Folke H. Kihlstedt and the ‘Discovery’ of Cerro Bolivar in Venezuela

 

This brochure celebrated the day that the first shipment of iron ore arrived at Fairless Works in Morrisville, Pennsylvania and was unloaded from the ship Tosca. That ore came from a mountain in Venezuela, “discovered” by my father in 1947.

Mountains, however, are not discovered. They simply exist. They impose themselves on the landscape. They can be seen from miles away by everyone. I suspect that even a blind person must sense their presence.

Why did George Leigh Mallory want to climb Everest, a reporter asked in 1923? “Because it is there,” he answered.

Why did Francesco Petrarch climb Mont Ventoux in Provence some 600 years earlier?  “To see what so great an elevation had to offer,” he wrote in his Epistolae familiares.

Now Petrarch, once at the summit, reached for his compact volume of St. Augustine’s Confessions. It fell open to a passage chastising “men [who] go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains…but themselves they consider not.”

Petrarch still was a medieval man. To him the earth and its mountains were created by God on the third day. His ascent was an act of temerity. Who did he think he was, climbing a mountain? Moses??!!

Mallory was a modern man, someone who understood that mountains are much younger than the earth and were created through tectonic plate movements over millions of years. His attempted climb was about personal challenge.

But to both these men, and to my father, and to the rest of us, mountains are simply there. They exist. They are not discovered.

 

This is my father, Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt, on that mountain in Venezuela. Had Mallory succeeded in reaching the summit of Everest (and had Andrew Irvine carried a camera on their ascent), I imagine that he would have assumed a pose similar to this.

In this family photograph,  Folke is standing in the center of the second row, a younger brother seated in front, an older brother standing to our far right. He was one of six children. My suspicion is that he was the family “black sheep”– the only one to totally abandon the upper-middle-class comforts of Sweden in favor of the unpredictability and likely hardships of foreign exploits.

 

Folke was, in essence, Indiana Jones before Indiana Jones. His adventures began the year after he graduated from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology (1924). I have little information to go on, but apparently he was soon leading surveying teams in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria and Poland…

 

…and his globe-trotting was not limited to Europe. Here we find him in 1926 (fourth from the right, standing cross-legged) with a work crew in Port Arthur, near the Louisiana border.

Folke met his Croatian wife—my mother—in Poland. He then left her in Sweden with his family for the reading of the traditional marriage banns while he began work in Texas. When no impediments were voiced to their marriage, Carla debarked for America (New York, I assume); Folke met her at the dock; they married the same day in a civil ceremony and then boarded a train for Texas.

I recall my mother cheerily telling me how she spent her honeymoon in a tent in West Texas, waking up to shoot rattlesnakes sunning themselves too near the Sterno stove. From the sparse information I have of these early years, it appears that the Swedish-American Prospecting Co. had sent Folke to Texas (1926-29) and then to Canada (1930-34).

 

Then, following a brief stint exploring the Gold Coast of Africa, Folke, in 1935, took charge of an American iron mine in Larap, Philippine Islands.

It was in the Philippines, in Manila, that I was born in 1940. But we would live in Larap until late 1941 when, anticipating the inevitable Japanese invasion of the Philippines, Folke dynamited the mine shaft and evacuated the family to the relatively safer capital city.

We survived the Japanese occupation, very likely because my father was a Swede and citizen of a neutral country. On June 8, 1945, following the liberation of Manila, we boarded the Belle of the Sea and set sail to the USA.

In less than a year, my father was off exploring once more—first in Honduras, and then, as he wrote in a manuscript that I will often cite in this blog post, I took off for Venezuela on a six month contract on July 21, 1946.  (p. 1)

His contract was with the U. S. Steel Corporation (actually its subsidiary, the Oliver Iron Mining Co.), which was searching for iron ore (so desperately needed following WWII). This—his “Venezuelan adventure” and his last and greatest–forms the basis of my blog post.

I call this his “greatest” adventure because, in Venezuela, he identified a mountain that has often since been described as containing “the richest concentration of iron ore on the face of the earth.”

 

This superlative appears in the above article by Leigh White, who also writes, as you can read in the pull quote (above): “In one of the great ore strikes of our time, a Swede named Kihlstedt found ‘the world’s richest iron deposit,’ insured our industrial future and touched off the darnedest high jinks Venezuela has ever seen.”

 

We will touch on those “high jinks” a little later. But we can assume, maybe, that superlatives from a popular journal like the Post are more than hyperbole if similar superlatives appear in major journals of the profession. In the above article, for example, Mr. Lippert, the Manager of Publications for the AIME, assured his audience that “over half of La Parida is solid iron ore of almost unbelievable purity—by all sober estimate the richest and greatest iron deposit in the history of the world.”

