Buried Treasure

The Iron Range is actually three separate veins of iron ore, which started forming nearly three billion years ago, first from volcanic eruptions and later beneath shallow seas that long covered much of the state. Tower's mine was on what came to be known as the Vermillion Range, extending 25 miles in a narrow band from the Minnesota Mine east to the wilds beyond Ely. Further south, a square-shaped expanse of iron outcroppings, the Cuyuna Range—named partly after its discoverer, Cuyler Adams, and partly after his loyal St. Bernard, Una—opened a few years later. But the largest and most important of the three ranges was the Mesabi. A hundred miles long and about three miles across, with dense pockets of reddish ore, the Mesabi would quickly become the locus of iron mining in the state.

Leonidas Merritt, an elaborately mustachioed timber surveyor, was among the first to see promise in the Mesabi. At the time, Merritt was spending long days in the dense woods north of Duluth, scouring the land in search of towering, knot-free white pine trees for lumber companies. Although he had no background in mining or minerals, he'd heard about iron outcroppings along Lake Vermillion from his father, who'd been among the prospectors in the 1865 gold rush.

Resigned that Tower had claimed the best Vermillion ore, Merritt headed west. Together with three brothers and three nephews—collectively they would come to be known as the Seven Iron Men—Merritt scoured the wilderness with the assistance of a "dip needle," a primitive metal detector. Having thus identified a sizable chunk of what was to become the Mesabi Range, Merritt and his family capitalized on a landmark 1889 law severing mineral rights from surface land ownership. Borrowing money from a local banker, they snapped up the mining rights to thousands of acres of public lands.

But the brothers faced a challenge: They had rich iron deposits and plenty of immigrant laborers, but no efficient way of getting the ore to Lake Superior, where it could be shipped to steel refineries in Ohio and Pennsylvania. The Merritts' ambitious solution was to commission their own railroad. Bold though it was, their investment was poorly timed. Even as the ties were being laid, the panic of 1893 swept the country, drying up lines of credit and bankrupting homesteaders and tycoons alike. The Merritts, who'd borrowed heavily from New York financier John D. Rockefeller to build the rail, were forced to hand him their nascent mining empire.

Within a decade, these mines had been folded into what instantly became the largest corporation the country had ever seen. In today's business vernacular, U.S. Steel was a vertically integrated company. Founded in 1901 as a syndicate of world-class industrialists including Rockefeller and J.P Morgan, U.S. Steel owned not only 70 percent of the mines, but also the railroads to Duluth and the steam ships carrying the cargo across the Great Lakes, as well as the mills where the iron was smelted and alloyed with carbon to form steel.

Flush with record profits, the first billion-dollar company sank its windfall back into expansion, building even more steel mills and sending drillers fanning out across the Range to find new deposits. In 1885, more than 5,000 people lived in the mining towns north of Duluth. By the mid-1920s, the number had quintupled.

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BY THE TIME OF WORLD WAR II, the Iron Range had come of age. Recovered from the Great Depression, towns had grown to small cities, with brick houses and paved, tree-lined streets. Immigration slowed to a trickle, then stopped. An Iron Range culture—resilient, left-leaning, and proud—took root. As the United States entered the war, the Range, already producing more than half the world's iron, ramped up production to unprecedented levels. In 1941, it produced more than 60 million tons of ore. As men left to fight a war thousands of miles away, miners, for the first time some of them women, took pride in providing raw material for the planes, tanks, and guns powering the effort.

But after the Axis powers were defeated, concerns mounted about the Range's future. The vast iron pits, once thought to be inexhaustible, were running low.

Happily, a far-sighted academic named Edward Davis was already working on a solution. As Davis knew, the ore that had been mined in Minnesota, known as hematite or natural ore, was about two-thirds iron. All around and beneath it, in far greater quantity, was a harder, less pure form of iron rock, called taconite. Although taconite had long been considered useless, Davis devoted his career to proving otherwise. With millions of dollars in grants from the state, he spent 40 years experimenting with different methods of extracting the iron from taconite ore. Eventually he solved the riddle: Taconite plants employed gargantuan crushing and grinding machines to turn the ore into a fine powder. Then, using powerful magnets, the iron was separated from the waste rock, formed into marble-sized balls, and baked at extreme heat to form pellets.