Ross Toms, Part II

“Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;

It’s just a little matter of degree.

My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain;

It’s life and love and wife and home to me.

And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail;

I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call;

I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,

To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.”

— from the poem “The Prospector” by Robert Service

Anytime anyone questioned the merit of one of Ross Toms’s properties, suggesting it might be “moose pasture,” Ross would quickly respond: “Sure it is. What’s wrong with moose pasture? Every day at the Sigma [mines in Val d’Or, Que.], I would climb out from the headframe and look across the road, and there was a big moose in the pasture.”

The notion that there might be other motherlodes out there under the moose pasture got into Toms’s head at some point, and he decided to move back to Toronto and become a prospector.

He spent part of his early years as a prospector with Fenimore Iron Mines, and he eventually got involved with some of the greatest promoters, geologists and mining men of his day, such as Joseph Hirshhorn (1899-1981), Franc Joubin (1911-1997) and Cyrus Eaton Sr. (1883-1979). One of his favourite tales from this era was about the time he was down mucking out a glory hole at Elliot Lake on a visit by Joubin and Hirshhorn. Duncan Derry (1906-1987), renowned consulting geologist, came striding in, hoisted a piece of ore under his studious gaze, and remarked: “Whoever heard of uranium in pyrite?” Toms and Derry were good friends, and Derry was a brilliant geologist, but the Elliot Lake mines produced uranium for more than 25 years . . . from pyritic ore.

By the early 1950s, Ross was engaged in a bold prospecting venture of his own, one which would take him far away from home and change his life.

Grubstaked first by a Toronto lawyer, then by Cyrus Eaton Sr., the great Cleveland industrialist, Ross prospected south of Ungava Bay, and in 1953 he hit it big. Here is an excerpt from a full-page spread that appeared in the March 21, 1953, edition of the Toronto Star Weekly:

“Ross Toms and his daring team of prospectors, with a retinue of eskimoes, have staked fabulous iron.

“As motley a crew as ever was armed with prospectors’ hammers has found a new iron bonanza in a remote corner of Canada’s tundra, where only a handful of whites ever before dared to venture. The party was made up of eight whites, of almost as many nationalities, plus 55 nomadic Eskimos and their entire retinue of wives, children and aged in-laws.

“The party leader was Ross Toms, an enterprising prospector with restless feet and a yen for fortune and adventure. Back home in Toronto, frontier-buster Toms recalls three years of incredible hardship while master-minding his unique metal-sleuthing effort. During this time, tents and igloos alternately were his only home, and his sole protection from the unfriendly, sub-Arctic elements.

“What he found may prove to be among the world’s largest iron mines.”

Ross had been gone for many months at a time, with Marie and two daughters at home alone in an unfamiliar city, but he came back a hero.

In the end, however, it was not to be.

As Ross would often tell (never having totally lost his sense of disappointment, but rarely showing it), it all came down to a fateful meeting in Montreal between Cyrus Eaton Sr. and his partner-to-be, Alfred Krupp, the German industrial magnate. At the last moment, just before the deal was to be signed, Cyrus Eaton Sr. demanded a dollar more per ton of iron. According to Ross, Krupp, ever the Teutonic gentleman, looked at Eaton, said “thank you,” then turned to his aides and said “let’s go home.”

The iron deposits were never developed, and remain there to this day.

— This is the second of a 3-part series on Ross Toms. The author is a geologist with Toronto-based Odyssey Resources.