JEFFREY T. MANUEL
On April 20, 1974, United States District Court judge Miles Lord ruled that the Reserve Mining Company’s enormous iron ore–processing plant perched on the edge of Lake Superior—the largest of the Great Lakes—must immediately stop dumping tailings into the lake. The tailings were an enormous stream of waste generated as Reserve Mining crushed boulders of taconite with some 25 percent magnetite iron content and separated the valuable iron from the worthless siliceous tailings. Since opening in 1955, the mammoth Reserve Mining plant had dumped approximately 67,000 tons of tailings into Lake Superior each day. This enormous volume of tailings soon created a spreading delta of finely powdered rock. The smallest tailings particles did not settle in the delta, but instead dispersed throughout the lake, creating billowing green clouds and infiltrating the water supplies of coastal towns. In 1969, the U.S. government filed a lawsuit against Reserve Mining alleging that the company was polluting Lake Superior. The trial, Reserve Mining Company v. United States of America, which lasted until 1980, was one of the longest and most expensive environmental lawsuits in U.S. history. As a result of the trial, Reserve Mining was forced to stop dumping tailings into the lake and to deposit them on land instead.1
Considered alone, Reserve Mining Company v. United States of America fits an often-told narrative about mining’s relationship with the environment and with the modern environmental movement. According to this narrative, the American mining industry either ignored or was hostile to environmental concerns until the modern environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Mining historian Duane Smith, for example, argues that an “environmental whirlwind” swept through the mining industry in the 1960s. Although the mining industry avoided environmental regulation for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, the American mining industry “reeled under the barrage of condemnation” from environmental groups. The mining industry realized it could no longer resist growing pressure for regulation and slowly began to ameliorate the worst aspects of earlier pollution.2
This narrative about the conflict between mining and the environment in the 1960s and 1970s builds on the argument that the environmental movement emerged from consumer sensibilities that were external to industrial production in the post–World War II era. In his classic account of the rise of the modern environmental movement, Samuel P. Hays argues that in the decades after World War II, Americans began seeing the environment as a fundamental source of their quality of life rather than merely a resource to be exploited.3 Industrial mining was especially problematic from the environmental viewpoint since it devastated large swaths of land, in some cases destroying areas that would otherwise have been valuable recreational spaces. Countering the environmental perspective, the mining industry argued that it provided minerals that Americans demanded in ever-increasing quantities. Yet this argument fell on deaf ears among an American public eager for nature’s products but unwilling to consider consumer culture’s roots in the natural world. This narrative of an American mining industry that polluted freely until the environmental movement forced miners to change their ways certainly captures the drama and tension of the era, but it misses a longer and more complex history of the relationship between mining technology, economic growth, and ecological realities.
Recent literature has painted a more complex picture of the long relationship between mining and the environment in the United States. Environmental historians have drawn attention to the enormous scale of global mining in the twentieth century. A global perspective reveals a worldwide mining industry moving more and more of the earth to satisfy growing populations and increasing consumer demand. In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J.R. McNeill argues, “Humankind moved mountains in the twentieth century and for the first time became a significant geological agent.” Humans’ enormously expanded capacity to move (and remove) mountains was largely the result of the technological and energy intensification of large-scale mining operations.4 A global perspective also complicates Smith’s idea that mining companies cleaned up their polluting practices because of U.S. environmentalism. Much as manufacturing in the United States and Western Europe was outsourced to low-wage nations, mining has expanded in countries where pollution is less tightly regulated.
Recent environmental histories of U.S. mining before the mid-twentieth century have also complicated binary understandings of mining versus environmentalism. Hydraulic mining in California provides an excellent example of nineteenth-century mining practices involving a hybrid of human ingenuity, hydrology, and geology. As Andrew Isenberg has noted, hydraulic mining for gold in California was a form of mass-destruction mining that preceded the open-pit mines later developed for coal, copper, and iron ore mining elsewhere in the United States. Hydraulic mining also illustrates how industrial mining’s environmental consequences led to popular agitation and legal action long before the modern environmental movement of the 1960s. Following widespread complaints from farmers and downstream interests, hydraulic mining in California was stopped in 1884.5 The history of low-grade ore mining also replaces binary histories of mining and the environment with more complicated understandings. Timothy LeCain describes the dramatic expansion of low-grade copper mining to meet the needs of the electrical age, creating a system of “mass destruction” open-pit copper mines. Using railroads, steam shovels, and massive ore separators, copper mines in the western United States profitably mined deposits containing as little as 2 percent copper. Low-grade ore mines turned the age-old logic of mining on its head. Rather than finding valuable minerals and removing them from the ground, the modern mass-destruction mine removed everything and used industrial technology to separate valuable ore from worthless tailings. The results included both profitable new mines and enormously expanded ecological consequences.6 Overall, recent environmental histories suggest a complex, hybrid history of mining and the environment that has spread across the globe and has deep historical roots.
Low-grade iron ore lacks glamour. It has received surprisingly little attention from historians, especially considering that it revolutionized the global steel industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of those observers who have commented on low-grade iron ore, especially low-grade iron ore from the Lake Superior mining district, have emphasized that the industry was a techno-scientific fix for depleted natural resources and an ailing economy in the mining region. Journalists described low-grade iron ore as a “Cinderella story” to indicate how the fairy godmother of mineral engineering transformed the rock from something worthless to something cherished. “If ever there was a Cinderella in the world of nature,” one journalist wrote, “it is taconite.”7 Although this enthusiastic endorsement captures the modernist belief that science and engineering overcame natural limits, it obscured a more complex reality. Low-grade iron ore was not a triumph of science and engineering over natural limits, and it did not unequivocally save the economy of the mining region. Rather, it is more accurate to say that low-grade iron ore rearranged ecologies, economies, and technologies into new alignments, with significant, often unintended consequences for humans and nonhumans in the region.
