STEEL - 451 for financial support. It was evident that what the Vermillion ore needed first of all was transportation. At Philadelphia he gained the ear of the famous Jay Cooke, who had done much of the financing for the northern government in the Civil war. Cooke came west, saw St. Louis Bay, Duluth and the Minnesota shore, and offered to handle the bonds of a railway to tap the region. The mere announcement now brought a boom to Duluth. Real estate sold. Lewis Merritt built a hotel. General Warren, another easterner from Long Island, N. Y., offered him $10,000 to build a road through the woods to Vermillion Lake. Merritt worked five months, summer and fall, with eighteen men, two ox teams and wagons, and completed a wagon trail 84 miles long from Duluth, good enough for hauling supplies. But alas ! In 1873 Jay Cooke's banking house failed. The Menominee and Gogebic iron ranges were discovered down in Michigan. The Duluth population drifted thither, reducing the town from 6,000 to 3,000. Even Lewis Merritt departed, going to Missouri with his wife to farm in a sunny climate. But his boys remained, clearing their forest lands and ranging the Mesabi hills for iron, and eventually their much-enduring little mother came back from Missouri to keep house for them again. Stuntz returned to the enterprise, determined to enlist capital in the production of Vermillion ore. He persuaded men from Ontonagon and Duluth to look into it. With their expedition went A. H. Chester, professor of geology in Hamilton College. They turned aside on the way to verify reports of a deposit southeast of Vermillion Lake. There were intimations of Mesabi iron. Stuntz impatiently insisted on going on to their original objective. The others hesitated, then gave him Indians and a keg of powder. He went on without them, drilled, and "shot the first blast in the history of iron mining in Minnesota." He and his Indian broke off sixty tons of ore, afterward found to run 65 to 66 per cent Bessemer quality. Professor Chester, summoned to the spot, was astonished. But it was for Stuntz the same old story of defeat through indifference. 452 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS Then came action at last in 1880. George C. Stone, who had done some banking in Duluth, now past sixty years of age, had gone east to Philadelphia and was running a modest cement business. Stuntz had given him some of his ore sample and communicated his own enthusiasm, after applying in vain to Captain Eber B. Ward of Detroit, Orrin W. Potter of Chicago and Amasa Stone of Cleveland. Docks and railroads were needed—it was too expensive. The cement maker succeeded in interesting Charlemagne Tower, who had made a fortune of $4,000,000 in coal and railroads, and thought only of spending the rest of his life in ease. With Stuntz surveying around Lake Vermillion, plotting the land where he had discovered his iron, Stone and Tower took it up, the former supplying the business enterprise and the latter the money. With claims supposedly good for anything but mineral land, through the services of accommodating "entry men," they obtained for $40,000 some 17,000 acres of rich iron land. Stuntz hauled in supplies over his old abandoned Vermillion Trail—buckets, windlasses, dynamite, provisions. He located the route of a railroad, to be called the Duluth and Iron Range, running through steep, barren and rocky territory, in the most direct way from the mines, touching Lake Superior at Two Harbors, twenty-five miles north of Duluth. At last a mining project had money and modern machinery to work with, on a scale never known before. Stone proceeded to make the most of his opportunity. He undertook the railroad on the strength of a single mine. Manager of a company capitalized at $10,000,000, with a personal stake of 3,000 shares, he threw all his energy into the venture. Tower played the game like a sportsman. When his partner Munson pulled out, Tower took over his holdings. Edward Breitung, who had iron mining enterprises in Michigan, became interested, along with George H. and Samuel P. Ely of Cleveland. But Breitung quickly discovered that he had too many other investments, changed his mind, and Tower bought his stock. The railroad had to be built with private capital, because STEEL - 453 the state was making no more such land grants as had facilitated the opening of the earlier mines. An old, unused grant was discovered, issued to the "Duluth and Winnipeg Railroad Company," and the Legislature agreed to let the new company have it. But large sums were needed. There was no market for the company's stock and bonds. Steel rails were $60 a ton, iron rails $40. Supplies had to be sledded in during the winter, because in summer the mines were almost inaccessible. Tower alone had to take nearly all the bonds. The company held nearly all the stock, because nobody else wanted it. Soon Tower had thrown $3,000,000 into "a hole in the ground," and Stone was keeping the construction work going by borrowing on Tower's reputation. The impoverished capitalist was perpetually hounded for money. He sold the last of his negotiable securities, some Erie bonds, and wrote a check for $100,000, telling Stone, "I must have the next installment on my bonds, or I cannot live." And Stone met that demand with more money borrowed from note-brokers on Tower's reputation. Somehow the money was always found somewhere. Part of it was found in Cleveland, where Samuel Mather, Col. James Pickands and Jay C. Morse were getting the now historic firm of Pickands, Mather and Company under way. The railroad engineering work was done in winter at a temperature of 40 degrees below zero. The construction work was done in summer in a plague of mosquitoes. Machinery and rolling stock were obtained. The job was scheduled for completion before August 1, 1884; and at 11 P. M. on July 31st a carload of ore was dumped on the dock at Two