Showing Typical Mesaba Ore Bed Which, after Earth Covering is Removed, Becomes an Open Pit Mine
During the many years of campaigning for Federal help in the building of a canal at Sault Sainte Marie, the fisheries, valued at $1,000,000 a year, were given as the leading reason why a canal should be built, and it was no less a personage than Henry Clay, who, in opposing appropriation for this purpose, referred to the project and the district as “beyond the remotest settlement, if not in the moon.”
Now, within eighty years of that time, the annual tonnage of shipping passing through the Sault Sainte Marie canal is as great as the combined tonnage from the ports of New York, London, Liverpool, Antwerp, and Hamburg, and, as against the $1,000,000 value of the fisheries, the value at the mines of the ore alone shipped from this region amounts to about $100,000,000 yearly.
Shenango Open Pit Mine, Chisholm, Minn.
Interior of a Hard or Lump Ore Mine
As the copper deposits are mostly along the shore of the lake and the great iron ore beds occur seven or more miles inland, the latter were not discovered until Sept. 19, 1844, when William A. Burt, a Deputy United States Surveyor, noticed that the needle of a solar compass of which he was the inventor became unreliable. In looking about to discover the magnetic source which must be the cause of the variation, members of his party discovered ore just beneath the sod near what is now Negaunee, Michigan. Inventor-like, Burt’s only concern was to devise some preventive for future interference by stray magnetic currents. He simply noted in his book that there was here a deposit of iron ore and neither he nor any of his party profited or apparently attempted to profit from the discovery.