In the long view, it is useful to see the Reserve Mining Company’s iron ore–processing plant as a link between two distinct eras in the history of American iron ore mining. In the first era, which lasted until the mid-twentieth century, Americans treated iron ore strictly as a mineral resource. This first era was dominated by fears of resource depletion and a frantic search for new ore fields. The second era, which continues into the present, relies on low-grade iron ore deposits that can, through extensive industrial processing, be manufactured into high-iron pellets that the iron and steel industry can use in blast furnaces (i.e., pellets containing 50 percent or more iron). This procedure resolved worries about depletion, but the result has been a constant tension between the development of mining districts and concerns about the ecological consequences of low-grade iron ore mining on a mass scale.
Pollution from low-grade iron ore mining in the late twentieth century was a direct result of changes to iron ore mining made in response to resource depletion, a modernist quest for technological efficiency, and attempts to promote economic development in the mining region. To understand how these interconnected histories played out in the Lake Superior mining region, this chapter describes a series of crises and enviro-technological fixes, beginning with depletion of high-grade iron ore in the early twentieth century, followed by the shift to low-grade pelletized iron ore as an efficient technological fix to the problem, and the ultimate environmental consequences that resulted from low-grade iron ore production.
The history of low-grade iron ore mining in the Lake Superior district deserves environmental historians’ attention for several reasons. First, it offers a case study of how economic development in declining mining regions emphasized new technologies and expanded mining with little regard for possible environmental consequences. Throughout the Lake Superior mining district, miners, politicians, and engineers actively promoted low-grade iron ore mining as an economic development project to preserve the region’s mining economy in the face of declining reserves of high-grade ore. The environmental problems that twentieth-century mining posed often developed in response to calls for economic development in depressed mining regions. This builds on arguments that the twentieth century’s focus on sustained economic growth—the “growth fetish”—is crucial to understanding the ecological consequences of modern mass-removal mining practices.8 It is impossible to understand the history of mass-removal mining in the United States—including mountaintop-removal mining in Appalachia, open-pit iron ore mining in the Lake Superior region, or western copper mining—without considering how economic development of depressed regions was a guiding principle in the twentieth century.
Second, the history of low-grade iron ore mining offers a case study of how one form of mining (low-grade pelletized iron ore) replaced another (high-grade, direct-shipping iron ore) and the environmental consequences that resulted. At the core of iron ore pelletizing and modern mass-removal mining is a quest for efficiency. The costly processing involved in low-grade iron ore mining meant that it was profitable only if conducted on a massive scale. The Lake Superior iron-mining region thus illustrates how the quest for efficiency in modern industrial mining led to industrial pollution on a scale that was correspondingly efficient. As the scale of production increased, so too did the scale of tailings waste.
The Lake Superior mining district encompasses several deposits, or “ranges,” of iron ore around Lake Superior. The district’s iron deposits occur in six major ranges near the western and southern shores of the lake in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The largest and most significant of these deposits is the Mesabi Range in northeast Minnesota. Whereas several of the district’s deposits lie deep underground, the Mesabi Range’s iron ore is near the surface, allowing for open-pit mining operations. After a century of iron ore mining, the Mesabi Range has developed some of the world’s largest open-pit mines. For example, the Hull-Rust-Mahoning mine near Hibbing, Minnesota, covers five square miles and is colloquially referred to as the “man-made Grand Canyon of the North.” Mining historian Richard Francaviglia describes “the blood-red tablelike escarpments of Minnesota’s Iron Ranges” as “some of the grandest manmade topography on earth.”9
The region’s history is inseparable from the history of mining. Euro-American prospectors first arrived in the area in the 1860s following reports of gold. These prospectors found large deposits of iron ore but no gold, and they soon left the region. A handful of miners remained, however, hoping to exploit the iron ore deposits. By the 1870s, an expanding U.S. steel industry needed larger quantities of iron ore, making the area’s deposits increasingly valuable. Wealthy financiers soon joined local prospectors to develop the iron ore mines for commercial production. By 1884, seven mines were operating on the northern Vermillion Range. Soon after, prospectors discovered the far richer iron ore deposits of the Mesabi Range to the south. The Mesabi Range contained pockets of extremely high-grade iron ore, often 60 to 70 percent iron. And its gravel-like consistency meant it could easily be removed after scraping off a thin layer of overburden. The Mesabi Range developed the enormous open-pit mines that made it internationally famous by the early twentieth century. From the late 1890s through the first decades of the twentieth century, open-pit mining in the region grew quickly. The mines were vertically integrated into the largest American steel companies, including Carnegie Steel and U.S. Steel. The availability of huge quantities of high-grade iron ore from the region’s open-pit mines was essential to the growth and development of the U.S. steel industry.10
To understand the region’s history, it is necessary to differentiate between high-grade iron ore and low-grade ore. High-grade iron ore typically contains 50 percent or more iron content. High-grade ores on the Mesabi Range generally take the form of hematite, a rusty-red, gravel-like ore. The Lake Superior district’s high-grade ores revolutionized the U.S. iron ore industry because they could be scooped from the ground and shipped directly to the steel mill with little further processing. Thus, the steel industry often called them direct-shipping ores. With their high iron content, they could be added directly to the blast furnace. Low-grade iron ore generally contains less than 50 percent iron as natural ore. Several types of low-grade iron ore exist in the Lake Superior mining district, with the most common being taconite (in Minnesota) and jasper (in Michigan). Both ores contain approximately 20 to 30 percent iron. Through industrial processing, low-grade ore can be concentrated (or beneficiated) to remove the noniron material and create a manufactured product containing enough iron to be used in steel mills. Rudimentary forms of concentration involved sifting and washing iron ores to eliminate noniron material. But the more complicated industrial processing of the mid-twentieth century involved extensive crushing and grinding, followed by separation using magnets or flotation, with the iron-bearing particles finally concentrated and bound together into high-iron chunks or pellets.
By the first decades of the twentieth century, the fundamental problem facing the Lake Superior mining district was depletion of high-grade iron ore. Despite the district’s abundance of rich ore, mechanized open-pit mining removed the ore at a fantastic rate. As early as the 1910s, Iron Range residents worried about the future of their communities. What would happen to their towns when the ore ran out?