Harbors, and a $50,000 bonus was collected. There were 84,000 tons of ore shipped from Vermillion that season, nearly all of which came from the Soudan Mine, with its hard, steel-blue, non-bessemer hematite. Additional mines were soon opened—Chandler, Pioneer, Zenith, Sibley, and others. The mines were operated very profitably. Tower sold out to Rockefeller and others for $8,000,000, and gave Stone $400,000 of it. The Tower fortune was doubled, as was the Tower prestige. The capitalist's son, of the same 454 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS name, became ambassador to St. Petersburg and Berlin. Somehow, in the press of events, Stuntz seems to disappear from the scene, as is the way of men who have sought "something lost behind the ranges." By 1907 the Vermillion Range had produced over $85,000,000 worth of ore. In that same year of 1884 shipments started from the Gogebic Range, "back east" between Duluth and Marquette. The first examination of this rich region had been made by Col. Charles Whittlesey, the Cleveland historian, scientist, business man, and all-around pioneer, when he assisted in the first government survey of 1848. There was no development until after the Wisconsin Central Railroad was built to Penokee Gap in 1873. In that year a shaft was sunk 100 feet in a body of magnetic ore analyzing about 57 per cent metallic iron. Richard Langford, the "Hermit of Lake Superior," claimed to have been the real discoverer of Gogebic Range, finding an outcrop beneath the roots of a birch tree leveled by the wind. He was a trapper, and had gone about for years with samples of ore. According to his account, he told his story to Capt. N. D. Moore, thereby enabling Moore in 1880 to locate the important deposit which developed into the famous Colby Mine at Bessemer. The region was explored in 1881 by George A. Fay, representing men in Marquette and Ishpeming. He found ore in many places, but missed the rich deposits around Gogebic Lake. He was handicapped by the expense of prospecting in a region where supplies cost a dollar a pound. The next year he found good, soft hematite east of Sunday Lake. But a lease was refused by the owner and the project was abandoned. Pickands, Mather & Company, organized in 1883, took an immediate and practical interest in the Gogebic region. They started explorations and acquired valuable holdings, particularly the Colby Mine and the Sunday Lake Mine. There has not been much of romantic interest recorded of this ore range, compared with some of the others, but much of substantial achievement. Up to 1927, despite its late start, it had produced 160,705,000 tons of ore, slightly more than either the STEEL - 455 Marquette or the Menominee, and three times as much as the Vermillion. There was plenty of ore. Always, as the steel era proceeded, more raw material was needed to feed this insatiable industry, and always new supplies had been found. But profits bred keen competition. Industrial captains were looking far ahead. There were incalculable prizes for the winners in the great game. They demanded always cheaper ore, always new resources against the time of need. So we come to the romantic story of the Mesabi Range, the greatest deposit of wealth stored in one spot for the use of man that has ever yet been discovered on this earth. It is a tale told many times in diverse ways. The necessarily brief account here given follows, in the main, the narrative of Paul de Kruif in his "Seven Iron Men," while acknowledging that the method of this author tends somewhat to sacrifice historical proportion for dramatic effect. First the scene, those iron hills, "Mesabi" or "Giant," which looked so to the Indians who named them, and which once were so in reality. They were probably the top of the continent before the Rockies rose from the sea, and had been worn down by weather and abraded by ice sheets through countless millions of years. There was geological drama in them, and there was chemical drama. According to a scientific theory accepted by De Kruif, the iron laid down there in the world's youth was all the product of iron-eating microbes, "strange, thread-like beings, some shaped like microscopic ribbons, others looking like nothing more than five-thousandths-of-an-inch-long twisted strands of rope," drinking iron salts washed down by soil erosion into a primeval sea. "In delicate sheaths around their sub-visible bodieg, the iron had gathered, great clots and knots and reddish-brown masses of it. Then they died in their coats of iron." For long ages this continued. Countless decillions of them settled, drifted to the bottom, mixed with sand, became cemented together, the carbonate of iron they absorbed being transformed to oxide of iron. Vast deposits of this material formed, and ooze settled over them and hard- 456 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS ened into rock. The whole mass rose eventually to meet sun, wind, rain and frost. Erosion was resumed. At last the red oxide was bared to the scouring ice cap and glacial waters, which ground and washed and scattered it, and left it in the earth for men to discover in due time. The human actors are the Merritts already mentioned, sons and nephews of Lewis Merritt, a strange family of lumberjacks, poets, small business men and prospectors, nearly all of them inveterate "land-lookers." They were seven—Leonidas, Cassius, Alfred, Wilbur, Bert, Lewis J. and John E., with some others occasionally counted in, and there is no positive agreement regarding the relationships and names. But they are known collectively as the "Seven Merritt Brothers," and they are Duluth's most famous and legendary heroes. Particularly famous are "Lon," who was leader, organizer and poet, "Cashy," a notable scout and explorer, Alfred, a strong and shrewd bushwhacker, Wilbur, a physical giant, and John E., "brave and gentle," with a streak of poetry