City in the Wilderness

When Benjamin Self and his stout, hearty wife Viola arrived in Val D'Or, Quebec, eleven years ago, they had $4 in cash and $267 worth of hardware. When the Selfs retired last week and headed for a U.S. vacation (the World Series, Ben's birthplace at Claremore, Okla., the Mardi Gras at New Orleans, then the warm sun of Florida and Cuba), they had $20,000 cash--the price they got for their hardware store--$100,000 in Val D'Or real estate, and an estimated 100,000 shares of 32-c--a-share stock in a promising but yet-to-be-developed gold mine.

No gold miners themselves, the Selfs had cashed in on one of the fastest-growing gold booms in Canada's golden history.

Haircuts & Gold. The first traces of gold were found in the Val D'Or area, in the heart of Quebec's wild northwestern bush country, as early as 1909, but the town of Val D'Or itself was not really born until 1933, when a peripatetic barber set up a stool on a flat rock and started to work on hairy prospectors. In 1934, the year the Selfs arrived, the town's official population was five.

Then things began to hum. The great Lamaque and Sigma mines were discovered (1939 aggregate production value: nearly $7,000,000). Get-rich-quickers swarmed northward to pick up the nuggets in the wilderness. They stayed because the stories were not too far wrong.

For a while Val D'Or lived, as boom towns do, at a dizzy pace. In 1936 it had a population of 4,000 and was a hell-roaring mining camp in a valley in the middle of nowhere. Prospectors got there by plane, dog sled or canoe until a road was built. Beer was $1 a bottle. A town census registered 46 different nationalities. Shady characters prospered like green bay trees. In 1936, the first year that Val D'Or had a police force, Chief Leo Therien led a raid through the town's 300 unpainted board-and-tarpaper shacks, arrested 112 prostitutes, gamblers and bootleggers. Only 61 could be held, because no more could be jammed into the town's 25 ft. by 25 ft. log jail.

The town today (pop. 7,500) is still mushrooming--4,000 of its inhabitants work in its mines, and there are hundreds of untested claims. But now trains of the Canadian National streak past its back doors. Val D'Or's rowdiness is gone.

Shoppes & Sodas. A shrill curfew whistle sends Val D'Or's moppets kiting home at 9 p.m. The town's Third Avenue (the main stem) has nine hotels* (including a Ritz and a Continental), sandwich shoppes and beauty salons, four furniture stores, taxis, even such accouterments of civilization as a nightclub and a stock exchange (one recent day's business: 27,000 shares, representing $50,000). Val D'Or's drug stores sell barrels of pop. Miners get ice cream sodas at the Splendid Sweets.

And Val D'Or's boom may not be over. The legend of devout, childlike Pierrette Regimbal (TIME, Aug. 27) is bringing tourists by the thousands. Moreover, Val D'Or's buried treasure seems scarcely touched. Geologists, who know more about the area's minerals than anyone else, guess that some day, despite its frigid winters, Val D'Or may be one of the greatest mining cities in Canada. Mayor Joseph Eugene Berard last week solemnly predicted a population of 25,000 within three more years. He said that Val D'Or's six big producing mines (Sullivan, Siscoe, Lamaque, Sigma, Perron, and Golden Manitou) and potential new ones would hire 5,300 new hands now if there were houses for them. To solve the problem, he announced a new mile-square subdivision on which some 2,000 houses will be built soon, with help from Ottawa.

*Excerpt from the menu at the Windsor Hotel dining room: pork chops 55-c-, pork tenderloin 60-c-, sirloin steak 70-c-, T-bone steak 95-c-, roast beef 50-c-, chicken 70-c-.

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