Iron mining on the Mesabi Range removed so much ore so quickly because it was among the first instances of fully mechanized open-pit mining in the world. Unlike the slow, labor-intensive process required to dig ore from underground mines, gravel-like Mesabi Range hematite could be easily scooped from the ground using the era’s primitive steam shovels. Transportation of the ore was fully mechanized as well. Railroads ran directly into the pits and carried the ore out to docks on Lake Superior, where it was loaded onto boats for water transport to steel mills in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. As Peter Temin described the process, “By the turn of the [twentieth] century the transport of Lake ores had become an intricate ballet of large and complex machines.”11 Mechanization quickly displaced human labor in the mines. From 1910 to 1920, the amount of ore produced annually per worker rose from 1,522 tons to 4,257 tons.12
During the late nineteenth century, mining engineers and operators were concerned that wasteful mining practices were costing millions of dollars each year. The Mesabi Range, in contrast, was upheld as a model of modern conservation practices, which mining engineers at the time defined strictly as preventing costly waste. The combination of open pits and full mechanization meant that the ore body could be completely and efficiently removed. The Mesabi Range mines wasted little ore—certainly far less than the 10 percent typically lost in underground mining.13
Mechanization shifted the mines’ energy source from human and animal power to hydrocarbon-fueled shovels and locomotives. As Timothy LeCain notes, “The steam shovel was nothing more than a device [. . .] to channel large amounts of concentrated hydrocarbon or hydropower energy into the previously slow and labor-intensive process of mining.”14 Replacing humans with hydrocarbon-powered machines allowed miners on the Mesabi Range to extract ore at rates unimaginable decades earlier. Mesabi Range mines extracted over 41 million tons of hematite iron ore in 1917 alone, five times more than in 1900.15 The enormous volume of iron ore extraction from the Lake Superior district was a source of both awe and dread. Observers were clearly impressed by the size of the giant open-pit mines. Many mines set up crude observation stands so that the curious could watch the growing man-made canyons. Such vast mines offered a vision of the industrial sublime, David Nye’s term for “a man-made landscape with the dynamism of moving machinery and powerful forces” that “evoked fear tinged with wonder” yet “threatened the individual with its sheer scale, its noise, its complexity, and the superhuman power of the forces at work.”16 Indeed, the observers’ wonder battled with alarm that removing so much ore meant that the district’s mines would soon be tapped out.
One indication of concern over iron ore depletion in the United States was the 1909 Report of the National Conservation Commission. Initiated by President Theodore Roosevelt, the report emphasized the key tenets of the Progressive era conservation movement, including concern that rampant industrialization was wasting finite natural resources; worry that nonrenewable resources, including minerals, would be depleted; and urgent calls for efficient use of resources to conserve them for future generations.17 Regarding the nation’s iron ore reserves, the report described the high-grade ores of the Lake Superior region as quickly diminishing even though the district was only several decades old. The report noted a “remarkable rate of increase” in American iron ore production between 1880 and 1909, with most of this increase in the Lake Superior district. Although an estimated 2.5 billion tons of high-grade iron ore remained in the district, this was far below the 6 billion tons of ore that the United States was predicted to need before 1940. If the Lake Superior district could not keep up with demand, the United States would be forced to import iron ore from foreign sources, a troubling prospect in an era that associated steel with military strength.18
Worse, the Lake Superior mining district’s highest grades of ore were already showing signs of depletion. The percentage of iron in the ore mined on the Mesabi Range was falling steadily in the years before 1909. The report concluded with a pessimistic prediction for the region and the U.S. iron ore supply. “It is evident, therefore, that the present average rate of increase in production of high-grade ores can not continue even for the next thirty years, and that before 1940 the production must already have reached a maximum and begun to decline.”19 A 1914 textbook on iron ores confirmed the report’s findings, noting a “growing scarcity of high-grade ores in the Lake Superior district” and describing various efforts, such as washing and roasting, used to improve the quality of remaining ores.20 By the first decade of the twentieth century, news of the depletion of high-grade iron ore reserves on the mighty Mesabi Range had reached a national audience.
Fears of depletion only grew in the following decades. In a 1920 technical bulletin, Edward W. Davis, the engineer who later perfected low-grade pelletizing technology, predicted that the Mesabi Range’s high-grade iron ores would soon be depleted. “Production has been at an enormous rate,” Davis noted, “and the question naturally arises as to how much longer this district can continue to supply the demand.”21 Production slowed during the Great Depression, but World War II demand for ore rapidly depleted the Mesabi Range. During the war years, the United States consumed approximately 480 million tons of iron ore, with two-thirds of this supply coming from the Mesabi Range.22 By 1950, the federal government was holding meetings to discuss the looming shortage of high-grade iron ore in the United States.23
At the same time that high-grade iron ore was waning, the towns of the Lake Superior mining district committed themselves to permanence through economic development and continued growth. Their emphasis on permanence and ongoing economic growth atop a foundation of finite (and quickly vanishing) natural resources set the stage for low-grade iron ore mining. The population of Iron Range towns boomed in the early twentieth century as thousands of workers flocked to the region to work in the iron ore mines. The population of the Mesabi Range increased from 15,800 residents in 1900 to 84,180 in 1920. The region’s towns during these decades were, as geographer John Borchert notes, “the fastest-growing urban areas in the Upper Midwest.”24 City leaders made plans for the new towns’ permanence. During the 1910s, Mesabi Range towns such as Hibbing began building extensive public facilities in anticipation of continued growth and community development into the future. By the 1920s, Hibbing was known as the “richest little village in the world” due to its high spending on public facilities such as lavish schools, parks, skating rinks, and day-care facilities.25
The desire to create permanent towns atop finite mineral resources ran against earlier precedent that imagined mining communities as transitory. Mining camps sprouted next to the mines and were quickly abandoned when the mineral boom ended. Observers in the nineteenth-century United States saw hundreds of mining ghost towns littering the American West. John Muir, for example, described Nevada’s mining region as “strewn with ruins that seem as gray and silent and time-worn as if the civilization to which they belonged had perished centuries ago.”26 In the Lake Superior district, some observers also believed that the district would turn into a string of ghost towns. A sociologist visiting the region in 1938 wrote: “It is obvious that the days of the Mesabi towns are numbered. The greatest iron range of all history will some day, perhaps during the next generation, be worthless and desolate.”27 Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, observers emphasized the inherently temporary nature of mining settlements.
