President Coolidge celebrated the close of his fifth year in office with a short railroad trip. It is only about a three-hour journey from Cedar Island lodge to a place called Hibbing in the Minnesota hinterland. Thither the President journeyed in a special train provided by U. S. Steel Corp., a train that had been examined and guarded with utmost care for 48 hours before its great passenger went aboard. Steel Corporation guards were posted at switches and trestles. Some 700 American Legion men were mobilized for guard duty at stations. No spectator was allowed to approach within 300 yards of the train when it stopped. Dozens of persons suspected of discontent about Labor's condition were temporarily deported from the region. Everything was prearranged so carefully that almost nothing happened to remember the event by. Yet it was an historic event.
It was Calvin Coolidge, apostle of Prosperity, visiting perhaps the greatest single source of Prosperity in the U. S. The low mountains of Itasca and St. Louis counties are, literally, mountains of iron. Near Hibbing, where the earth gives an enormous red yawn, is the Hull-Rust Mine, the largest open-pit iron ore mine in the world.
Thirty-six years ago, when Calvin Coolidge was a countrified freshman at Amherst, a train of cars creaked down from the Mesaba Range, where Hibbing was to be built, bearing the first shipment of blood-colored rocks and dust.* Today the Mesaba district produces 63 million tons of iron ore per annum, four-fifths the total consumption of the U. S. In 1892, the iron ranges of Wisconsin and the Michigan peninsula—Gogebic, Florence, Menominee—had been developed for over a decade. They were the first answer to Railroader James J. Hill's gloomy prediction that the world's supply of iron was approaching exhaustion. By 1902, the Minnesota deposits, almost unlimited, were yielding more than the mines, were outranking the Michigan and Wisconsin ranges. The Minnesota ore lay right at the earth's surface, or buried only a few feet. The iron-bearing substance was earthy, not rocky. All that men had to do was shovel it up and cart it away to the smelters.
On the train with President Coolidge rode Pentecost Mitchell of Duluth, whose father organized the first mining company on the Mesaba. Mr. Mitchell, president of U. S. Steel Corp.'s potent subsidiary, Oliver Iron Mining Co., doubtless referred to the fact that a rich part of the Mesaba used to belong to the Federal-Government, before iron was discovered there. It was traded to the State of Minnesota and now is operated by U. S. Steel Corp. on a royalty basis. Township taxes on the mining properties have made Hibbing one of the richest communities in the land. The miners who live there pay a nominal price for the heat that is piped to their shacks and frame houses from a municipal heating plant. Their children go to high school in a $4,500,000 edifice.