 

Any reader paying close attention may ask why, in its title, the article calls this mountain Cerro Bolívar, while the text calls it La Parida?

Before 1948, the mountain was La Parida. But when experts estimated that it contained more than 400,000,000 tons of high-grade ore with a content of at least 58% iron, the Oliver Iron Mining Company (the U.S. Steel subsidiary headquartered in Ciudad Bolivar) and officials of the Venezuelan government thought it prudent and compelling to re-name it after Simón Bolívar, the man who liberated Venezuela (and other South American countries) from Spanish rule in 1821.

To name such a rich mountain after the country’s most famous historical figure certainly has merit, but why was it also prudent? The above photograph provides an answer.

When seen from this angle, the mountain’s profile clearly resembles a supine, pregnant woman. As my father wrote in his manuscript, the name La Parida has in Spanish a meaning: The woman who is giving birth. The meaning has been twisted into foul slang, and it was agreed upon between the minister, Dr. Travieso Paul and Mr. Lake to change it to Cerro Bolívar by which name it is now known, even locally.  (p. 26)

 

This is my father, pretty much as I remember him, wide forehead marked by a vertical crease running up into his hairline, a lit cigar (or a pipe) angling off to one side. I am uncertain as to when, or where, this photo was taken: in Manila, prior to 1945; in Ciudad Bolívar, between 1946-1950; possibly even in the United States after the exploration phase was completed.

 

Twice, now, I have quoted from this, my father’s narrative about his work in Venezuela. I will quote more because it is revealing, compellingly written and–as far as I know–the only first-hand description of what actually took place. Whenever I quote from it, his words will appear in bold italics so as to separate them from my and other secondary text.

What comes clear to me after reading A Personal View… is that Folke Kihlstedt was the right, and possibly best, person to lead this exploration. His superb general education as well as his scientific training as a geologist are evident throughout this manuscript, whether describing how various landscape elements evolved or intuiting what sort of rock is concealed under the various forms of visible flora. Added to this is his uncanny insight into people, his sense of humor, his gift for storytelling, and his self-effacing introspection.

A Personal View on Iron Ore Exploration in Venezuela July 1946 — March 1951 is a fascinating and historically important manuscript.

 

Let’s use this partial map of Venezuela to familiarize ourselves with some relevant geography. Near the bottom left, we see the Orinoco River flowing ENE until it opens into the Gulf of Paria and the Atlantic Ocean. As you can see, the Orinoco Delta is vast, emptying into the Gulf of Paria at the north and the Atlantic Ocean at the south. From N to S, its three main channels (or distributaries) are the Caño Manamo, the Caño Macareo and the Boca Grande (labeled on this map as Orinoco River).  Remembering this will help discussion of how to best get the iron ore into ocean-going vessels, like the Tosca, and to the United States.

If we trace the Orinoco one third of the way up our map, we find Ciudad Bolivar, the capital of Bolívar state, major city of this region, and where the Oliver Iron Mining Company was headquartered. If we trace the Orinoco half way up, we find its juncture with the smaller Caroní River, which flows in from the S, and also the town of Palua.

It’s essential to know that there were different rules governing the granting of mining concessions on land E of the Caroni and land W of the Caroní. These differences will set the stage for “the darnedest high jinks Venezuela has ever seen,” as Leigh White stated in his Post article.

Now, note that there are three ore concessions marked in red E of the Caroní: Piacoa, La Grulla, and El Pao. Then note that, W of the Caroní are concessions named Arimagua, Altamira, Rondon and–the largest by far–Cerro Bolívar.

When Folke Kihlstedt arrived in Venezuela in 1946, the only evidence of iron ore was E of the Caroní. Bethlehem Steel, for example, had concessions at El Pao from the late 1930s, but postponed any mining work until the War ended. All parties with an interest in mining, whether governmental entities, foreign corporations, or Venezuelan citizens, understood that iron ore only existed E of the Caroni. Therefore, as my father wrote, This area had been declared an iron ore reserve by the Venezuelan government. Mining concessions could only be obtained through negotiations with the government, and only for 40 years without preferential right to extension.  (p. 3)

West of the Caroni, where it was apparently thought that no ore occurred, there were no limitations of this kind. The ground was open for staking according to the regular mining law. Concessions were valid for 50 years with preferential rights to extension for another 50 years.  (p. 3)

This geographical difference essentially defined the land W of the Caroní as analogous to a “Wild West” where anybody could stake claims at any time. There was no government protocol or control.

