A shy, elderly and virtually anonymous man named Thayer Lindsley personally controls a fabulous international kingdom of gold, silver, copper, zinc and iron. With a genius for geology and finance he has made millions but he has never got around to buying a car.
Maclean’s Magazine – August 15, 1951
The financial pages of Canadian newspapers in the past few months have heralded the discovery of new high-grade ore at Giant Yellowknife, Canada’s lusty gold-producing youngster of the Northwest Territories; they have announced that United Keno, the Yukon’s big silver-lead-zinc producer, chalked up a two-and-a-half-million-dollar profit in 1950; that Falconbridge Nickel of Sudbury and its expanding overseas refinery in Norway will spend millions of dollars to boost output for defense; the “big two” of Canadian mining exploration, Ventures Ltd. and Frobisher Ltd. are pushing the search for titanium in Quebec, uranium in northern Saskatchewan, iron in British Columbia.
Mining editors have headlined a proposed thirty-three-million-dollar project to develop a fabulous copper-cobalt property in Uganda; they have announced that an American firm will reopen ancient silver mines in Greece; that Latin America’s biggest gold mine, the La Luz of Nicaragua, has acquired substantial interests in a Californian tungsten mine, and in promising mining properties of the Philippines, Costa Rica, Honduras and the state of Nevada.
There have been reports too of an exciting iron discovery in the western Sahara, of a Venezuelan move to expropriate the Guyana gold mine, and of mounting production from Southern Rhodesia’s Connemara gold mine.
It is almost inconceivable, yet every one of these enterprises is directed and financially controlled by one person, a reclusive mystery man whose genius for evading the limelight is exceeded only by his genius for geology and mining finance. He is Thayer Lindsley, undisputed No. 1 figure in Canadian mining, who carved out Canada’s biggest mineral empire and then went on to create another international empire just as great.