in him finer than "Lon's." For twenty years they looked for the iron in those hills. They were nearly all lumbermen by vocation, and what they made from timber, beyond bare necessaries, they spent in prospecting. "It was a matter of conscience with me," said Lon afterward. "I believed the iron was there because my father was a very intelligent man, and a man that did not go off the handle, and he had studied that up, and he told me so." Lon wanted two things, white pine and iron; and what he made from one, he spent looking for the other. He toted his packs through -,he wilderness without a tump line, regardless of mosquitoes, black flies, windfalls, underbrush, ice, rain or wolves. In 1885, when the Mesabi had already been searched pretty thoroughly by prospectors and geologists, and pronounced hopeless, Lon found a little mound of lean ore. In 1888 Cassius, exploring for a railroad engineering party, at the top of the Central Mesabi ridge which constituted the height of land, found a lump of iron on the surface. It was not far from the other place. The next year the Merritts, STEEL - 457 being in funds from lucky timber deals, forsook everything else and swarmed over the region. Lon decided upon a survey with a dip-needle compass, along the whole range. John E. and Cassius obediently performed this tedious task and made their charts. They saw no iron, but much dipping of the compass, and the resulting map showed curious wavy loops connecting the points of equal dip. They had bought expensive equipment and were determined to use it. They made a snug camp and dug pits on the crest of the range, working there all winter, and drilling with engines, but struck no iron. In the spring when the ground had thawed they dug farther south, down the slopes, and still found nothing. The ground was strangely soft and reddish, and the wagon wheels sank in it. The compass dipped markedly. From a wheel rut, cut through the carpet of pine needles, Alfred scooped up a handful of red dirt and found it surprisingly heavy. "That's iron !" He exclaimed. He was puzzled. He concluded that it was merely "float ore." A mine couldn't lie so close to the surface. And it was too fine. "What we want," he said, "is a vein of ore." Their money spent, Lon and Alfred made a hurried trip home to raise more and renew the search. They had left in charge of the work a German miner named Capt. J. A. Nichols, who had his own ideas about mining. Lon had told him to continue southward, digging at the foot of the slope. Instead, he had gone the other way. Lon, returning, faced him about, and with him and Alfred went down into the basin to sink a pit. Alfred dug through the pine needles and found only soft earth. It was discouraging. The brothers went again back to Duluth, while Nichols continued digging, this time a little way up the hill. He struck soft hematite. It was November 16, 1890. The next day he hurried to Duluth and showed the brothers fifty pounds of ore that assayed 64 per cent iron. That little pit, the beginning of the Mountain Iron Mine, had tapped the first body of soft ore discovered on the Mesabi Range. All of them felt that they had it at last. The cautious 458 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS German wanted to hurry back and cover up the pit before anyone saw it. "You go right on and dig !" said Lon. "We want ore. You go on and open up that ore. Find the bottom." The test pit, 14 feet deep, was sunk lower, but it was to be many a year before anyone found bottom. The very soil was iron, and the soil seemed fathomless. The ore, though, was a puzzle. People were incredulous when they showed samples of it around Duluth. Nobody had ever seen iron in the form of a soft, fine powder, and nobody had ever heard of iron lying around loose on the surface, instead of being in veins, down amid rock layers, where it belonged. Experienced miners said it might be iron; but could they mine it? The Merritts, popular as they were among their fellow-townsmen, and respected for their integrity, had long been regarded with amused tolerance for their persistent belief that there was iron in the Mesabi. Now, with their excited tales of immense wealth, they were the joke of the town. Friends smiled, but would buy no interest nor lend them any money to waste on such digging. They went back to the test pits and continued digging holes. Lon called a family council, spread out his magnetic survey charts and set forth his theory of that peculiar deposit. His biographer quotes him as saying : "Imagine a lake filled with water, with ordinary banks, and displace that water, and place in it soft ore! The ore lays in basins, just as water would lay in a lake—that's why it's flat." He thought he had discovered something the mineralogists and geologists themselves did not know. And apparently he was right. At any rate the ore was there. They would find a way to mine it. And because there was so much of it, and they could produce and sell it cheaply, they would find a market for it. They kept on sinking wells, raising the ore with windlasses, and were more and more amazed at the extent and depth of those ore-filled basins. As the idea took hold of them, they hastened to sink test pits elsewhere along the range, with the same results. Lon began buying ore basins recklessly, using his magnetic chart for a map. The Merritts among them made filings on over two hundred claims. STEEL - 459 But they were not exclusive about it. They felt that while they deserved a reward for their long years of labor and expense, there was plenty of ore there for all. Lon demanded a state lease law which would enable poor people to take up land on easier terms, so that it would not all be bought up at five or ten dollars an acre in large holdings by rich people, and succeeded in that effort. The townspeople at Duluth were not so sure now that it was fool's iron. They began to show interest. The