If anybody could stake a claim on land W of the Caroni without first seeking government approval, one can easily imagine how a gringo engineer tooling around the savannas in a jeep would quickly raise the curiosity of local citizens, particularly avaricious and opportunistic ones. Here is Folke’s assessment:

Ciudad Bolivar is an old provincial capital almost isolated from the rest of Venezuela until recently.  Its past history can best be likened to a sleep, now and then interrupted by spasmodic money making when a turn in world markets or a foreign company appeared, stirring up interest in the submarginal hinter land, be it for gold, diamonds, oil, iron ore, rubber, chicle or tonca beans. Each time there appeared a new crop of wealthy city dwellers with large ranches in the country, run by caretakers. This rich middle class, mostly of Corsican origin, could smell that situation and get ready for it. Therefore we were watched closely by this smart, pleasant happy-go-lucky crowd, whose boundaries of business ethics not infrequently were considerably expanded beyond the borders we ourselves live within. This I have experienced in other countries as well, but it is not always understood by newcomers.  I found it best to be very close-mouthed on our own plans, and to handle the local public relations personally, or through the one man retained by us, whose integrity was unquestioned—Don Carlos Boccardo...  (p. 16)

 

I happen to have this photograph of Boccardo, although I have no idea where, when or for what occasion it was taken. What I do remember is the name, Boccardo, and, if my memory is correct, he either owned a grocery or a hardware store in Ciudad Bolívar.

 

I use this, the only color aerial photograph I have, for a discussion of the role played by AAF trimetrogon aerial photographs, which allow for stereographic interpretation of a topography. This, of course, is not such a photo. This photo, I believe, was taken in 1946, the year Folke went to Venezuela, and that he himself took it on his first flight east from Ciudad Bolívar with Earl Nixon (whom Folke would replace as head of exploration at year’s end):

A few days had gone by when Mr. Nixon invited us all to an airplane ride over the country to the east. The trip, in a single motor ruggedly built Norseman, was a very constructive step by Mr. Nixon indeed. A few impressions that later proved to be fundamental to our work are worth while mentioning….

….As we sped eastward from Ciudad Bolivar, we passed over the level green carpet of the savanna….Burrell pointed out that we faced a peneplane ahead….I agreed fully with him. No ramification of this geological fact were mentioned, and it was only later that it became an important link in the chain of conclusions which led to the discovery of Cerro Bolívar.

Regarding those AAF trimetrogon photographs: My father wrote that, upon first arriving in Ciudad Bolívar, It appeared that…several scattered AAF trimetrigon air photo strips had just been acquired, and I assisted Burrell and Wright, our geologists, to assemble these the next morning. At times we would run across photographs which were highly suggestive in the way they reflected what obviously were geological structures and various rock types of guessable kind.   (pp. 3-4)

Folke quickly realized how these photographs, if properly read with the use of a stereoscope, would enable him to determine what sort of rock was likely to be hidden below any particular type of vegetation. This knowledge would enhance their geological surveying and reduce the on-site exploration that, W of the Caroní, would alert local landowners and compromise their investigations:  Suppose we had complete air photo coverage and therefore did not need further topographic work now seemingly the main occupation of the field engineers, how would we use the photos best?  (p. 8)

Once Folke replaced Mr. Nixon at the end of 1946, he approached the director of operations, Mack C. Lake, his boss:  We discussed the probability of an appropriation for aerial photography over the whole area, and I judged from that that the chances were good….The air photography project was approved. I obtained bids, of which one was particularly attractive. Mr. Lake got the specifications and a contract with Fairchilds Aerial Survey Company was signed…and when New Year came I took over the front command.  (p. 15)

 

Kihlstedt spent the first few months of 1947 somewhere in the field each day, returning in the late afternoon to Ciudad Bolívar to examine aerial photographs. By March 1, 1947, the Fairchild project manager was delivering a new set of photographs every afternoon:  In the evenings, I scanned the air photos until one night the potent looking west end of a high ridge showed up on a picture in the deep south, not far from our demarkation line for photography.  A day or two later sufficient new prints were available to pin together a mosaic of it. It was obviously the same mountain that I had looked at with Wright several months previously. With months of work and experience behind us, it now looked like ore. It was previously also one of the mountains of the range that Mr. Lake and I had seen from Sabaneta. The prints went into my locked desk drawer….  (p. 22)

….Realizing from stereoscopic views that the mountain probably was iron ore, I nevertheless had my doubts about it. As an outcrop of ore it would outrank anything the world had seen so far. A possible 5 miles long, here and there swelling out to 3/4 mile in width. It seemed like common sense that it could not be ore. Just the same, everytime I looked at the photos the certainty that it was ore grew….  (p. 22)

.…The grain of the photos reflecting that typical iron ore outcrop assemblage of vegetation and topographic detail was there….If it were ore, why was it lying there undiscovered with a village at its base….What finally decided the issue in my mind and made me throw out all the doubts dressed up as “common sense” in favor of evidence alone were the enormous land slide scars….With that view of it, it became deadly serious business. We must shoot first, ask questions afterwards!  (p. 22-23)

 

And so begins the “high jinks.” Shoot first meant “go see what’s there without alerting any locals.”

