the Burke-Bromley claims alone, clearing topsoil. Diamond drillers would start work soon. A tent city sprouted nearby and hundreds of gold-seekers lived in sleeping bags. Little Foleyet (pop. 2,000), twelve miles north, was jammed. Big mining firms like Hollinger, Mclntyre, Moneta and Vincent were buying up claims at fancy prices. The Canadian National Railways was already making emergency stops a mile from the strike site, and there was talk of putting in a spur.

On the strength of the strike, Berwick stock has climbed from 17¢ to 50¢ a share. Burke owns 300,000 shares. He will get a lump sum “bonus” (amount still undetermined) from his employers, plus 15% of the stock issue in a new Rush Lake-Berwick firm to be called Joe Burke Gold Mines. Mining men last week guessed that he could get half a million dollars for his holdings, if he wanted to sell. Said Joe Burke: “Pot of gold.”