International Socialist Review (1900) Vol 17

330 THE MESABA IRON RANGE
ticularly anxious about monkeying with
iron mines. They contracted with Rockefeller
and secured leases on all the mines
Rocky had foreclosed on, upon a basis of
25 cents per ton royalty, with the provision
that in exchange for this extremely
low royalty the Carnegie people were to
mine and ship over John D/s roads and
in John D.'s boats not less than 1,200,000
tons of ore yearly for fifty years.
This done, that third group of "independents,"
who had been sitting tight to
see what would happen, hearing the
news of the Carnegie-Rockefeller combine,
and evidently appreciating the
kindly intentions of these commercial
Apaches, fell over one another to sell at
any old price they could get to the Carnegie-Frick-Oliver
crew, who thus gobbled
control over the Mesaba Iron Range. It is
worthy of note that at this time some
members of the Minnesota Legislature
are accused of having an itching palm
and having it scratched with some of
Carnegie's iron dollars, in exchange for a
leasehold of state lands for the small
royalty of 25 cents per ton, when private
holders were and are getting from 50
cents to $1.00 per ton royalty.
Today the Indian word, "Mesaba," can
be rightly applied to everything connected
with the Range. Carnegie and
Morgan combined, forming the United
States Steel Corporation, a giant organzation.
Massive machinery was brought
in and today the face of the earth bears
frightful and gigantic scars. The open
pit mining, which requires stripping off
the surface to the ore-bed; the milling
process, which leaves immense chasms
from which the ore has been taken out
through chutes leading to an underground
railroad; all the impedimenta of
vast and ceaseless activities—changing
the aspects of nature. Stupendous artificial
mountains of over-stripping greet
the eye on every hand; great pits yawn
where once was level ground; underground
caverns have caved in, burying
men by the score with entire trains, and
there they still lie buried. The silence
of the ages has been hunted out by the
screaming whistles, the groaning of giant
steam shovels, the snorting of innumerable
locomotives—while incessant blasting
rocks the body of the Range from end
to end. Machinery has been invented
capable of doing incredible things, and
man and his labor are almost lost sight
of in the immensity of operations.
Men are there however, thousands upon
thousands of them, risking their lives
day after day in underground drifts or
taking chances at having their brains
dashed out by the swift swinging buckets
of the steam shovels in the open pits.
LOADED ORE TRAINS READY FOR THE DOWNGRADE HAUL TO THE DULUTH DOCKS
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