The timing was right: A few days remained until Easter week. The whole town would then be intensely occupied between church and fiesta and forget their interests in our doings. That would be my time for the trip even if I would get gray hair waiting for the day. As yet nobody knew anything about this new development.  (p. 23)

The timing, also, was wrong: Kihlstedt would have to enlist his least-reliable engineer for this visit, Victor Paulik. Paulik was overenthusiastic and uncritical of his own work….we would never succeed in making a good staff member of him, because the thing that made him tick would probably be killed in the process. A psychological problem, good horseman, a poor judge, a noisy enthusiast.   (pp. 18-19)

Why Paulik?:  Burrell had recuperated from an illness and left for Piacoa to see Sigman who was leaving. Moyka was on his regular vacation. Leonard had had a bout with malaria and was in Barbados recovering. Wright had taken his place. Boeckman was out in the jungle.There remained Paulik, good bushman as he was, to accompany me, and the area was, after all, in his territory. (p. 23)

 

Good Friday came and we began the steep climb. Some boulders of iron formation greeted us, and with the map prepared in Ciudad Bolivar we soon passed a small subsidiary peak, the last point before we entered the jungle. The laterite soil in there had many small silvery pebbles of dense iron ore that kept growing in size and became a scattering of enormous ore boulders.

We faced a long cliff in the jungle and followed a trail of tapir tracks at its base until a ledge permitted us to climb up. On top a treeless expanse opened up and I was staring with awe at iron ore as far as I could see, right, left, uphill where the ore and the sky met high above us.

I casually threw a piece of ore down into the treetops below us. My partners were unconcerned standing on this lichen grey rock carpet of insignificant looking high grade porous ore. Thank God they did not realize what they were standing on.  (pp. 23-24)

 

This is the only photo I have of Ciudad Bolívar (actually a few miles on its outskirts–the first of the four houses was for our family), but it will suffice for what comes next.

The following day we returned to Ciudad Bolivar and I noticed that my companion from yesterday did not have his dinner at the staff house. Suspecting possible leaks I took our cashier,  Prudhomme, on a trip around the town’s night clubs and we found him in the notorious Trocadero in an inebriated condition. In his company was among others one to me unknown man. Paulik struggled over to the mike of the orchestra and began introducing me as “the greatest bushman that ever hit Venezuela”. Prudhomme shut off the loudspeaker and after a while we got him out of there. I now felt certain that he had begun to realize the significance of this awe-inspiring heap of “canga”, and that the secret gradually would leak out. He was again sent back to his camp.  (p. 24)

On Monday morning I therefore was in Caracas with the intention of having Dr. Travieso Paul apply for an exclusive prospecting right of the Parida range. Unfortunately the necessary minister was in the United States, so Kihlstedt rushed back to Ciudad Bolívar to register a series of denouncements in my own name, to be transferred to the company later….Burrell, Nieto and I spent the next day and evening writing out the denouncement papers. When I came to the registrar’s office, he informed me that he was too busy to receive the papers that day because he had received eleven ones ahead of ours…

To say that I was fighting mad and disgusted with Paulik and his Trocadero visit is an understatement…

However, the following morning I filed our five claims, Carla 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The registrar introduced me to an old man, Sr. Rojas Gutierrez, whom he said he wanted present from the “other side” to avoid any future questioning of his own impartiality. He then dated and numbered my papers and showed me briefly the other eleven denouncements, signed by one Alfredo Gruber. We received copies of these shortly afterwards.  (p. 24)

My father then wrote: I went home to lie down and think, This seemed too fast work to come out of the Trocadero incident alone. In 1949 the puzzle finally disclosed a fuller picture of an extraordinary interplay of shrewd actions and coincidents... Kihlstedt then tells of local intrigue that led to the Gruber denouncements along with a subsequent survey ruse on the mountain initiated by him, and naturally seen by Gruber’s people, which convinced them to physically make a reference point which would create the least amount of claim overlap. This is fascinating, worthy of a good cloak-and-dagger tale, but far too long and convoluted for this post.

 

A digression: At least one of the four pieces of ore in this Monument came from a Spanish furnace built over 270 years ago in Mundo Nuevo (near Ciudad Bolívar), discovered by engineers of Oliver Iron Mining Co. In January of 1950 this would become the Orinoco Mining Co with Mack Lake as its first president.

Thus, as of April 1947, U. S. Steel, or the Oliver Iron Mining Company [OIMCo] to be precise, owned Cerro Bolívar. That amounted to about 4,000 hectares. Venezuelan mining law limits holdings of one company for “one mining installation” to 10,000 hectares. And so, there was yet more work, intrigue and diplomacy ahead were OIMCo to add another 6,000 hectares to its holdings. As we saw on that map illustrated earlier, W of Caroni were also the ore concessions of Altamira, Arimagua, Rondon and Frontera.