Merritts continued with their drive. "Whatever we could raise, whatever stuff (mostly timber) we could sell," said Lon afterward, "we bought the basins with. We put in everything we ever made and ever had." The first mine, which revealed the Mesabi to the world, was named Mountain Iron. A company was organized the next spring, and Lon made John E. general manager. Production demanded capital, and that was hard to raise. Personal friends would gamble on it, getting $100 shares for $10, but business men turned him down. There was as yet no transportation, and so no market. The next August the Biwabik group of mines was discov&red by Wilbur Merritt, Captain Nichols and John McCaskill, a Canadian woodsman, who had seen yellow-red soil under the roots of a fallen pine tree and directed the others to the spot. A few months later the Merritts found the Mesabi Mountain ore body, which became a part of the Virginia group. Frank Hibbing and others discovered the great ore body of the Hibbing district. Contemplating their early workings, with holes and heaps of ore all around looking as if it were a giant prairie dog town, and pondering the everlasting question asked them by prospective investors, it dawned on them that they didn't have to mine it. All they had to do was to shovel off the usual overburden of gravel, and there was their ore lying ready for them in a natural stock pile. They could mine it with hand shovels. No—they would use horse-scrapers. A little later came the big idea—steam shovels! It was merely an excavating contractor's job. With up-to-date machinery there would be hardly any expense for labor. 460 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS The important thing now was to finance the enterprise. Lon, who had a sentimental turn and a gift for versification, though he "looked more like a dressed-up blacksmith than a poet," decided to win with poetry. He went home and wooed the commercial muse. The result was an epic poem of great length, after the style of "Hiawatha," which he printed and circulated around town. "A Lay of the Mesabi" he called it. He ended with this eloquent appeal : "We are going to build a railway, With easy grades for transportation, From the mines of the Mesabi To the smokestacks of the Zenith, To the furnaces for smelting, To the mills where cunning fingers Fashion articles for commerce, Structural steel and heavy castings, Tools and rails and nails and what-not. Put some cash in the Mesabi, Lend a helping hand to others, Others who are working for you. Let us bind with bands of iron The Mesabi to the Zenith." The Merritts had their ore now, more ore than they had ever dreamed of, in their big caches and in dozens of other basins scattered through the range. One body of ore alone was two and one-half miles long and 100 to 400 feet deep. The thickest mass was 440 feet from top to bottom. There were particularly, under their ownership or control, the Mountain Iron, the Mesabi Mountain, "that young giant of the future," and the Biwabik, ripe for development. "More merchantable iron," said a geologist, "is known to exist on the Mesabi Range than has been discovered in all the other mines in the Lake Superior region since they were first discovered," and that was putting it mildly. There it lay, queer stuff looking like so much pigment in the ground, yellow, red, brown, blue, purple, green and black, but fairly uniform in analysis, yielding as high as 68 per STEEL - 461 cent iron, with little silica and hardly any phosphorus. Early blast furnace tests showed it difficult to smelt, until the smelters learned the trick. The fine ore dust would cake or puff up like smoke. But it could be mixed in the furnace with other ores. Furnaces could be built with "explosion doors" to handle it pure. It could be used as well as any known ore for making steel by the Bessemer process. There must be a market; and to reach the market there must be a railroad. The Merritts sought transportation from the Northern Pacific and the St. Paul and Duluth Railroads, and were refused. Lon made a hurried trip East to Pittsburgh, which was producing steel at an ever-accelerating tempo, under the drive of Carnegie and his young men. Carnegie himself was away on one of his perennial travel trips. Lon talked to his shrewd partner Frick, the "Coke King," and came back reporting that Frick had "tried to bulldoze him." A free-spirited woodsman does not relish being bulldozed. The brothers decided to build a railroad themselves. Wilbur and Cassius had already been blazing a trail through the woods, sdrveying it with axes and a pocket compass, using their woodcraft instead of science. There was difficulty about an entrance into Duluth for a dock terminal. By this time strong interests were blocking their efforts. Competitors did not want the incalculable Mesabi iron dumped into a market already showing signs of glut and depression. Their humbler fellow-townsmen, from whom they sought help, had little faith in their Duluth, Mesabi and Northern Railroad, but did have faith in the personal integrity of the Merritts. By miracles of finance and energy they put through that transportation line. Barred from the water-front in their own city, they made a traffic contract with the Duluth and Winnipeg, which tapped the Vermillion district, enabling them to link up with it at Stony Brook on the St. Louis River and reach the lake across the bay at Superior. They got their stretch of line built to the Mountain Iron mine, gained their connection and started shipping. That railroad was a paragon of thrifty building. They 462 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS had made their construction camps and bridges, and cut their ties, from trees felled in clearing the right of way. Their route required little grading. They used for roadbed the gravel from the overburden of their ore beds, thus laying bare the ore while they