AN ORE STOCK PILE AND HANDLING MACHINERY : CLEVELAND/ OHIO 



Many furnaces are located on the banks of navigable waters and the ore is unloaded 

 directly on their stock piles. As the lakes are navigable only from the latter part of April 

 to December, great mountains of ore must be piled up in reserve for the winter season. 

 This is delivered to the blast furnace by cranes and other apparatus. 



ORE HANDLED LIKE SAND 



Ordinarily one thinks of mining as an 

 occupation for human moles that bur- 

 row in the ground and bring out hard 

 ores from cavernous depths. But when 

 Nature laid down the Lake Superior ore 

 ranges she made burrowing and blasting 

 unnecessary for the most part. In the 

 Mesaba Range — and, by the way, there 

 are as many ways of spelling that word 

 as there are of pronouncing Saloniki — 

 the ore has largely the consistency of 

 sand, and lies so close to the surface that 

 it would be as foolish to burrow instead 

 of digging as it would be to tunnel in- 

 stead of cutting in building a railroad 

 through a small knoll. There is a gen- 

 eral rule among the ore miners up Me- 

 saba Range way that it is profitable to 

 dig rather than burrow where there's not 

 more than a ton of soil above for each 

 ton of ore beneath. 



When one who has visited Panama 

 reaches Hibbinsf he can almost imagine 



that Uncle Sam is so i enamored of the 

 job of removing mountains with the 

 faith of enterprise that he has decided 

 to repeat his Isthmian performance in 

 Minnesota ; for they certainly do "make 

 the dirt fly" up there. Uncle Sam bor- 

 rowed their steam-shovel idea when he 

 tackled Culebra Mountain, and handled 

 it so successfully that all of the world's 

 excavation records fell before his work 

 there. But with the quickened demand 

 for iron and steel that the world war has 

 engendered, the pennant to the world's 

 champion diggers has passed back from 

 the Chagres River to Lake Superior. 



Yardage was king at Panama, but ton- 

 nage is czar on the Minnesota ranges. 

 At Panama the question was how big a 

 hole could be dug in a day; in the iron- 

 range region it is how many tons of ore 

 can be sent down the lakes a season. It's 

 somewhat uncanny to see a whole battery 

 of steam shovels biting into the soft red 

 stuff that looks like a cross between the 

 sand pounded out of red sandstone by 