Kihlstedt discussed these in his chapter titled The Southern Front, where he warned: The time element surely would work against us. The government would probably soon declare the region a Zona Reservada….We had to operate ourselves into a position where we could checkmate our opponents in what suddenly had, with me, become a chess game.  (p. 27)

And, sure enough, during the summer months of 1947 the denouncement spree in Estado Bolivar caused the Ministerio de Fomento in Caracas to take action. I received a message from Mr, Evans of the Escritorio that it was contemplated to extend the reserved zone for iron ore from Caroni river to Aro River to the west of us and that we should not lose any time if we wanted to stake some more claims.  (p. 29)

From various sources, I can state that OIMCo rushed through Rondon 1, 2, and 3 denouncements using features visible on the air photos as reference points in July, 1947; Arimagua 1-3 in June, 1947 (article of 1950 by Mack Lake); Frontera claims were purchased from the Gruber group in early 1948 (Kihlstedt). The completed acquisition of the Southern Front was quite a haul for Oliver and the United States Steel Corporation….Our prospecting period was over.  (p. 34)

 

Thus, my father wrote, while drills were moved to Cerro Bolivar…I had shaped up another, last trump card—a plausible solution to hauling the ore out of Venezuela. (p. 34)

He began his chapter on Ore Transportation with this: The first ore discovery in the fall of 1946 inevitably introduced the question of ore haulage to deep water. We had all seen Bethlehem’s port at Palua on the Orinoco take shape and seen them delay the final touches until suitable barges had been designed, with which to bring the ore to their future transfer station at Puerto de Hierro. Their system offered one solution, perhaps for us not the best one.  (p. 35)

Again, let’s consult the map pictured above. Kihlstedt observed that, of the three distributaries at the Orinoco Delta, the Caño Manamo, the Caño Macareo and the Boca Grande, only the top and the bottom ones had any traffic at all.  They, however, were too shallow to allow large sea-going vessels, which is why Bethlehem Steel elected to ship its ore by barges via the Manamo or the Boca Grande to Puerto de Hierro, which is on that peninsula at the top of the Gulf of Paria. From here, the ore would be loaded on to ocean-going vessels.

As my father considered the Orinoco Delta, he determined that the nearest relative of Orinoco is the Nile, not the Mississippi River. As he saw it, our own Mississippi is a digging river, sending its tentacles of land out into the Gulf, whereas the sea invades the Orinoco estuaries, the very opposite of Mississippi. From a lot of evidence of this sort one may draw the conclusion that the Orinoco delta is an old delta in a dormant state.

As he mulled this over for several days, he determined that the south coast of Trinidad and the Orinoco delta formed a nozzle-like bay, narrowing into Serpents Mouth. The fraction of that sea current going through there could be expected to flow faster through that nozzle and even become scouring instead of leveling or depositing silt.  (p. 36)

This would mean less dredging, lower maintenance costs, and a possibility to bring large vessels directly to the Caroni Junction economically.  And so, I took Moyka with me on an airplane trip to Trinidad and we found Macareo to be a fairly straight river without a single sandbar, over 1000’ wide, and with a well protected estuary….In contrast, the Manamo and Boca Grande were in places studded with sand banks….The Macareo distributary was quite obviously the one for our purpose.  (p. 37)

 

With the very first image of this blog post, we read that an ore ship named Tosca carried the first shipment of iron ore to Fairless Works on January 19, 1954. Tosca was the first large vessel ever to sail into the Orinoco and use the Macareo distributary. This photograph captures my mother and father on that day, guests of U.S. Steel for this celebratory occasion. I came across this accidentally this past week, stopped the film in order to take this screen shot. The film, Iron Ore from Cerro Bolivar, by Richard Finnie [31:04], who served as chief photographer for the Bechtel Corporation, is well worth watching as it captures the essence of this grand exploration with real, on-site footage.

 

I am sure that this memento paperweight was also handed out to the guests on that day at Fairless Works. I photographed this on a visit to our daughter, Rya, in Los Angeles. I had given it to her years ago. It seems to have survived quite well, with the exception of those dark smudges in the corners–disintegrated remnants of its rubber feet.

 

This is a very different “memento” honoring my father’s work in Venezuela. Here is the first of the two paragraphs:

VI Gustav, med Guds nåde, Sveriges, Götes och Vendes Konung. Göre veterligt att som Vi till befrämjande av de emellan Sverige och Venezuela Förenska Stater redan bestående vänskaps- och handels-förhållanden, för gott och nödigt funnit att utnämna och förordna Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt all vara konsul i Ciudad Bolivar med distrikt omfallande delstaterna Delta Amacuro, Bolivar och Amazonas.