While the economic and geologic reality of mass-removal mining pulled toward transitory communities and resulting abandonment, the era’s prevailing ethos of development pushed toward permanence and stability. The towns of the Lake Superior mining district developed primarily during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thus, town builders were immersed in western modernist thought that emphasized economic growth, development, and permanence. Throughout the region, civic boosters argued that their towns would thrive well into the future. “A high spirit of civic pride,” historian Clarke Chambers writes, “came to infuse every activity on the Iron Range,” reflecting the widespread belief that the Iron Range towns had a bright future. Iron Range residents devoted enormous energy to education and children’s welfare programs, believing that their progeny had bright prospects on the Iron Range. “The faith was in the future,” Chambers notes, “and the dynamic of hope was unleashed in concerted efforts in which the entire community joined to set loose the potential for good and for progress that the younger generation promised.” Plans for permanent economic growth and future development in the region fit into a larger pattern of thought at the turn of the twentieth century that emphasized science and technology’s ability to overcome natural limits.28
The tension between the mining economy and the modernist development impulse led to blind spots. The Lake Superior mining district was, in fact, littered with towns abandoned after their resources had been depleted. Among the earliest of these were the many logging camps abandoned in the nineteenth century after the region’s white-pine forests had been cut. There were numerous mining ghost towns as well. The small town of Babbitt, for example, was abandoned in 1924 after the town’s major mine shut down.29 The largest example of how the region ignored the transience inherent in mining was the gradual relocation through the 1920s of Hibbing, Minnesota, one of the largest towns on the Mesabi Range, to make way for an expanding open-pit mine. Buildings were placed on enormous logs and rolled to new locations several miles away. The abandoned neighborhood, which still contains ghostly sidewalks and street signs, was turned into a city park and mine overlook. The desire to create permanent towns atop a foundation of finite natural resources forced residents to ignore the reality of change and depletion.
The Lake Superior iron-mining district faced a fundamental paradox by the first third of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the region’s economy and society were built atop a finite natural resource that, due to mechanized open-pit mining, was vanishing rapidly. On the other hand, residents espoused a rhetoric of continued growth for their towns, the mining economy, and their way of life. To resolve the contradiction, the region turned to low-grade iron ore.
The Lake Superior region turned to low-grade iron ore as a technological fix that promised to address both the dangers of resource depletion and the lure of economic development through the miracles of modern engineering. Low-grade iron ore was an especially attractive solution because it seemingly allowed the mining region to postpone a reckoning with nature and to grow far into the future. Yet implementation of a low-grade iron ore industry in the district led to numerous unintended consequences, including widespread environmental pollution.30
For decades, iron miners had screened and separated ore to concentrate the higher-iron ores. In the 1880s, Thomas Edison designed a process that used magnets to concentrate crushed iron ore. Although Edison perfected the engineering process, his New Jersey plant was a commercial failure due to changing market conditions in the U.S. steel industry.31 By the first decades of the twentieth century, several firms had tried and failed to make low-grade iron ore commercially viable on a large scale. Geologists knew that there were enormous deposits of low-grade iron–bearing rock throughout the Lake Superior mining district. Most of this ore occurred as taconite, a flintlike rock containing approximately 30 percent magnetite. For many decades, miners ignored this huge volume of low-grade ore.
But by the early twentieth century, the rapid depletion of high-grade ores led to increased interest in low-grade ores. The primary advocate for low-grade ores, especially Minnesota’s taconite, was Edward W. Davis, an engineering professor at the University of Minnesota’s Mines Experiment Station. Davis first began experimenting with the separation of iron from low-grade ore in 1915. By the 1920s, he had largely perfected the engineering process, but low-grade ore was not yet commercially viable in the existing market.
To promote his engineering project, Davis argued that low-grade iron ore offered a technological fix for the depletion of direct-shipping ores in the Lake Superior district. Further, he warned that if development of low-grade iron ore did not begin immediately, the entire district would be in jeopardy. In a 1920 technical bulletin, Davis painted an alarming picture of depletion and argued that low-grade iron ore was the obvious solution:
It will not only be necessary to utilize these [low-grade taconite] ores in order to maintain the production of the district, but it will be necessary to begin the utilization of them in the very near future. If the furnace companies that have only a few years’ supply of ore available are allowed to invest large amounts of capital in developing and bringing into production new mining districts, the Lake Superior region will immediately start on its decline. If, on the other hand, these furnace companies find that the low-grade ores can be utilized, the fact that the Lake Superior district is already in large production and is so well equipped to handle immense tonnages will cause them to contemplate seriously investing new capital in this district for the purpose of developing the low-grade iron ores. The development of such an industry on a large scale will extend the life of the district into the far distant future.32
By the 1940s, Davis’s proposals attracted widespread attention from politicians and steel industry executives. The rapid depletion of high-grade iron ore during World War II—and the belief that more reserves were necessary for the dawning Cold War—made the iron ore supply crucial to U.S. national security. Davis argued during World War II that the federal government should support the development of low-grade iron ore mines, but he was rebuffed because of the need for immediately available high-grade iron ore during the war. After the war, however, arguments in favor of government support for low-grade iron ore mining picked up steam. Both trade economists and President Harry Truman’s administration worried that the United States was running out of domestic mineral supplies and may become a “have-not” nation in the global race for strategic minerals. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower supported the development of the low-grade iron ore industry and other domestic mineral industries via the Strategic and Critical Materials Stockpiling Act of 1946 and the Defense Production Act of 1950.33 Low-grade iron ore came to be seen as vital to national security. Steel companies could invest in the expensive processing technology with little financial risk thanks to government subsidies and tax incentives.
In 1955, the Reserve Mining Company, a joint subsidiary of Armco and Republic Steel, opened the first mill for processing low-grade iron ore in northern Minnesota. Reserve Mining Company mined taconite rock at its giant open-pit mine. After it was blasted out of the ground in piano-size chunks, the rock was transported by rail to the shore of Lake Superior where it entered the mammoth E.W. Davis Works. Here the rock was crushed and then ground to the consistency of flour. Using magnets, the high-iron magnetite was separated from the siliceous gangue. The magnetite was then mixed with bentonite for binding and rolled into marble-size round pellets. These pellets were baked hard and then shipped to blast furnaces. The tailings of noniron siliceous rock—which made up 60 to 80 percent of the original taconite—were mixed with water, and the resulting gray slurry was pumped into Lake Superior via two giant tubes.
