Word: mesabi
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Northeastern Minnesota, sometimes called the Arrowhead Country because of its shape, begins at the rugged Misquah Hills and Giants Range, a sharp granite ridge as high as 500 ft. To the southeast rises the Mesabi Range, a rocky belt that used to produce 82% of the nation's iron ore and still yields 63% in iron and taconite, the iron pellets sifted magnetically from huge loads of earth. Below the Canadian border stretch vast expanses of forests and lakes, a region of shaggy and pristine beauty. Timber wolves roam there. Moose can be seen feeding in the clearings. Sometimes...
There once was a time, about 20 years ago, when Reserve Mining's plant was considered a blessing. Northern Minnesota, its Mesabi Range depleted of rich iron ore by a half-century of open-pit mining, teetered on the brink of economic collapse. Then engineers devised a method of extracting iron from crushed taconite, a flintlike rock that contains some 25% iron. Reserve Mining, which is owned by Armco and Republic Steel, easily obtained dumping permits on the assumption that the gray torrent of taconite would sink 900 feet to the bottom of the lake's "Great Trough...
...Diplomatic Lesson. After four weeks of discreet conversations, the negotiators completed the "preliminary articles" of a treaty that conceded all the major U.S. demands and envisioned a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and from the Great Lakes to northern Florida-Minnesota, and with it the stupendous Mesabi iron lode, were included by a cartographical accident. On Nov. 30, 1782, the preliminary articles, which for all practical purposes constituted the final document, were signed. Vergennes was promptly informed. He was stunned. But when he protested "the unhappy news," Franklin cheerfully apologized for "neglecting a point of propriety...
Minnesota's good fortune has caused ripples elsewhere. With ranges like the Mesabi running low, the U.S. steel industry since World War II has increasingly depended on imported ore, now buys 33% abroad. The guarantee of a 300-year supply of taconite ore, which produces twice as much pig iron per ton as natural ore and requires less coke and limestone in the steelmaking process, is luring new steel mills, traditionally centered in an arc around Pittsburgh, to the lower Lake Michigan area. Another lure: the rising demand for durable goods in the Midwest, where automakers, farm-machinery plants...
Because of the lift in steel output and orders, employment and construction in the Chicago area are rising. Last week the state of Indiana sought first bids for a new port at Burns Harbor that will cost about $100 million, will handle ore boats carrying iron ore from the Mesabi and from similar mines in Upper Michigan. The Burlington Lines railroad recently decided to add 100 covered gondola cars to carry finished steel, later revised the total upward to 200 because of the rising volume of traffic. The New York Central System is planning to build...