INTRODUCTION
The Beginning
In July 1927, Sherritt Gordon Mines Limited was incorporated, and named after Carl Sherritt and the Gordon family. Carl Sherritt was an American citizen who worked as a teamster on the construction of the Hudson’s Bay railroad. He later became a trapper and prospector and staked copper prospects in the Cold Lake area of Manitoba. J. Peter Gordon was a civil engineer who also worked on the railroad construction and later became interested in mining developments in the area.
The formation of the company was largely due to the efforts of Eldon Brown, a young mining engineer, with the financial backing of Thayer and Halstead Lindsley and the Gordon family (1).
The Discovery of Nickel at Lynn Lake
In 1941, a Sherritt Gordon prospector named Austin McVeigh sampled an outcrop of sulphide-bearing rock near Lynn Lake that assayed 1.5% nickel and 1.0% copper (2). It was wartime and Sherritt Gordon could neither afford the men nor the equipment necessary to stake and drill the area. The discovery was kept secret until after the war.
In the summer of 1945, McVeigh started staking in a six mile square area which covered all of the known magnetic anomalies and McVeigh’s original nickel-copper find. A diamond drill was flown in but drilling on the strongest magnetic anomalies found only magnetite. In September, the drill was moved to test several weak magnetic anomalies close to Lynn Lake and by the end of the month, an intersection with good ore grade had been made.