The plant handled an enormous quantity of iron ore. Initially designed to produce 3.75 million tons per year, the Silver Bay plant was producing 6 million tons of taconite annually by 1961. Following successful tests of its ore in a blast furnace, the Reserve Mining plant increased its annual output to 9 million tons in the early 1960s. It was producing 10.7 million tons annually by 1970.34 During the 1970s, Reserve Mining’s Silver Bay taconite plant supplied 15 percent of the United States’ iron ore.
The Reserve Mining operation was the first in a wave of pelletizing plants that transformed the global iron ore industry in the second half of the twentieth century. During its construction and early years of operation, Reserve Mining’s mill “was praised by the mining engineering community [. . .] as a technological marvel.”35 Journalists breathlessly hailed the mill as the beginning of what they anticipated would be a billion dollars of corporate investment in iron ore–pelletizing plants across North America.36 The demand for pelletized iron ore skyrocketed, rising by almost 300 percent from 1961 to 1966, and newly built plants were operating at full capacity from the moment they came online.37 By 1970, thirteen low-grade iron ore pellet plants were operating in the vicinity, and the majority of the Lake Superior district’s iron ore was concentrated before being used in a blast furnace.
The commercial and technical success of low-grade iron ore alleviated earlier concerns over the depletion of high-grade ore in the Lake Superior district. The combination of low-grade iron ore processing and new foreign sources served to “eliminate worry over adequate supplies of iron for centuries.”38 Davis, who had done more than anyone to promote low-grade iron ore, noted that high-grade ore had gone from shortage to surplus: “In a few short years the success of low-grade ore concentration and the demonstrated economy of carefully prepared blast furnace ore has brought about a complete re-evaluation of iron ore production and reserves. Instead of a shortage, a great surplus of high-grade natural ore now exists, and blast furnace operators who are willing to use direct ores are in a position to pick and choose among several sources.”39
From one perspective, low-grade iron ore succeeded as a technological fix. But taconite was cheap only because the costs of low-grade iron ore mining and processing were shifted onto the environment. When the environmental costs of low-grade iron ore mining were later revealed, as described below, the fix appeared far less painless. Overall, low-grade iron ore offers a potent example of the high-modernist belief that the latest science and technology could obliterate all natural limits, including the finite deposits of high-grade iron ore, and the larger mindset that fundamentally separated nature from technology.40
Low-grade iron ore mining turned iron ore mines into high-throughput industrial factories. It was part of a more general change in twentieth-century mining systems, described by mining historians Logan Hovis and Jeremy Mouat as “the abandonment of low-volume, high-value, selective mining techniques and the adoption of higher-volume, nonselective methods that emphasized the quantity rather than the quality of the ore brought to the surface.” The massive open-pit metal mines of the twentieth century increased the speed and size of the process so much that LeCain has called them “rural envirotechnical factories” able to create a system of “mass destruction.”41 Indeed, the scale and complexity of the low-grade iron ore mines baffled those familiar with an older type of mining that only removed the valuable ore and left everything else. In the Lake Superior district, one mine operator asked Reserve Mining executives how much gold was extracted during processing. The man “could not believe that such an elaborate project had been built merely to produce iron.”42
The elaborate processing of low-grade iron ore was profitable only because of the mill’s enormous volume. Low-grade iron ore mills made very little profit per ton.43 High throughput was the key to a successful business. Since the overhead of factories and supplies was largely fixed, industries such as automobile manufacturing made money by pumping more products through their plants more quickly. Speed was also the essence of the open-pit mine. By moving so much earth so quickly—largely with the assistance of heavy machinery powered by hydrocarbon fuels—the large open-pit mines could economically extract and process very low grade ores.44
It is also useful to consider the changing temporal scales involved in modern mining. Low-grade mineral mining was little more than a drastic acceleration (aided by hydrocarbon-fueled technology) of the geological processes that created pockets of high-grade iron ore by leaching low-grade taconite ores over eons of geological time. Mining engineers soon conflated the language of geology and industrial processes. By the 1950s, engineers defined high-grade iron ore as ore in which geology, rather than machines, had done the work of concentration. Geology was imagined as a giant iron ore concentration machine, and one that worked very slowly at that.45 This intensification of the temporal scale was common in industrialization. Historians Sara Pritchard and Thomas Zeller emphasize that industrialization, especially the use of hydrocarbons, “significantly altered the temporal scale of natural-resource extraction by intensely tapping deep geological time.”46 Low-grade iron ore mining complicates the temporal scales involved, since the mines certainly tapped into “deep geological time” by using hydrocarbon-fueled machines. But those same machines allowed miners to replicate the effects of geological time on the compressed timeline of industrial production.
Although low-grade iron ore offered a technological fix to the problem of depleted high-grade ore reserves and the threat of community abandonment, it was not a costless solution. Processing the low-grade ore required rivers of water and produced mountains of tailings. The combination of water and tailings, and the resulting environmental consequences, was vividly illustrated by a landmark water pollution lawsuit in the 1970s, Reserve Mining Company v. United States of America, that ultimately shut down the Reserve Mining mill.
The major environmental pollution stemming from low-grade iron ore mining was water pollution. Separating iron particles from the surrounding siliceous gangue required enormous quantities of water. The process that Davis designed required approximately 45 tons of water for every ton of iron ore concentrate produced. A typical iron ore–pelletizing plant used 100,000 gallons of water per minute, approximately the same amount of water as flowed every minute through the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota.47 This water was ultimately filled with tailings slurry. The challenge for low-grade iron ore mining was how to dispose of those tailings.
