Little Mesabi

The industrial might of the U.S. rests on iron. Over 75% of all U.S. iron now comes from the fabulously rich Mesabi district (in northern Minnesota) which is currently yielding nearly 100,000,000 tons per year to feed not only the steel mills of the U.S. but many in Canada as well.

Last week out of Canada came increasing indications that this terrific strain on U.S. reserves-- so severe that at the current rate the Mesabi may be gutted in twelve years--will be eased. For at Steep Rock Lake, 100 miles to the north, Canadians, with the help of U.S. capital and engineering, are preparing to exploit a little Mesabi of their own, rich in high-grade ore.

Existence of some such deposit was suspected ever since the Mesabi was opened up a half century ago. But it was not till 1930 that a prospector and scout, Jules G. Cross, made a survey of the region, which led to the formation of the Steep Rock Iron Mines, Ltd. Backing the company is Cyrus Eaton, creator of Republic Steel, who is arranging a $7,500,000 bond issue.

The money will be used to blast new channels for the Seine River as a preliminary to draining Steep Rock Lake. Most of its 125 billion gallons of water will then be pumped out, its bottom stripped for open-pit mining. The Canadian Government has already appropriated some $5,000,000 for the erection of power lines and the financing of a railroad spur to lead from Steep Rock to Atikokan, which has rail connections with Lake Superior.

Priorities on U.S. machinery still have to be arranged and the earliest that mining could commence would be 1944. Proven reserves now amount to 32,000,000 tons, but if the bed is 3,000 ft. deep--which engineers hold not unlikely--the deposit would run close to a half a billion tons (or about half the Mesabi's 1.2 billions); and in this case Canada, which now consumes about 2,000,000 tons of ore per year and imports most of it, will almost certainly become an exporter.

"It is not at all impossible," gloats Gold ("magazine of Canada's North") "that a very few years from now may witness the founding of a great metropolis in the bush of Atikokan, where great smelters will belch smoke and flame into the northern sky, and a river of iron will flow into the industrial channels of Canada and perhaps all over the world."

Conservatives can discount some of this dream but by no means all. The past ten years have seen a steady intensification of the battle for ore reserves which J. P. Morgan thought he had sewed up for U.S. Steel once and for all when he bought some of the great Mesabi mines from Rockefeller. Bethlehem has struck down into South America. Now, if Canada comes in, Big Steel's control of reserves--and perhaps its pocketbook--will be further affected. But for the U.S. economy as a whole, for the first time facing possible exhaustion of its finest ores, Steep Rock is still a net gain.

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