Wally Bridgeman Green (b. 1896)
Wally Green was born in Huntsville, Ontario. His father worked for the Canadian National Railways. In 1914, Wally and his brother served in France for two years with the Canadian Army during the First World War.1)
After he returned, Green took a prospecting course. He was cooking in forestry and mining camps when he heard about the Alaska Highway. He headed north in 1944 as an army cook and prospected in his spare time. He knew tungsten and gold but was inexperienced with copper. In 1952, he and partners Chuck Kankins and Charles “Lofty” Ayrd hiked into the Kluane Range near Burwash Landing looking for copper. Green found a rusty looking, egg-shaped rock on the third day and they staked the ground, assuming it was low grade copper. They told Ted Chisolm, chief geologist for Prospectors Airways, the exploration arm of Anglo Huronian. He had a long association with nickel and knew what the rock contained. A nickel discovery was a rare commodity and the prospectors formed a syndicate called Yukon Mining Company. They turned down Prospectors Airways’ offer to option the property in favour of Hudson’s Bay’s offer that verbally promised the men a higher percent of stock in the future.2)
Hudson’s Bay invested several million dollars in exploration, development, and building a 500-ton-a-day mill. They called the deposit the Wellgreen Nickel Mine. Hudson Bay formed a new company, Hudson Yukon Ltd., and gave the prospectors seven percent with the majority shares going to the company. Green had been promised fifteen percent of the $3-million company and he concluded that prospectors had to know law as well as rocks. A Japanese firm was going to buy the concentrates from Hudson Bay and the mine operated for fourteen months before the ore proved to be uneconomical. In 1972 and 1973 three shipments of concentrates, about 13,000 tons each, were trucked to Haines, Alaska by Ray Russell Transport of Whitehorse and then Hudson Bay stopped mining.3)
All-North Resources Ltd briefly considered opening a 1995 open-pit mine at the site but nothing developed. The nickel-copper-platinum deposit reserves are estimated to exceed 42 million tonnes. When he was in his 80s, Green was still receiving a $900 prospector’s grant and walking through the bush looking for minerals.4)
In 2015 JDS Energy and Mining was hired by Wellgreen Platinum to prepare an economic assessment of the Wellgreen Project.5) Wellgreen Platinum became Nickel Creek Platinum Corp, listed on the Toronto stock exchange, and in 2019 focused on developing its 100 percent Nickel Shaw project into a mine estimated to have over two billion pounds of nickel, one billion pounds of copper, six million ounces of platinum metals and 120 million pounds of cobalt.6)