INDUSTRY'S GREATEST ASSET— STEEL 



123 



rivers and the loamy brown clay of the 

 fields, and to realize that it is the raw 

 material which will determine the fate 

 of nations and mayhap transform the 

 course of the world's history. 



And how they do make hay when the 

 sun shines up on the iron ranges ! Pan- 

 ama had its rainy season, but the iron 

 ranges have their snowy season, begin- 

 ning in December and ending with Easter, 

 when that festival happens to be late 

 enough. They have only eight months 

 in which to meet the vast demand of the 

 nations for iron and steel, and that de- 

 mand last year called for nearly 67,000,- 

 000 tons of ore from them. That meant 

 more than 46,000,000 cubic yards of ma- 

 terial, or nearly one and a half times as 

 much for the average month as the best 

 month in Panama's history can show. 

 Think of it — more material dug out, 

 loaded onto cars, transhipped to ore 

 boats, and carried a thousand miles in 

 eight months than Panama was ever able 

 to take out and haul an average of ten 

 miles in fifteen months ! 



INTENSIFIED LABOR-SAVING 



How do they do it ? They do it with 

 the most wonderful lot of man-elimi- 

 nating, time-saving, obstacle-conquering 

 machinery ever put to a thousand-mile 

 purpose. The Hull Rust mine, to begin 

 with the ore in the ground, is a series of 

 terraces, or benches, as the engineers call 

 them, from the banks to the bottom. On 

 each of these Brobdingnagian steps there 

 is room enough to maneuver a steam- 

 shovel and a railroad train, and up and 

 down the line go the shovels, shifting 

 their positions as they eat into the bank, 

 and loading a big ore train in less time 

 than a child with a toy shovel could fill 

 a little red express wagon. Day and 

 night the work goes on — two tons to the 

 shovelful, five shovelfuls to the minute, 

 and five minutes to the carload. Not long 

 ago a steam-shovel loaded 7,689 tons of 

 ore as a single day's work. 



The ore cars on the iron ranges are 

 of the regulation pressed steel, bottom- 

 dumping, 50-ton coal-car type, and they 

 run in trains a third of a mile lone. The 

 railroads from the mines down to Duluth, 



Superior, and Two Harbors are of the 

 best construction, like the main lines of 

 our biggest eastern roads. The trains 

 crawl through the hills and vales that 

 Proctor Knott declared, in his celebrated 

 speech in Congress, would not, except for 

 the pine bushes, "produce vegetation 

 enough in ten years to fatten a grass- 

 hopper," but where today, nevertheless, 

 there are communities in which farmers 

 are now growing three and four hundred 

 bushels of potatoes and thirty bushels of 

 wheat to the acre. Where gold and silver 

 were located on the map Knott made fa- 

 mous, one now finds the richest iron 

 mines of the world — mines that beggar 

 the bonanzas of California. 



The haul from Hibbing to Duluth is 

 80-odd miles. Just before the trains 

 reach Duluth they come to Proctor, the 

 biggest ore yard in the world. Here they 

 run across a scales unique in the history 

 of the art of weighing. There would be 

 an endless congestion and a consequent 

 shortage in steel were it necessary to stop 

 each car on a scales and weigh it ; so a 

 weighing mechanism has been devised 

 which permits the tonnage of cars in 

 motion to be registered. A train slows 

 down as it approaches and passes over 

 the platform at the rate of from five 

 to eight miles an hour, the weight of 

 each car being automatically recorded as 

 it passes. 



From Proctor the trains run clown to 

 the huge unloading piers at Duluth. 

 These piers are vast platforms built out 

 over the lake, nearly half a mile long and 

 wide enough to accommodate two tracks, 

 which are at the height of a six-story 

 building above the water. Beneath the 

 tracks is a series of pockets, holding some 

 two or three hundred tons of ore each. 

 The ore is automatically dumped into 

 these pockets and the train starts back to 

 Hibbing (see page 128). 



Even while the trains are clumping 

 their burden ships are alongside with 

 huge spouts in every hatch and a hatch 

 every 12 feet, with ore flowing clown out 

 of the pockets like water out of a funnel, 

 at the rate of some 80 tons a minute, as 

 a rule, and as much as 300 tons as the 

 exception. 