Gustav VI, by the grace of God, King of Sweden, Göte and Vende. Make it known that as We, for the promotion of the friendship and trade relations already existing between Sweden and the United States of Venezuela, have found it necessary to appoint and order Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt to be consul in Ciudad Bolivar with districts covering the states of Delta Amacuro, Bolivar and Amazonas.

 

And, naturally, the Venezuelan government must recognize its honorary new Consul of Sweden. If you caught the “royal we” in the Swedish document (Vi, We), here I direct your eye to the end of the Venezuelan document where you will find three official forms of dating.

La Junta Militar de Gobierno de los Estados Unidos de Venezuela. Por cuanto el Señor Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt en virtud de letras patentes expedidas en 21 de julio de 1948 ha sido nombrado Cónsul de Suecia en Ciudad Bolívar….Por tanto, se ordena a las autoridades competentes tengan a Sr. Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt como Cónsul de Suecia en Ciudad Bolivar, con la jurisdicción expresada….Firmado, sellado con el sello respectivo y refendado por el Ministro de Relaciones Exteriores en Caracas, a 8 de marzo de 1949 Año 139 de la Independencia y 91 de la Federación.

The Military Junta of the Government of the United States of Venezuela. Whereas Mr. Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt by virtue of letters patent issued on July 21, 1948 has been appointed Consul of Sweden in Ciudad Bolívar….Therefore, the competent authorities are ordered to have Mr. Folke Hjalmar Kihlstedt as Consul of Sweden in Ciudad Bolivar, with the expressed jurisdiction….Signed, sealed with the respective seal and endorsed by the Minister of Foreign Affairs in Caracas, on March 8, 1949, Year 139 of Independence and Year 91 of the Federation.

 

This photograph captures still another level of recognition, as it documents Benjamin Fairless, Chairman of the Board of U.S. Steel Corp. sitting in the office of Colonel Perez Jimenez, Venezuela’s President. The occasion was a visit to Cerro Bolívar and the new facilities then in construction by all the major corporate executives of U.S. Steel (and their wives). During this visit, Fairless claimed partnership with the President and Caracas businessmen at a luncheon in his honor with these words:

“The purpose of our partnership is to transform iron into gold – not through the mysterious black magic of the ancient alchemists, but through the modern miracle of mutual incentive under a system of free enterprise.”

 

Cerro Bolívar even made national radio headlines when it became the subject of the popular anthology drama series sponsored by Du Pont, The Cavalcade of America. I have a playscript of it, which I must say takes significant liberties with the actual events. Even the cast contains a curiosity: Dane Clark, the star, plays Latham. I have no idea who that is; Latham is not a name that appears once in my father’s 43-page, single-spaced document (nor in other sources I have examined).

 

My father died in October of 1956 at the age of 55. This homage to him was written by Morgan Leonard, one of the engineers who had worked under him. The periodical, El Minero, was published by the Orinoco Mining Co. Its letterhead lists three cities, two of which hadn’t existed in the previous decade. One was Caracas. The two new ones were Puerto Ordaz and Ciudad Piar, which I will introduce below as we look at the aftermath of this “Venezuelan Adventure.”

I was a teenager, a fifteen-year-old boy, when my father died. He was bed-ridden for more than a year before he succumbed. Occasional fragments of his manuscript reveal an awareness that something mysterious, unknown was taking over his body and changing him:

The malaria which I hoped was over after attack #3 had put its deep mark on my stamina…I felt indescribably tired. I had noticed signs of it previously when I had for days at a time been unable to dictate a letter—could not find the words to express my thoughts.  (p. 31)

My health had mysteriously gone to pieces. First in 1947 the difficulty to express myself. Then the perpetual tiredness and a general slowing down. Then my sense of humor left me. Finally in 1950 I found myself living under a permanent blue cloud of threatening ulcers. I visited doctors who prescribed vitamins for my tiredness, diets and advise to stop worrying to protect me from actually getting ulcers. I came to look at these Doctors with a great deal of disdain. To me it was something else, more serious, my whole personality gradually changed after mid 1947. Unable to see this matter in its true perspective the Doctors busied themselves just trying to cure symptoms.  (p. 42)

 

This is one of several obituaries on my father. He passed away on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where we had moved to avoid another hard winter in Duluth, Minnesota.

One may ask, of what did he die? On learning the answer, one may well ask, why did he die at all?

The why Folke died was due to inadequate or mis-diagnosis mainly by the doctors working for the Corporation.

