The largest wooden ship on fresh water being towed out of the Maumee River, Toledo.]
Because of the transportation of this mighty product Cole is as closely associated with the Lakes and their ships as with the ranges and their mines. It has been said that he was “born between ships and mines,” and he has always remained between them. He is one of the most remarkable characters of the Inland Seas. Cole is only forty-seven years old, and for thirty-nine years he has earned his own livelihood, and more. When six years old, his father was killed in an accident in the Phœnix Mine. Baby Tom was the oldest of the widowed mother’s little brood, and he rose to the occasion. At the age of eight he became a washboy in the Cliff stamp mill. He had hardly mastered his alphabet; he could barely read the simplest lines; never in this civilised world did a youngster begin life’s battle with greater odds against him. But even in these days the great ambition was born in him, as it was born in Abraham Lincoln; and like Lincoln, in his little wilderness home of poverty and sorrow, he began educating himself. It took years. But he succeeded.
This is the man whose name you will hear first when you enter the mining country. To chronicle his rise from a dusty Calumet office of long ago to his present kingdom of iron would be to write a book of romance. And there are others of the iron barons of the North whose histories would be almost as interesting, even though fortune may have smiled on them less kindly.
From the immensity of the interests which Cole superintends one might be led to believe that the iron ore industry is almost entirely in the hands of the trust. This, however, is not so. For every ship that goes down into the South for the trust another leaves for an independent. Nearly every maker of steel owns a mine or two in the ranges of Minnesota, Michigan, or Wisconsin. There are five of these ranges. The Mesaba and Vermilion ranges, both in Minnesota, produce about two thirds of the total product carried by the ships of the Lakes; the Goebic, Menominee, and Marquette ranges are in Michigan and Wisconsin.
Somehow it is true that nearly every great thing associated with the Lakes is unusual in some way--unusual to an astonishing degree, and the iron ore industry is not an exception. Probably not one person in ten thousand knows that one lone county in this great continent is the very backbone of the steel industry in the United States. This county is in Minnesota. It is the county of St. Louis, and is about as big as the State of Massachusetts. Not much more than twenty years ago it was a howling wilderness. Even a dozen years ago the Mesaba bore but little evidence of the presence of man. Now this country is alive with industry. Buried in the wilderness which still exists are thriving towns; where a short time ago deer and bear wandered unmolested, is now the din of innumerable locomotives, the rumbling of thousands of trains, the screeching of whistles, and the constant groaning of steam shovels. There is not a richer county on the face of the earth. In it are over one hundred mines, from which one hundred and twenty-three million tons of ore have been taken since Charlemagne Tower, now Ambassador to Germany, brought down the first carload to Duluth in 1884. These mines afford livelihood for more than two hundred thousand people, and because of them St. Louis County possesses the greatest freight traffic road in existence--the Duluth, Mesaba, and Northern Railway--which, in 1907, carried about fourteen million tons of ore from the mines to the docks.