CHAPTER SEVEN 

 MINERALS 



Take the Lincoln Highway from New York to Chicago. As 

 you near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, you will pass through 

 wretched little towns of grimy black houses clinging to steep 

 hillsides. Somewhere nearby you will see several large, shape' 

 less buildings from the top of which runs an endless chain of 

 cars to a great black heap. If you get near enough to one of 

 these buildings, you will see beside it a black hole in the 

 ground out of which come trains of cars loaded with coal. This 

 is one of the most important of the bituminous coal regions in 

 the world. In Pittsburgh itself you will see the many smoke' 

 stacks of the steel mills, pouring out the smoke of the fires 

 lighted by the coal from these mines. 



Fly from Pittsburgh to Duluth, and you will see many more 

 of these great mills on the ground beneath you at Youngstown 

 and at Gary. At Duluth you will see the tremendous chutes 

 dropping 758 tons of iron ore a minute into the hulls of ore 

 ships that feed those steel mills. From Duluth follow the long 

 lines of ore trains back to Eveleth and Virginia City and 

 Hibbing. Here you will see suddenly yawning by the side of 

 the roads huge pits dug 350 feet into the red ore'bearing earth. 

 These pits are so large that the steam shovels and trains work' 

 ing away in the bottom look like toys under a Christmas tree. 

 One of them, the Hull'Rust'Mahoning is one mile across and 

 2}/2 miles long. This is the heart of the Mesaba Iron Range, 

 one of the largest sources of iron ore in the world. 



Come back to Duluth and take the train to Butte. As you 



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