Low-grade ores, no matter the mineral, generate enormous quantities of tailings. The tailings problem was less pronounced in low-grade iron ore mining than in other types of mining, such as copper sulfates, which often processed ores as low as 2 percent copper and left behind sulfuric acid and other highly poisonous chemicals. In contrast, low-grade iron ore created approximately 2 tons of tailings for every 3 tons of ore. And the tailings were a siliceous rock similar to that found on the bed of Lake Superior. The large volume of tailings still needed to be dumped somewhere, and the region’s water system soon emerged as the logical dumping ground. From the moment that the earliest pilot plants for low-grade iron ore processing were developed in the Lake Superior mining region, the question of where to dump tailings was problematic. The first pilot plants dumped the wet tailings in nearby swamps or small lakes.48
The tailings issue became more important when the first industrial processing plants were built in the mid-twentieth century. While engineering the processes for low-grade iron ore mining, Davis immediately turned to the possibility of dumping the tailings into Lake Superior. From Davis’s perspective, Lake Superior offered several advantages. The plant could use its enormous quantity of cold freshwater in processing operations. More important, if the tailings were dumped directly into the lake, they would seemingly disappear as the lake’s currents pulled the tailings—so finely ground that they were suspended in the water—deep below the surface. Davis and Reserve Mining conducted several small laboratory tests and determined that depositing the taconite tailings in the lake would not lead to any serious problems. Davis wrote:
As a result of these investigations, we [. . .] concluded that the best place for fine taconite tailings was in the deep valleys at the bottom of Lake Superior. There they would be out of sight forever and posterity would not have to cope with them. [. . .] It was our conclusion that the fine tailings from all the magnetic taconite on the Mesabi could be put into the deep water of Lake Superior and would have no harmful effect on its usefulness or beauty.49
Reality proved more complex, however. At the Mines Experiment Station, Davis and his staff tested how tailings might affect Lake Superior by putting taconite tailings into large water tanks where they “observed what they would do under controlled conditions—just how they would act and what would happen to the water and what pollution would occur, if any, and what discoloration would occur, if any.” The University of Minnesota ultimately made a small-scale model of Lake Superior and dumped taconite tailings into the model in the same proportion as would the Reserve Mining plant.50 Satisfied that the tailings did not pose a threat to Lake Superior’s clarity, Davis went ahead with his plan to dump tailings into Lake Superior.
Reserve Mining obtained twelve permits before dumping tailings into Lake Superior. These were divided into three main categories: permits from Minnesota’s Department of Conservation that allowed Reserve Mining to remove water from Lake Superior and use it in the mill, permits from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency that allowed the company to discharge water and tailings back into Lake Superior, and permits from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granting the company permission to construct a dock and breakwater required for shipping.51 These permits were quickly approved given the plant’s promise of economic development and jobs in the mining region. The only significant opposition came from sportsmen’s groups and the fishing industry, both of which were worried that tailings would affect fishing in Lake Superior. Ultimately, the quest for economic development overshadowed these concerns. In December 1947, Reserve Mining received the necessary permits to use 130,000 gallons of water per minute from Lake Superior.52 Worries about possible pollution carried little weight against the promise of an expanded mining economy in the region. As Davis recalled, the head of the state’s Department of Conservation “was very anxious to get something of that kind [a low-grade iron ore plant] started” because of the economic benefits it offered in a declining mining region. Overall, Davis noted, “everybody was very helpful and enthusiastic about getting our plant started [. . .] because it would employ three or four thousand men.”53 The permits also allowed Reserve Mining to dump tailings into Lake Superior. From 1955 to 1980, the Reserve Mining plant dumped an average of 67,000 tons of taconite tailings into Lake Superior each day. Historian Thomas Huffman notes that this amount was “more than two times the estimated solid waste garbage produced by New York City during the same period.”54
Beginning in the late 1960s, government officials, along with citizen environmental groups, brought lawsuits against Reserve Mining to force the firm to stop dumping tailings into the lake. Although the details of the case were specific to low-grade iron ore mining and highly technical, the Reserve Mining lawsuit was just one event in what Samuel Hays identified as the “second phase” of the U.S. environmental movement, stretching from roughly 1965 to the early 1970s. During these years, Hays argues, environmental politics in the United States focused on “the reaction against the adverse effects of industrial growth.”55 Indeed, the lawsuit represented a fundamental shift in attitudes as the ecological costs of low-grade iron ore mining were accounted for alongside its economic benefits.
The case began in the late 1960s when the Reserve Mining Company attempted to renew permits to dump tailings into Lake Superior. Whereas its initial dumping permits had met little opposition in the 1940s, by the 1960s fishermen, scientists, and lakeside lodge owners were worried about how the tailings were affecting the lake. Residents complained that billowing clouds of green water were spreading across the lake’s surface, which was typically a crystal-clear blue. Longtime fishermen described how water clarity had dropped drastically in just a few years.56 Environmental scientists, often working closely with concerned citizens, started documenting the spread of fine tailings throughout the lake and noting how the tailings were affecting the lake’s ecosystem. Water pollution experts found that the tailings were spreading hundreds of miles from the plant at Silver Bay and increasing turbidity throughout the lake. The tailings were also harming fish. According to an expert on the Great Lakes’ sedimentary geology, the Reserve Mining mill was nothing less than “a major geological event in the history of the world’s largest expanse of fresh water, comparable to the arrival of European civilization.”57 After several years of data collection, government officials believed they had enough evidence to show that Reserve Mining’s tailings were harmfully polluting the lake. Using new water pollution regulations, the U.S. government and the state of Minnesota filed suit in 1972 to force Reserve Mining to quit dumping tailings into the lake.
