The Great Lakes.The Vessels That Plough Them. Curwood James Oliver

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      This is the man whose name you will hear first when you enter the mining country. To chronicle his rise from a dusty Calumet office of long ago to his present kingdom of iron would be to write a book of romance. And there are others of the iron barons of the North whose histories would be almost as interesting, even though fortune may have smiled on them less kindly.

      From the immensity of the interests which Cole superintends one might be led to believe that the iron ore industry is almost entirely in the hands of the trust. This, however, is not so. For every ship that goes down into the South for the trust another leaves for an independent. Nearly every maker of steel owns a mine or two in the ranges of Minnesota, Michigan, or Wisconsin. There are five of these ranges. The Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, both in Minnesota, produce about two thirds of the total product carried by the ships of the Lakes; the Goebic, Menominee, and Marquette ranges are in Michigan and Wisconsin.

      Somehow it is true that nearly every great thing associated with the Lakes is unusual in some way – unusual to an astonishing degree, and the iron ore industry is not an exception. Probably not one person in ten thousand knows that one lone county in this great continent is the very backbone of the steel industry in the United States. This county is in Minnesota. It is the county of St. Louis, and is about as big as the State of Massachusetts. Not much more than twenty years ago it was a howling wilderness. Even a dozen years ago the Mesaba bore but little evidence of the presence of man. Now this country is alive with industry. Buried in the wilderness which still exists are thriving towns; where a short time ago deer and bear wandered unmolested, is now the din of innumerable locomotives, the rumbling of thousands of trains, the screeching of whistles, and the constant groaning of steam shovels. There is not a richer county on the face of the earth. In it are over one hundred mines, from which one hundred and twenty-three million tons of ore have been taken since Charlemagne Tower, now Ambassador to Germany, brought down the first carload to Duluth in 1884. These mines afford livelihood for more than two hundred thousand people, and because of them St. Louis County possesses the greatest freight traffic road in existence – the Duluth, Mesaba, and Northern Railway – which, in 1907, carried about fourteen million tons of ore from the mines to the docks.

      This comparatively little corner of Minnesota practically runs the whole State in so far as expenses are concerned. To administer the affairs of the State, including all of its activities, costs about two million six hundred thousand dollars, and, as inconceivable as it may seem, the three railroads in the ore region pay in taxes one fifth of this sum. They pay one third of the total railroad tax of the State, notwithstanding the fact that some of the greatest lines in the country centre at Minneapolis and St. Paul. To this must be added about seven hundred thousand dollars paid in direct taxes by the mines themselves, so that the iron ore which the ships of the Lakes bring down to Eastern ports each season pays almost half of the total expense of running the State of Minnesota!

      And these mines will add more and more to the State exchequer each year, as will also the mines of the three ranges in Michigan and Wisconsin. For in no part of the world has mining been undertaken on a scale so gigantic as that of the Superior region, and every contrivance known to mining science is being used to increase month by month the mountains of ore which ever fail to satisfy the hungry furnaces of the East. It is predicted by Captain Joseph Sellwood, of Duluth, one of the oldest and greatest of the iron barons, that the time is not distant when the Mesaba range alone will be producing forty million tons of ore a year – as much as all five ranges are producing now.

      “It will cost over a billion dollars to get this ore to the docks,” said he. “And seven hundred and fifty million dollars more to land it in Lake Erie ports.” – Nearly a two-billion-dollar mining and transportation business for the people of the Lakes to look forward to, and this from a single range!

      “But will not this tremendous activity exhaust your mines?” I asked of several of these iron barons. “The ore doesn’t go down to China, and it doesn’t extend all over the State. What is the future?”

      The future! Few have thought of this. There are just at present too many millions of dollars in the making to give one time or inclination to picture the days when only black and silent scars will remain to give evidence of the time when this Northland was one of the treasure houses of the earth. But that time must come. Old mining men say so if you can get them to talk about it, and scientific computations, as far as they go, are proof of it. These computations differ, but they agree pretty generally that there are still between a billion and a half and two billion tons of ore in the Superior district. Within the next five years the ships will be bringing down fifty million tons a year, and there is no reason for believing that this will be the maximum. So it is obvious that the ore of the Lake Superior regions will not last beyond the year 1950 unless new deposits are discovered, or methods are found for the utilisation of immense deposits that cannot now be used.

      “Will this event not prove ruinous to a large extent to shipping interests?” I asked G. Ashley Tomlinson, of Duluth, and others closely associated with iron and vessel interests. “To-day nearly half of the total tonnage of the Lakes is from the mines. If this industry becomes practically extinct what will become of the hundreds of ships engaged in the traffic?”

      Mr. Tomlinson’s answer struck me as extremely logical. “The production of ore will probably reach its maximum within the next ten years,” he said. “It will then begin to decline. But the decrease will be gradual, and meanwhile other freight traffic on the Lakes will be increasing so rapidly that each year ships that were intended originally for the ore trade will carry other business. There will be no loss for the ships. The development of our own and the Canadian West has only begun, and the Lakes are the great links of commerce between their vast enterprises of the future and the East. The grain trade of the Canadian West alone will in the not distant future be something tremendous.”

      But whatever the future of the ore regions of the North may be, their present is one of great interest and importance to the world at large. Mining, like shipbuilding, has been reduced to a science on the Lakes. A stranger visiting for the first time any one of the five ranges is filled with astonishment. I will never forget the sensations with which I first saw mining on the Mesaba range. We had come up over a forest-clad hill and stood on the very edge of the mine before I had been made aware of its nearness. Below me there stretched a mile of deep, huge scars in the bottom of what seemed to be a great hole dug into the earth. One of these pits, half a mile in diameter, and, as I afterward discovered, nearly two hundred feet in depth, was almost at my feet.

      “That’s iron ore,” said my companion. “And right there it goes one hundred feet deeper down.”

      This was one of the great “open pits” of the Mesaba range. There are many others like it in the Superior regions. They are the most wonderful mines in the world. Imagine that you take a barrel of salt, dig a hole, pour the salt into this hole, and cover it with a few inches of earth. This gives you an idea of one of these ore mines. After the earth has been “stripped” from the top the ore is reached and it is found in much the same way that the salt would be found. In the words of one superintendent, it is “all together.” It is as if Nature, like a pirate, had dug holes here and there in which she had hidden her treasure, covering it over for concealment with a few feet of earth.

      Down into these pits and along their edges run the tracks of the ore cars. There is here but little of the shovelling and “picking” of men. Steam shovels, weighing from sixty to seventy-five tons each, do the work. Like a great hand one of these shovels dips down into the soft mass of ore, buries its great dipper until it holds from four to eight tons, and then, groaning and rumbling, slowly lifts its burden aloft, swings it over a car, and the actual work of mining is done. A thousand times a day it will repeat this operation, lifting from three thousand to eight thousand tons of ore. This one shovel keeps busy three locomotives and as many trains of dump cars. And there are nearly two hundred of these shovels in use on the СКАЧАТЬ