made ready to haul it. Their seventy miles of track cost them only $10,000 a mile. It was a great day at Mountain Iron when the first train rolled up, with its single passenger car and, riding in state, the guest of honor—Hepzibeth Merritt, the iron-hearted little mother of those iron men, who had come back from Missouri to see them through. Their first ore was shipped in November, 1892, so late in the season that it froze in the hold. It was a cargo of 2,073 tons, consigned, as the earliest shipments from the Marquette Range had been, to Oglebay, Norton and Company of Cleveland. The ore was divided among the Carnegie Steel Company, the Isabella Furnace Company and the Oliver Iron and Steel Company. That shipment turned Cleveland's and Pittsburgh's eyes upon the Mesabi. It was hard to get enough cars to keep the mines busy. The Merritts built many themselves. Then they made another traffic arrangement, this time with a barge company which admitted them to its docks in Duluth, helped finance the necessary railroad extension and rolling stock and gained a contract to ship all their ore. It was known as a Rockefeller concern. The railroad was now out of debt, with money in the treasury. Lon boasted that he would "cover the entire Mesabi Range with tracks and spurs." The Merritts were visibly sitting on top of the world. The Mesabi was covered with prospectors and investors. Men swarmed to their mines to work for them, or to gaze in wonder and admiration. Claims were staked out at random for forty miles. The brothers could borrow easily enough now, if they wanted to. Capitalists and industrialists were interested. Peter Kimberly, the Sharon furnace man, leased three "forties" from the Biwabik Company, agreeing to mine at least 300,000 tons a year and pay a royalty of fifty cents a ton. Henry W. Oliver, the Pittsburgh manufacturer, came hot-foot from a national Republican convention at Minne- STEEL - 463 apolis, looked and was convinced, and paid the Merritts a bonus of $75,000 cash on a contract by which he agreed to take a minimum of 400,000 tons of ore a year at 65 cents a ton. The brothers made good hauling contracts for their railroad. The Minnesota Iron Company offered them $8,000,000 for their interest in their mines and railroad, and they laughed. Lon, turned Napoleon, was dreaming vastly of mines, railroads, docks and ships. The impecunious Merritts had become industrial magnates. They were worth $10,000,000 already. Their credit was good anywhere. They did not have all the ore. Other explorers were fortunate. Sebenius and Roucheleau discovered the Adams mine in the Eveleth group, and in 1893 the great Stevenson mine was found by Edmund J. Longyear. But of the five huge treasure pits, the Merritts controlled three, with dozens of smaller ones. They had enough to dominate the Mesabi Range and the ore industry. They might come to dominate the Lakes—the whole realm of steel. Big steel men, at first indifferent, were now turning their attention to the Mesabi. Henry W. Oliver had gone home and told his friend Frick about it. And Frick, who had snubbed the "dressed-up blacksmith," Lon, listened to the suave and eloquent Oliver. He knew that the Marquette hematite and the Gogebic red ore would not last forever, that the ore stored underground in Alabama was expensive in Pennsylvania. Ore might be mined in the Mesabi for less than five cents a ton for labor. Oliver himself had organized a mining company, which owned some of the finest ore lands, and needed money for development. Money was hard to get, and growing harder. He offered to give the Carnegie Steel Company half the stock in his own mining company for a $500,000 loan to use for development. Frick, who had been shot by the anarchist Alexander Berkman, but was still able to use his head, put the proposal up to Carnegie, and the steel master refused. "If there is any department of the business which offers no inducement," he said, "it is ore." He wrote afterward to his board of managers, "If any more of our 464 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS brilliant and talented young partners have more time or attention than is required for their present duties, they will find sources of much greater profit right at home." But farsighted Frick, who made coke for the steel industry, and who could understand production of raw materials as clearly as Carnegie understood manufacture and sale of the finished product, went ahead and closed the deal with Oliver. Thus Carnegie was forced, against his judgment, into a position which enabled him soon to dominate the steel industry by means of a "vertical trust." As the historian Bridge says, "The Carnegie Company acquired its great ore mines on Lake Superior with hardly a dollar of investment, and accepted an impregnable position in the industrial world with a reluctant and complaining consent." John D. Rockefeller, too, had come into the picture, starting in the transportation field and then interesting himself in Minnesota ore. He already had Vermillion holdings and was reported to be "reaching out for the vast iron production of the Mesabi Range." He may have been less interested in mining ore than in hauling it, as was suggested later when he leased his mines to Frick and Oliver at a royalty of 25 cents a ton, far below the usual rate, and then carried it down the Lakes in his own ships. James J. Hill, who soon acquired vast holdngs for his Great Northern Railway, followed the same policy, even lending money to mine operators to stimulate production of freight. Turning back to Cleveland for a moment, we find the Superintendent of the United States Census saying in a public address : "An investment of $175,374,985 seems almost beyond the proportions of almost any one closely connected line of commerce, but such are the figures representing the capital involved on July 2, 1892, in mining and transporting, by lake and