The lawsuit initiated several years of conferences and administrative procedures that pitted the environmental costs of mining against its economic benefits. At the time, the case was framed as a classic example of the jobs-versus-the-environment debate. The citizens groups and government agencies suing to stop the dumping argued that tailings from low-grade iron ore mining were industrial pollution that threatened the health of Lake Superior and everyone living near its shores. Opposing them were Reserve Mining and many industrial workers in the region who argued that the economic benefits of low-grade iron ore mining outweighed any potential costs from pollution. Among those who supported Reserve Mining were many skeptics who questioned whether the tailings were even pollution, including several scientists who testified on behalf of Reserve Mining. Just as Edward W. Davis had done years earlier, Reserve Mining argued that the tailings were inert, pulverized rock that could not possibly harm the lake’s ecosystem. According to Reserve, the fine tailings were “pure sand” that were “inert, inorganic, insoluble in Lake Superior, and biologically inactive.”58
The case gained international attention in the early 1970s when Reserve’s tailings were linked with asbestos. A researcher noticed that taconite tailings were similar in appearance to amphibole asbestos fibers, whose connection to cancer was being discovered at this time. There was almost no concrete scientific evidence of how asbestos-like fibers affected those who drank water containing them. Nonetheless, the revelation was a bombshell that turned the case from a pollution lawsuit into an enormous public health debate. Reacting to the news, Judge Miles Lord exclaimed that the pollution was “potentially [. . .] the number one ecological disaster of our time.”59 Soon thereafter, Judge Lord ruled that Reserve Mining was polluting the lake. The company was ordered to stop dumping tailings into the lake and begin depositing its tailings on land. Reserve Mining immediately appealed the decision and was allowed to continue dumping in the lake for several more years. In 1980, the company finally shifted to on-land tailings disposal near its Silver Bay plant.
The decision to stop Reserve’s dumping proved to be an important precedent in U.S. environmental law. The most important legal decision to emerge from Reserve Mining Company v. United States of America has been cited extensively in American environmental case law. For example, the decision was a crucial precedent for Ethyl Corporation v. EPA, a 1976 decision that justified limits on leaded gasoline because of possible health risks. But the decision also had an economic impact on the Lake Superior iron-mining district. By the mid-1980s, Reserve Mining’s Silver Bay plant was closed. Although Reserve Mining blamed the environmental lawsuit for the shutdown, it should be noted that several other low-grade iron ore plants shut down in the early 1980s amid an economic crisis in the U.S. steel industry.60
At the center of this story stands the engineer who designed the system for processing low-grade iron ore and dumping tailings into Lake Superior, Edward W. Davis. He was heavily criticized for Reserve Mining’s pollution. Davis held views that were typical for mining engineers in the early twentieth century. Like many others in his field, Davis prioritized economic growth and the efficient use of natural resources over respect for complex ecologies. More important, he was certain that modern science and technology offered the tools to solve any potential problems from pollution, just as modern techno-science allowed him to turn worthless low-grade ore into valuable iron pellets.
Many of Davis’s statements appear ridiculous in light of modern environmental science. Davis thought that so long as pollutants were not visible to the human eye, they were not a problem. For example, in 1968 he speculated that the enormous open-pit iron mines in the Lake Superior district could be filled with junk cars once mining ended. “At least you would be rid of the old automobiles,” Davis speculated, adding that the cars could be blended with water and chemicals so that oxidation would turn the cars back into iron ore.61 More alarming was Davis’s suggestion that atomic bombs could be used as tools for open-pit mining. In 1964, he hypothesized that huge deposits of low-grade iron ore located deep underground could be easily exposed for open-pit mining by using atomic bombs to blast away overburden. “You have to strip off the top of the earth to get to the taconite now,” Davis told a reporter, “but it may be done even easier for the next generation. The atomic energy commission [. . .] may come in some day and blow off the whole top.”62 This is not to say that Davis was entirely careless about nature and the environment. In his personal life, Davis was an avid outdoorsman. He summered at a remote cabin north of the Mesabi Range, and in unpublished personal journals he wrote loving descriptions of his time fishing and canoeing amid the clear, cool waters of northern Minnesota lakes.63
Instead of seeing Davis as either a hero of technological triumph over nature or a heartless destroyer of Lake Superior’s ecology, it is more appropriate to view Davis’s attitudes toward the natural world as a product of his time. As mining historians have emphasized, prior to the mid-twentieth century, miners and mining engineers often paid little attention to the ecological consequences of their trade. Reviewing the mining literature of the late nineteenth century, Duane Smith finds little mention of the environment among mining’s proponents. When they did discuss the environment, it was only to emphasize its usefulness in mine operations. The few miners and engineers who spoke of the environment described the wilderness as a site for character building, but not preservation.64 The point is not to apologize for Davis, but rather to emphasize that the mass-destruction mines of the early twentieth century and their resulting pollution derived from a worldview that separated nature from technology and insisted that modern technoscience could overcome any natural limits.
When the Reserve Mining controversy is viewed within the broader context of mass-destruction mining and its environmental consequences in the twentieth century, it is clear that the enormous scale and speed of low-grade iron ore mining, the very factors that made it profitable to mine and process ores containing only 25 percent iron, also created pollution on an enormous scale and with tremendous speed. As LeCain has noted for low-grade copper mining, the “insight that speed was the essence of mass production” also suggests “an equally profound insight into understanding modern environmental degradation.”65 In other words, the high-speed throughput of low-grade iron ore necessarily resulted in an equally high-speed throughput of tailings waste. The Reserve Mining plant produced 20 million tons of tailings waste per year. These tailings, a mixture of rock and water that poured into Lake Superior in a giant pipe-fed waterfall, contained, in Davis’s words, “enough sand to cover 40 acres nearly 200 feet deep each year.”66 When dumped into Lake Superior, these tailings threatened the giant lake’s ecology within a few years due to the sheer volume of pollution.
All histories of mining are environmental histories. Extracting minerals from the earth’s crust is necessarily a hybrid activity combining nature, technology, and human labor. Amid the long history of mining, twentieth-century low-grade iron ore mining deserves attention for several reasons. First, low-grade iron ore mining in the Lake Superior district highlights how the need for continued economic development often fueled mining’s expansion in the twentieth century. Rather than accept that high-grade iron ore supplies, and the future of mining communities dependent on them, were finite, the Lake Superior mining district was committed to the continuous growth of both mining operations and the towns that developed near the open pits. Globally, the push for sustained economic growth and development fueled a massive expansion of mining in the twentieth century. Attention to the demand for economic development in depressed mining regions also highlights causal factors in mining’s development other than mining firms seeking to maximize profit. Low-grade iron ore mining in the Lake Superior district was not purely a response to capitalist pressures or technological change; it also emerged from a deep-seated desire for permanence and long-term growth built on a foundation of resource extraction industries.