The lack of improvement, and the symptom curing attitude of Doctors continued in New York from 1951 after my transfer. I began reading up on medical literature pertaining to personality changes. Towards the end of 1953 I thought I had a correct lead and went to my clinic. This time I intended not to have numerous specialists with utmost, probably also useless, care give their various keyhole views of myself, have a girl type it all up together with a nice letter, probably one out of 20-40 similar letters for the average day, and with the chief Doctor’s signature on it give me the frustrating verdict of perfect health—with a smile. I wanted to know what was wrong, and to put myself on the map I believe I succeeded in frustrating everybody else up there by demands for repeats on the very simplest things, like the pulse, blood pressure, weight and others. It helped. The chief Doctor would give me as much of his time as I wanted.

Subnormal pulse, subnormal blood pressure, subnormal basic metabolism, tired, fat, slow, ulcers threatening, a case of malaria seems to have started it, tropical climate, long and taxing working days. I could see how this man rapidly and intelligently kept evaluating all these various factors, and in 10 minutes he said:

“Your thyroid does not function too well. Take this course for a month and tell me the results, You have to give it a chance to recover”, and handed me a prescription.  (p.42)

The of what Folke died from is hemochromatosis. Not until my father insisted on getting some new opinions at the Mayo Clinic was he accurately diagnosed. By then it was too late. Had he been properly diagnosed in 1947, he would have survived quite well through a most medieval mode of treatment: blood removal. Only, instead of leeches, today we treat the patient by therapeutic phlebotomy–a needle in the vein.

Hemochromatosis was destroying my father from the inside. It is a genetic disorder that leaves a person unable to rid the body of ingested iron.  This results in the body storing the excess iron everywhere it can, in the liver, thyroid, heart, gut lining, pituitary gland, brain.  Thus all of these organs slowly start to fail as the iron deposited in them interferes with their normal functioning.

As my sister, Ingrid, herself a medical doctor, wrote me, “Unless a doctor is aware of the possibility of the diagnosis, he/she will deduce that the person has, say, diabetes, hypothryoidism, heart failure, slow onset dementia, etc. and treat each of these separately,” which is just what we read in my father’s text.

Aah, the double irony of an iron mining engineer whose life was taken, not exactly by the quarry he spent his life hunting, but by its “ancestor,” its chemical element, Fe (atomic number 26), lurking in so much of the food that we eat.

 

The Oliver Iron Mining Company needed to build two new towns to house workers and administrate the extraction and movement of iron ore to an appropriate loading dock on the Orinoco River. The one, Ciudad Piar, was built at the eastern foothills on the south side of Cerro Bolívar. The other, Puerto Ordaz, was built at the junction of the Orinoco and Caroní Rivers.

Ciudad Piar was founded on February 9, 1952 as a planned city to house the workers at Cerro Bolívar. The elegant, International Style building you see on the top left in this photo is its clinic. In her article, Virginia Hendershot enthuses that “gone were the frontier days” of four years ago and now all “community needs, protection, education and recreation have been completed.” With obvious pride, she describes the various amenities: the new water system, the jail, the stadium, the Catholic church, the new homes, the swimming pool, the shopping center, and here, the school with its “arcades and patios…[like] the colonnaded courtyards in the ancient Roman home.”

No thatched-roof huts here!

The Orinoco Mining Company (which replaced OIMCo in 1950) had hired two Venezuelan architects in 1951, Moisés Benacerraf Coriat  and Carlos Guinand Baldó to have a hand in the design of both Ciudad Piar and Puerto Ordaz. They collaborated on this project with the well-known Catalan architect and city planner Josep Lluís Sert.

 

 

This map shows the route that trains would use to haul ore from Ciudad Piar to Puerto Ordaz, following the western side of the Caroní River. Puerto Ordaz, as we will see in the next map, is part of what is here labeled Guayana City.

Although I don’t know when the top photo of the street in Ciudad Piar was taken, already in 1955 Richard Finnie, the photographer for the Bechtel Corporation, described it as “a miniature modern city…with row after row of houses.” In 2011, its population was between 40,918 and 51,967 (both from Wikipedia). But within a decade, it shrank to only around 3,000, according  Joelnix Boada (writing in the Correo del Caroní): “For many years, its inhabitants lived in optimal conditions….Today seven decades after its founding, only memories of these golden years remain.”

 

As was Ciudad Piar, Puerto Ordaz also was founded in February of 1952, and in May of that year, the largest barge ever built was towed there. Two more would follow, and the three, together, would become the ore loading dock for Puerto Ordaz. They came from a U.S. Steel plant in Orange, Texas, 2,500 miles away. Less than two years later, on January 9, 1954, Colonel Marcos Pérez Jiménez was given the honor of standing on this new dock and dispatching the first cargo of iron ore into the hold of the Tosca.