rail, the output of the Lake Superior iron mining district. The sale and movement of every ton of ore from this district is conducted by sales agents in Cleveland, who are also owners of the mines to a large extent. "Here the docks at all Lake Erie ports, excepting Buffalo STEEL - 467 and Erie, are controlled, and here is owned fully 80 per cent of the vessel property engaged in this commerce, which forms the largest single item in the lake traffic. "This country consumed, in 1890, 17,500,000 gross tons of iron ore. Of this amount 1,246,830 tons were imported and 16,253,170 tons were of home production. Lake Superior mines produced, in the same year, 9,003,701 gross tons, or more than one-half the raw material for a nation that leads the world in the output of pig iron, Bessemer steel and steel rails. This statement in itself is enough to show the relation the city bears to the iron industry, whose prosperity is most often used to serve as a measure of the general business prosperity of the country." And the Merritts' mines were just starting production. A few months of glorious activity, preparation and expansion, then came business depression. Mills closed, ore vessels rode idle in their harbors, ore trains stood empty on their tracks, ore piled up at the mines. Money for dividends, interest and payrolls failed. In the spring of 1893 the depression deepened. The United States Treasury itself was having trouble. The Merritts' money melted away. Expected advances from the affiliated barge company failed to come through. Lon went east to see Rockefeller himself. The result was a proposal for a merger. Lon was to be president of the Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mines. The Merritts were allowed a majority of directors and stock. Rockefeller threw in some mines that he had. Lon pledged the Merritts' stock, and signed notes, for loans to keep the works in operation. The trouble, they felt, would soon blow over. The trouble grew worse. The Merritt properties were eating themselves up. Notes came due. Lon spent the summer in New York, and was there again in the winter, incapable of understanding the business paralysis, the flight of money, the economic forces sweeping him away. In January of that panic winter, 1893-94, he sold the Consolidated stock to Rockefeller in a despairing effort to save something for the family out of the wreckage. He never understood how it all happened. He told a congressional committee, sev- 468 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS enteen years later : "I could not conceive how I could have gone down there with millions, absolute millions, of my own and my brothers' money, and how in hell, within those few months, without ever spending a cent above my board bill, I could have lost all those millions." Broken physically and mentally, Lon went back into the woods seeking health and forgetfulness. The Merritts were all "flat broke," dazed and overwhelmed. Alfred brought suit against Rockefeller in 1895, and won a verdict of $940,000 in the United States Circuit Court at Duluth, at a time when he literally had not a nickel for street car fare. The suit was appealed and reversed in St. Louis. He gave up. Later all the Merritts signed a retraction of their charges. They received about $500,000, as Lon expressed it, "to relieve my family from their destitution and absolute poverty." The brothers and their families shared everything, in poverty as in riches. Some of them returned to the quest. Alfred thought the Mesabi Range might extend northeast into Canada, toward Labrador, and searched there for iron. Lon and John E. searched along the northern shore of Lake Superior. Lon lived on in the same little old house at Oneota, on St. Louis Bay. Dying in 1926, he left no debts, no will, $1,500 in household goods, $800 in miscellaneous possessions and $150 cash. When Congress was reviewing the story in 1911, the Merritt mines were producing more ore than all others in America. In 1893 there had been 600,000 tons of red ore brought down the Lakes. In 1910 it was 30,000,000 tons. The Carnegie Steel Company realized from its cheap ore, between 1896 and 1900, profits of $8,000,000 to $40,000,000 a year. The heirs of Henry Oliver, the versatile but rather thriftless manufacturer, realized $17,000,000 for his one-sixth interest in the Oliver Mining Company, when it was sold to the United States Steel Corporation. The Merritts' cook at the Biwabik mine, who had taken half his $40 a month pay in stock, got $95,000 for it. Charles M. Schwab in 1911 estimated the value of the Merritt discoveries at $333,000,000. Rockefeller turned in his holdings, in the steel STEEL - 469 consolidation of 1901, for $68,000,000, and called it a low price. "Without those mines," he said afterward, "the United States Steel Corporation could not have survived." The discovery of Superior ore, says Herbert N. Casson in "The Romance of Steel," changed the industrial map of America, opened up a territory as large as France, shifted the center of the iron and steel trade from the Ohio River to the Great Lakes, and more than any other factor made America the leader of the steel world. After more than $4,000,000,000 worth of ore has been shipped from the Superior region it remains today, as it was forty years ago, the greatest source of raw iron in the known world. In 1929 it produced five-sixths of the ore in the United States. The deposits are scattered over an area of about 180,000 square miles in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario. The actual area of deposit susceptible of mining is estimated to be about 4,000 square miles. This ore is found always near the surface, in strata of old rock which is mostly disintegrated and of which, in the case of the Mesabi ore basins, nothing remains. Above it here and there is the younger rock containing the copper which is a secondary source of wealth, though