Editor’s Note HUDBAY’S EMPIRE (November 01, 1988)

Flintabbatey Flonatin. How awkward a civic handle that would have been for the town fathers. Fortunately, the discoverers of the great orebody that became the guts of the Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting empire abbreviated the name of their revered pulp fiction character to Flin Flon. (The protaganist’s full name was Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin from a novel called The Sunless City.) So Flin Flon, Man., came into existence in the early 1900s on the strength of a showing at the edge of a lake and at the whim of a novelist’s imagination. Operational know-how and exploration smarts have sustained it through the decades, Technical Editor Patrick Whiteway found during his 3-day stay recently. HudBay sprawls across the western portion of the Manitoba northland. It has two hubs — the Snow Lake area and Flin Flon. Mines open and close regularly as new orebodies replace ones that are exhausted. Anderson Lake, Centennial, Ghost Lake and Westarm at one time or another fed the concentrators and smelter. Now it’s Flin Flon (still going after all these years), Trout Lake, Stall Lake and others. In the future, Callinan, Chisel Lake open pit and Namew will yield the muck that’ll keep HudBay prospering. Doubtless, there will be more.

The company has done all this with little national fanfare. Even in its own backyard of Flin Flon, the approach is low-key. (Whiteway says the general perception in town is that HudBay is not the big exploration success that much smaller Granges Resources is believed to be.) As a rule, the big metal producers seem not to worry about their public image. Noranda Inc. is the one exception that comes to mind.

Anyway, within these pages, you can learn more than a little about how Hudson Bay operates.

You’ll also find, in our annual metals review, explanations of why the metals fetched the prices they did this year and an introductory analysis by a metals expert who is surprisingly bullish. I don’t want to give it all away, but the good news is that prosperity should be ours well into the 1990s. The bad news? A short downblip maybe next year.

Flintabbatey Flonatin. How awkward a civic handle that would have been for the town fathers. Fortunately, the discoverers of the great orebody that became the guts of the Hudson Bay Mining & Smelting empire abbreviated the name of their revered pulp fiction character to Flin Flon. (The protaganist’s full name was Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin from a novel called The Sunless City.) So Flin Flon, Man., came into existence in the early 1900s on the strength of a showing at the edge of a lake and at the whim of a novelist’s imagination. Operational know-how and exploration smarts have sustained it through the decades, Technical Editor Patrick Whiteway found during his 3-day stay recently. HudBay sprawls across the western portion of the Manitoba northland. It has two hubs — the Snow Lake area and Flin Flon. Mines open and close regularly as new orebodies replace ones that are exhausted. Anderson Lake, Centennial, Ghost Lake and Westarm at one time or another fed the concentrators and smelter. Now it’s Flin Flon (still going after all these years), Trout Lake, Stall Lake and others. In the future, Callinan, Chisel Lake open pit and Namew will yield the muck that’ll keep HudBay prospering. Doubtless, there will be more.

The company has done all this with little national fanfare. Even in its own backyard of Flin Flon, the approach is low-key. (Whiteway says the general perception in town is that HudBay is not the big exploration success that much smaller Granges Resources is believed to be.) As a rule, the big metal producers seem not to worry about their public image. Noranda Inc. is the one exception that comes to mind.

Anyway, within these pages, you can learn more than a little about how Hudson Bay operates.

You’ll also find, in our annual metals review, explanations of why the metals fetched the prices they did this year and an introductory analysis by a metals expert who is surprisingly bullish. I don’t want to give it all away, but the good news is that prosperity should be ours well into the 1990s. The bad news? A short downblip maybe next year.