I have seen many volcanoes, a few in eruption—that was terrible—but this great smelter at Anaconda always, while I was there, pouring from its great stack high on the mountain its endless cloud pall of heavy, drifting, falling smoke, was more wonderful—for this volcano is man's work and one of the Wonders of Work. Dead and gray and bare are the nearby hills, glorious the snow-covered peaks far off, but incredible is this endless rolling, changing pillar of cloud, always there, yet always different—and that country covered with great lakes, waterless, glittering, great lava beds of refuse stretching away in every direction down the mountain sides into the valleys, swallowing up every vestige of life, yet beautiful with the beauty of death—a death, a plague which day by day spreads farther and farther over the land—silently overwhelming, all-devouring—a silent place of smoke and fire.
XXII APPROACH TO DULUTH, THE LAND OF WORK AND BEAUTY
The lines of the winding waterways, each leading to a furnace, a mill, an elevator, are simply beautiful and the color absolutely lovely. This is the modern landscape—a landscape that Claude would have loved. All his composition is in it—only the mills have replaced the palaces, the trestle the aqueduct; instead of the stone pine, there stands the water tower; instead of the cypress, the automatic signal; instead of the Cross, the trolley pole. Soon, however, all this will go—the mystery of the smoke will vanish in the clearness of electricity, and the mystery of the trestle in the plainness of the concrete bridge. But it is here now, and the thing is to delight in it. Artists don't see it—and the railroad men who have made it don't know any more than the Greeks what a marvellous thing they have made.
XXIII ORE WHARVES, DULUTH
Mighty, terrifying are these monsters—filled chock-full with ore, which, when the empty steamers come alongside, vomit roaring red and gold and brown streams of ore that load them in half an hour, or less, and then are ready for more.