also the greatest known deposit of its kind in the world. Norman Beasley calls the region "an enormous basin of iron, copper-plated." Fortunately for the iron men, deposits of the one red ore are seldom found on top of the other. The ores taken out in recent years have run 50 to 62 per cent of natural iron, with the richest in the Vermillion Range but surprisingly little difference in the percentage of the various ranges. They differ more in their phosphorus content, and are rated as "bessemer" when they contain only .045 per cent phosphorus or less. The phosphorus is difficult to burn out in the converters, wherefore there is a considerable price differential in favor of the bessemer ores as against the non-bessemer, which require the open-hearth process for steel-making. This has been one advantage of the Mesabi ore. Production in principal ranges from the beginning in 1854 470 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS until the close of 1926, given in even thousands of gross tons : Marquette, 156,054,000; Menominee, 152,622,000; Gogebic, 160,705,000; Vermillion, 51,548,000; Mesabi, 747,305,000; Mayville, 2,280,000; Cuyuna, 23,122,000. The total for the United States mines, including all known shipments, was 1,294,280,000 tons, which with the addition of the 3,935,000 tons produced in Canada made a grand total of 1,298,215,000 tons. The total shipments from the Superior region in 1929, the last big year before the depression, were 65,204,600 tons. The total Superior production ending with that year was 1,471,581,488 tons. So much for the past. What of the future of this great source of raw industrial material which is so large a factor in the fate of Cleveland? Is the ore "playing out?" At the beginning of 1927, the Minnesota and Michigan tax commissions estimated the ore reserves of the Mesabi Range at 1,233,979,000 tons, the Vermillion reserves 12,383,000; the Cuyuna 51,091,000; the Gogebic 52,136,000; the Marquette 67,161,000; the Menominee 69,188,000, making a total for Minnesota of 1,297,453,000, for Michigan 188,485,000, and 24,500,000 for Wisconsin, a grand total of 1,510,438,000 tons. Two years later the United States Bureau of Mines estimated them at 1,431,886,000 tons. On the basis of these figures it might be said there is today a little less Superior ore in the ground than has been taken out in nearly eighty years of operation. But the downward curve is not easy to plot. New deposits are still discovered. Ore not formerly considered merchantable comes to be handled profitably, and there are large deposits of low-grade ore. On the other hand the consumption curve rises, not steadily—because of the industrial cycle—but from decade to decade. In Crowell and Murray's "Iron Ores of Lake Superior" for 1927 the problem was analyzed as follows. The average yearly shipments from the mines for the ten years ending with 1926 were 52,320,000 gross tons. If subsequent average shipments remained the same, the supply of known ore would last the iron industry about twenty-nine years, or until 1956. STEEL - 471 The demand is almost sure to be greater. From a study made by the Lake Superior Mining Institute in 1925, the region may be expected to produce about 75,000,000 tons a year (about equal to the whole country's 1929 production) by 1944. On that basis the average production for the next two decades would be about 67,000,000 tons, exhausting the known reserves in twenty-two and a half years, or roughly about 1950. It is necessary, however, to consider the "probable" ore in the ground as well as the "assured" ore. The same institute estimated that in 1924 the Superior district had remaining 1,560,505,000 tons of assured ore and 1,383,720,000 tons of probable ore, making a combined tonnage of 2,944,225,000. This left 2,834,892,000 tons of assured and probable ore remaining on January 1, 1927. Shipped at the estimated average rate of 67,000,000 tons a year, this quantity would last for 42 years, or until the end of 1968. The conclusion was that in view of the dubious mathematical value of the "probable" supplies, it was safe to assume twenty years of assured ore and twenty years of probable ore. "There are, however, large tonnages of low-grade ores or iron formation which would constitute a tremendous reserve, sufficient to extend greatly the life of the district." Such ores will naturally be used as the better ores run out. There is increasing appreciation of the value of manganese-bearing ores, formerly considered off-grade. The manganese is found to have a metallurgical value in a furnace mixture, whether in the blast furnace or the open hearth, which makes such ores more available. There is evidently nothing for Cleveland to worry about, as a shipping and manufacturing center for the steel industry, for at least another generation. There are about three hundred mines on the Mesabi Range, one hundred on the Menominee, the same number on the Marquette, forty on the Gogebic, almost as many on the Cuyuna Range, which was the last important one opened, and about a dozen on the Vermilion. Most of the Mesabi ore, and much of the ore in other ranges, is in possession of the United States Steel Corpora- 472 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS tion. It has been said that the state of Minnesota gave away the greatest mineral heritage a state ever had. Except for the tracts reserved for the support of schools, outsiders were permitted to take it nearly all by filing, lease or purchase. Yet in recent years Minnesota has been doing pretty well with these tracts. In 1932 the Cleveland companies taking ore out of the Mesabi Range were paying taxes amounting to twenty-two per cent of the gross return on their product. One mine owned by northern Ohio steel companies expected to pay in this year about $1,000,000 taxes on 500,000 tons production. The money goes to the state of Minnesota, which has supported