Still another gold seeker was responsible for the discovery of the greatest of all the ranges, the Mesaba. Some years before the Civil War Louis H. Merritt, a prospector, struck out into the woods in quest of the yellow metal, but brought back with him nothing but a few samples of iron ore. Little did he dream that he had found what would one day prove more precious than gold.
Merritt told of his discovery only to his four sons, and it was not until 1885 that these young men staked out their first mine in the desolate region. The Merritts were lumbermen, and the mining fraternity, having proved to its own complete satisfaction that iron deposits in the Mesaba section were geologically impossible, scoffed at their enterprise, but in one single year since the Steel Corporation alone has taken 24,928,039 tons of ore from this range, a single mine yielding 3,500,000 tons.
There is a legend told in Minnesota, the story of a practical joke which had a different end from that expected by its perpetrators, and the result of which has been a great boon to the cause of education in that state. The story had its beginnings before the Civil War. At that time, it goes, the public school system of Minnesota, neglected in State appropriations and impoverished, clamored long and loud at the door of the legislature for a share in public lands, and eventually gathered enough popular support to wring from the law-makers a promise of ten sections. The promise was kept, but to the discomfiture of the educators and the amusement of everyone else it was found that the sections lay beyond the pale of civilization far in the northeastern corner of the state, an uninhabited, unexplored territory.
And then Merritt discovered the Mesaba range, and the implements of the steel companies began to shovel gold to the credit of the Minnesota school system.
The story is of doubtful authenticity, but it is nevertheless a fact that the Minnesota schools own large acreages of ore land, and their enormous receipts of royalties on ore shipped therefrom make them probably the richest in the world.
A mine, in the commonly accepted sense of the word, is a deep shaft in the ground from which tunnels, or “drifts,” radiate through the ore bodies. But nature, in the Mesaba region, has saved the steel maker the trouble of burrowing under the earth’s surface to get at her riches. The majority of the mines here are not mines in the accepted sense at all. They are what a veteran of pick-and-shovel methods called them when he first saw one in operation. “Mine?” he exclaimed. “Why, that isn’t a mine, it’s an ore farm.”
Imagine a vast amphitheatre hollowed out of the ground half a mile wide and a mile and a half, or more, long—these are the dimensions of the Hull-Rust mine at Hibbing—and descending in a series of deep terraces to 120 feet or more from the surface, every terrace, save the first, being dug out of iron ore, and you will get a vague idea of what one of these Mesaba “ore farms” is. The mines are graded toward one end to permit the entrance of trains, and big steam shovels burrow into the soft ore, scooping up, some of them, seventeen tons of ore at each lift, and dumping it into the waiting cars.
Under these conditions mining becomes principally a matter of speeding up steam shovels and of transportation. At the beginning of the century no mine had ever shipped 500,000 tons of ore in a season. The Hull-Rust mine has shipped more than that a month, a ton of ore every two seconds, allowing for a ten-hour working day.
Exclusive of the mines covered by the now abandoned Hill lease the Corporation has developed more than seventy mines in the Mesaba range. In the Vermilion range it has three; in the Menominee, seven; in the Marquette, twelve; in the Gogebic, thirteen, and in the Baraboo range in southern Wisconsin, one. This does not include twenty-one mines of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in the South. In a single year, 1916, the Corporation mined 33,355,169 tons of ore, of which 30,255,616 came from the northern regions. Some idea of the immensity of the Corporation’s mining operations may be obtained from the fact that the excavations involved in “stripping,” or removing the surface earth overburden from the open pit mines, aggregates about a quarter of a billion cubic yards of earth, or more than the excavation made in digging the Panama Canal, in the Mesaba range alone. Total excavation in this range, including mining operations, amounts to about a half a billion cubic yards.
The vast Hull-Rust mine, the greatest of the Mesaba deposits, is perhaps the largest single body of ore in the world. Its exact extent is not known. Only recently it was discovered that the ore body led under the town of Hibbing, a fair-sized municipality, whereupon it was decided to move the town to get at the ore. So in the summer of 1920 houses and other buildings forming the town were lifted bodily from their foundations and moved to a new location near by. This enormous undertaking seemed to be considered quite part of the day’s work by officials of the Oliver Iron Mining Co., which subsidiary has charge of the Corporation’s ore operations. An official of that company, questioned about the expense of moving the town, said: “Oh, it will cost a million or more, but there’s at least $40,000,000 in ore under the old site.”