San Félix had existed as a settlement since its founding in 1724. The founding of Puerto Ordaz 230 years later injected new life to this region, even though its primary function was mainly to serve as an ore port. Already in 1955, Richard Finnie made this observation: “Only a few months after the beachhead had been established, Puerto Ordaz was taking on the appearance of a thriving community.” And then, because President Jiménez favored the building of open cities in the hopes of promoting economic development, it seemed logical to merge these two settlements and create a true commercial and civic center. Thus, in 1961, nine years after Puerto Ordaz, Ciudad Guayana was founded by the state assembly to merge the two neighboring towns into a single city that embraces some 25 miles of the south bank of the Orinoco River.

 

 

These are just two examples of the high architectural expectations for this new development in which an international team of architects and urban designers from the MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies was involved. The government had projected that Ciudad Guayana would have a population of one million before the end of the twentieth century. It has come close to that today, with an estimated population of around 978,202. However, it seems to have met the same fate as Ciudad Piar.

Richard Barnes, a resident of Puerto Ordaz since 1963, wrote a compelling post in 2020 titled “Alas! Alas! Puerto Ordaz!” chronicling “the rise and the fall of one of the greatest cities of Venezuela…streets abandoned for fear….chaos is her daily bread….its toothless ruins in Matanzas [the site of the city’s teeming, massive industrial works]….stacks that once announced prosperity, today herald diseases of the skin and lungs….Alas! Alas! Puerto Ordaz! Now a mere gibberish…of rude and gross speculators and carpetbaggers all looking for quick and easy money, of misery rooted in deplorable suburbs.”

In 1950, Venezuela “was the world’s fourth-wealthiest country,” according to the editors of Knowledge at Wharton. By 2016, not only had its economy collapsed; so had any semblance of public order.

 

So, as Venezuela collapsed for so many reasons, what remained of this majestic mountain, La Parida, The Woman Who Is Giving Birth?

As Mack C. Lake wrote in the Engineering and Mining Journal of August, 1950, “Actual drilling explorations at Cerro Bolivar began Oct, 2, 1947 and was carried on continuously until May, 27, 1949…about 90 diamond-drill and churn-drill holes were put down….[and] three tunnels were driven into the orebody to check the accuracy of the drill sampling.”

During this period, she prevailed, still a majestic beast. As any mountain, La Parida was simply there.

I know, because I also was there, in the jungles and savannas of Bolívar state AND, most definitely, and with some frequency, on La Parida, happily traipsing by myself over her body as a six-to-nine year old boy (1947-1950). My strongest recollection was standing under the camp shower, a 55-gallon drum, at the end of the day, listening to the roar of the red howler monkeys rising up from the jungle below as I scrubbed my my blood-red skin with Lifeboy Soap. My skin was that color because La Parida’s hematite ore was so rich that the mere dust from a few diamond drills would paint everything.

 

Unfortunately, that ore would not remain underground. As Lake informed his readers, “The top of the hill will be sliced off in 35 to 50-ft horizontal cuts.” And so we see in this photo above, or in the many gettyimages you may choose to “google,” the scarring of this extraction process. It’s not pretty. I couldn’t bear to return today.

What I will do though is invite you to remain in the past, to browse through a few more selected photographs that document this period in Venezuela. Until the final three, you will only have captions–no text. My blog post ends here.

I wrote this for my children and grandchildren so that they knew something of the person who I, myself, hardly knew.

The following photographs are for everyone else: documents to serve the most catholic of interests.

 

Selected Photos: People

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selected Photos: Cerro Bolívar

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selected Photos: Other Ore Concessions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selected Photos: Miscellaneous

 

I am fairly certain that this waterfall is a section of Llovizna Falls on the Caroní River, near its confluence with the Orinoco River. Llovisna means mist or drizzle. I have memories of standing with my father on a bluff a good distance off to one side of a waterfall somewhere on the Caroní. He called it Rainy Falls, and indeed the mist from it was so heavy that I soon was soaked. These Caroní River rapids would become essential to powering the growth of Guayana City.

 

This boat belonged to the OIMCo, and for some reason I remember the name of its skipper: Captain Delgadillo.

 

When we visited Caracas, we always stayed at the Hotel Ávila, located up on Mount Ávila. My main boyhood memory was the Hotel mascot and logo, a toucan. It was the symbol of the hotel and was colorfully printed on the top of every sheet of hotel paper. A toucan also dwelt in a very large cage on the grounds of the hotel. One day, there was a toucan emergency. The bird was unable to open its beak or eat. Someone had given the toucan a wad of chewed bubble gum. Apparently its beak-opening muscles are nowhere near as strong as its closing muscles. I was the only youngster there at the time, so my father had good reason to know the likely suspect. He didn’t turn me in, but I received a stern talking-to…and the bird, thankfully, survived.