many of its expensive institutions from the iron ore tax. The result has been lavish expenditure by the tax-spending authorities in the towns of the iron range. There is said to be a school built in Hibbing where all the hardware is of fine nickel plate, and there is a large room used solely for girl pupils to dry their hair with electric dryers. "Cleveland," said Herbert N. Casson twenty-five years ago, "is the nerve center from which the independent mines and ore fleets are managed; and if it were not for its inconvenient harbor, it would easily be the first of the ore ports." After the United States Steel Corporation was organized, possessing mines, ore fleets, railroads and docks of its own, Cleveland lost its domination of this field, not merely because of its inadequate harbor but because the Steel Corporation handled so much of its ore through Ashtabula and Conneaut for the Mahoning Valley, Pittsburgh and other eastern manufacturing centers. Ever since, ore receipts at these three Lake Erie ports have run nip and tuck. In 1928 Cleveland handled 9,375,000 tons of ore, Ashtabula 6,376,000 and Conneaut 8,437,000, Buffalo coming fourth with 4,337,000 tons, and Lorain fifth with 3,423,000 tons. In 1930 Cleveland ran a little behind Ashtabula. If Lorain is reckoned with Cleveland, as perhaps it should be, there is no question of the city's primacy as a receiving port. Lake Erie as a whole gets by far the largest part of the Superior ore, with Lake Michigan second. Most of the ore STEEL - 473 coming to ports on the southern shore of our lake naturally goes to interior consuming districts, especially Pittsburgh and the Mahoning Valley. This interior flow in 1928 was 27,036,000 tons. Of the 37,050,000 long tons distributed from Erie docks, there were 10,014,000 consumed in the furnaces of the local ports. Conneaut ships most to the interior, with Ashtabula next and Cleveland third. Buffalo, the largest local consumer, uses nearly all the ore it receives. Cleveland ranks second in this respect, consuming one-third of its receipts. Toledo and Erie come far behind, with a respective consumption of 705,000 and 217,000 tons in 1928. Cleveland is easily first in its commercial control of the independent ore business. Cleveland firms own, operate or are agents for about one-fourth of all the Superior mines and have handled about one-third of all the ore produced in the Superior region from the beginning. Foremost in this field, in order of their tonnage, are Pickands, Mather & Company, the M. A. Hanna Company, the Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company, the Corrigan-McKinney Company and Oglebay, Norton & Company. The first two of these are primarily agents for ore, although they own and operate mines of their own. Cleveland-Cliffs owns and operates nearly all of its mines, as does Corrigan-McKinney Company. And what of other iron fields? The Alabama district comes immediately to mind as a possible competitor of the Superior district. The latter has superiority in its ore, the supreme requisite for the steel industry, and in cheap water transportation. Alabama, however, has all the raw materials assembled by nature in unparalleled proximity. It was said early in the century that this southern state had no equal in combination of natural resources, cheap labor and convenient handling of raw materials, with perhaps 42,000,000,000 tons of coal in her mountain ranges and 200,000,000 tons more iron ore than was possessed by the United States Steel Corporation. Abram S. Hewitt declared : "The two great centers for dominating the iron and steel of the world are to be the Lake Superior region, with its Bessemer ores, on the one side, and Alabama, with its basic ores, on the 474 - THIS CLEVELAND OF OURS other. Alabama, with its abundant stores of iron and coal and limestone, in such close proximity, bids fair within the next quarter of a century to dominate the basic steel industry of the world." That state has needed no elaborate and costly system of railroads and steamships, because its three essentials for steel manufacture are "at the furnace doors." The cost of assembling all the raw materials for making iron had been reduced at Birmingham, in 1907, to 77 cents a ton, the lowest point reached anywhere. Round about was cotton for clothing and corn for food. Yet Alabama so far has failed to realize its magnificent expectations, largely because of its high ash coal and the low iron and high phosphorus content of its ore. In 1929 it produced only about one-tenth as much ore as the Superior region. Of the five states now leading in the production of pig iron, Pennsylvania ranks first, Ohio second, Illinois third, New York fourth—and Alabama last, with an output only one-third as large as Ohio's. Early mining methods throughout the Superior region consisted mainly in drilling and blasting ledge outcrops, followed• by sinking small shafts or tunnelling along the ore levels. Then came surface test-pitting through the usual sand and gravel and sinking the pits down into the ledges thus exposed. Sometimes the magnetic needle was used in locating deposits, following them under deep overburdens of soil, rock or swamp, and tracing the richest deposits with less cost of exploration. Where lean ore was found, some stripping was done to find whether the deposits were worth working. The present system is much more scientific. Thorough geological surveys are made, showing all the known outcrops and former explorations and the old diamond-drill holes formerly put down. A careful land survey is made, too. Magnetic variations are taken at frequent intervals. Rock specimens are minutely examined. There is test-pitting with a churn drill for shallow explorations and with a diamond drill for deep ones. All material running over 40 per cent iron is carefully determined. The diamond drilling is often carried down as far as 1,000 or 2,000 feet.