Page Eight
THE MICHIGAN DAILY M ,AZINF
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THE DWINDLING MESABI-Soon this iron pit will become just another man-made canyon, filled
with evergreens and occasional remnants of ore.
THE MIGHTY MESABI
After Twenty Years, Then What?
5ashion keep$S
eye
By JAMES BOW
Daily Staff Writer
WE DROVE many miles over
make-believe roads on a warm,
dusty day in early September. Most
of the journey was either up or
down, in or out of the iron pits of
the Mesabi Range near Hibbing,
Minnesota.
The roads were carved out of the
man-made canyons and that was
all. Boulders blocked the way, and
occasionally the car stopped and
backed up a' steep grade, faced
with an electric shovel tearing up
the surface in order to get at more
ore. Tomorrow perhaps a new road
would appear, and the old road
would be loaded on railroad cars
headed for Duluth.
The Oliver Mining Division of
United States Steel has the largest
holding in the Range, with smaller
companies doing the rest. Much of
the area is owned by former lum-
ber estates which cleared off the
land only to find a far more val-
uable treasure under the ground.
The interests of these estates
are guarded by the Eveleth, Min-
nesota Fee Office which makes cer-
tain that all worthwhile ore is
cleared out of the mines. The own-
ers are paid a flat rate per ton of
ore.
ASSISTANT superintendent of
the Fee Office Vanner J. Mun-
ter, drove us through the mines,
some of which had already been
cleared and looked like the
strangest natural geological phe-
nomena. Other mines were still
being worked, and _in one pit'
Munter pointed outda towering is-
land of geological strata which
he said would be "quite a prob-
lem" to mine.
Mining in the Mesabi, the
United States' largest ore body,
is becoming "quite a problem"
all over. Steel companies are de-
manding higher and more com-
plex grades of ore. As a result,
Mesabi companies must wash the
ore and cannot send it straight to
Duluth and the waiting ships, as
they used to do.
Furthermore, the highest grade
ore is being stripped, leaving low-
grade taconite, which takes more
expensive processing. And compe-
tition is breaking into the ore
market. Canada is opening new
ore bodies in central Quebec, Lab-
rador, and at Steep Rock, On-
tario, not far north of the Mesabi.
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U.S. Steel has already leased new
properties in Canada, and can af-
ford to leave much of the less
valuable Mesabi ore untouched.
AND, one wonders what will
happen to the Mesabi towns
of Hibbing, Chishom, Virginia,
and Eveleth. Experts believe that
there are still 20 years of produc-
tion left near the present level.
After that, will these towns be-
come ghost towns, or will some
other industry move in?
It is hard to imagine Hibbing
a ghost town, with its ultra-mod-
ern community center and li-
brary, comfortable homes, and
the largest small-town high
school in the United States.
Junior college courses are taught
there, and students have an op-
portunity to study a course which
in two years prepares them for
technical jobs in the mines.
Still, new mines are being
opened; and if a person finds an
ore deposit and can dig up $16
million to invest, he can also dig
up the ground. In the Duluth
News Tribune, B. M. Andrews,
manager of one -f the mines, de-
scribed the openin" of an imagi-
nary mine thus:
"On each 40-acre tract in the
Mesabi there are five drill holes.
Early in the history of the Mesabi
Range, it was customary to drill
five holes on each forty."
THE MORE complex processes
of ore mining require strip-
pings dumps for the worthless dirt
and rock which must be cleared
from the pit. Since the ore must
be washed bef are shipment,
plants and tailings ponds for ore
fragments are necessary.
Andrews goes on to describe
how the dumps and plant sites
rhust be chosen so that they do
not cover up valuable ore. Also,
the feasibility of mining an area
depends upon the depth of the
"over-burden," the valuegs rock
covering the ore. The cost of re-
moving each cubic yard of over-
burden as well as the potential
cost of each ton of ore must be
be estimated before work can be-
gin.
If a person has already forked
out his $16 million, and diggings
have begun, he is then faced with
the problem of transporting the
ore up and out of the pit.
In open pit mining there are
four main methods of transpor-
tation: rail haulage, truck haul-
age, conveyors, and skip hoisting.
See MESABI, page 13
.All~
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