Second, low-grade iron ore mining in the Lake Superior mining district highlights how changes in mining practices during the twentieth century often involved an intensification of the speed and scale of mining. Increased throughput and large-scale surface mining subsequently increased the speed and scale of environmental degradation. This increase in ecological consequences suggests a far more complex portrait of the changing patterns of pollution in the modern mining industry. It is undeniable that some negative ecological impacts from mining have been ameliorated. In the Lake Superior district, for example, large reclamation efforts have reforested tailings dumps and prevented widespread erosion. But these reclamation efforts take place alongside industrial processes dedicated to mining more intensely than ever and using such low-grade ores that huge volumes of tailings waste are a necessary by-product. Narratives that emphasize a constant progression away from the “bad old days” of mining pollution and narratives portraying a bleak descent into ever-more-destructive mining are both too simple to account for the largest iron ore operation in North American history.
1. For an overview of the trial, see Robert V. Bartlett, The Reserve Mining Controversy: Science, Technology, and Environmental Quality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); Thomas F. Bastow, “This Vast Pollution . . .”: United States of America v. Reserve Mining Company (Washington, DC: Green Fields, 1986); and Frank Schaumburg, Judgment Reserved: A Landmark Environmental Case (Reston, VA: Reston, 1976).
2. Duane Smith, Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800–1980 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1987), 134–47.
3. Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Samuel P. Hays, A History of Environmental Politics since 1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
4. J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 21, 31–32, 85–86.
5. Andrew Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005).
6. Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction: The Men and Giant Mines That Wired America and Scarred the Planet (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009). See also Logan Hovis and Jeremy Mouat, “Miners, Engineers, and the Transformation of Work in the Western Mining Industry, 1880–1930,” Technology and Culture 37:3 (1996): 429–56; Charles K. Hyde, Copper for America: The United States Copper Industry from Colonial Times to the 1990s (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); Larry Lankton, Hollowed Ground: Copper Mining and Community Building on Lake Superior, 1840–1990s (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010); and Timothy J. LeCain, “When Everybody Wins Does the Environment Lose? The Environmental Techno-Fix in Twentieth Century American Mining,” in The Technological Fix: How People Use Technology to Create and Solve Problems, ed. Lisa Rosner (New York: Routledge, 2004), 137–53.
7. Wendell Weed, “Minnesota Taconite: Nature’s Cinderella,” Minneapolis Tribune Picture Magazine (October 18, 1953), 21; “The State and Taconite,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune (September 30, 1957). See also Terry S. Reynolds and Virginia P. Dawson, Iron Will: Cleveland-Cliffs and the Mining of Iron Ore, 1847–2006 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 160–68. For a contrasting opinion, see Peter J. Kakela, “The Shift to Taconite Pellets: Necessary Evil or Lucky Break?” Michigan History Magazine (November–December 1994): 70–75.
8. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 335–36.
9. Richard V. Francaviglia, Hard Places: Reading the Landscape of America’s Historic Mining Districts (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), xviii. On the general history of Minnesota’s iron ore ranges, see David A. Walker, Iron Frontier: The Discovery and Early Development of Minnesota’s Three Ranges (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1979).
10. Thomas Misa, A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865–1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158–60.
11. Peter Temin, Iron and Steel in Nineteenth-Century America: An Economic Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 197.
12. Paul H. Landis, Three Iron Mining Towns: A Study in Cultural Change (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Bros., 1938; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 107; E.D. Gardner and McHenry Mosier, Open-Cut Metal Mining (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941), 70–71.
13. Smith, Mining America, 86, 103.
14. LeCain, Mass Destruction, 159.
15. Ernest F. Burchard, “Iron Ore, Pig Iron, and Steel,” in Mineral Resources of the United States, 1918, ed. G.F. Loughlin (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1921), 545.
16. David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 126.
17. Henry Gannett, ed., Report of the National Conservation Commission, 3 vols. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909). On the general context of Progressive era conservation, see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (1959; reprint, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999).
18. On the association of steel with military might in the Progressive era, see Misa, A Nation of Steel, 91–132.
19. C.W. Hayes, Iron Ores of the United States (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), 520, 490.
20. Edwin C. Eckel, Iron Ores: Their Occurrence, Valuation, and Control (New York: McGraw Hill, 1914), 202.
21. E.W. Davis, “The Future of the Lake Superior District as an Iron-Ore Producer,” Bulletin of the University of Minnesota School of Mines Experiment Station 7 (1920): 1.
22. William T. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry in the United States (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1971), 4:1481; George Eckel, “To Tap Taconite as a Source of Iron,” New York Times (September 28, 1947).
23. “House Group Maps Inquiry on Steel,” New York Times (April 15, 1950). It should be noted that claims of iron ore depletion were always contested. Iron is one of the earth’s most plentiful elements and can be found throughout the globe. Some observers noted that the depletion of the Lake Superior region’s high-grade ore reserves meant that the U.S. steel industry would have to turn to new sources.
24. Arnold R. Alanen, “Years of Change on the Iron Range,” in Minnesota in a Century of Change: The State and Its People since 1900, ed. Clifford E. Clark Jr. (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1989), 159; John R. Borchert, America’s Northern Heartland (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 69.
25. Alanen, “Years of Change on the Iron Range,” 164–65; Clarke A. Chambers, “Welfare on Minnesota’s Iron Range,” Upper Midwest History 3 (1983): 7–8.
26. John Muir, Steep Trails (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), 195; Smith, Mining America, 19–20.
27. Landis, Three Iron Mining Towns, 55.
28. Chambers, “Welfare on Minnesota’s Iron Range,” 11, 28; McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, xxii; James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4.
29. Edward W. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1964), 24.
30. The use of technological fixes in mining is discussed at length in LeCain, “When Everybody Wins Does the Environment Lose?”
31. On Edison’s failed iron ore venture, see W. Bernard Carlson, “Edison in the Mountains: The Magnetic Ore Separation Venture, 1879–1900,” History of Technology 8 (1983): 37–59.
32. Davis, “The Future of the Lake Superior District as an Iron-Ore Producer,” 5.
33. Alfred E. Eckes Jr., The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), 121–73. This is not to say that iron ore mining did not proliferate outside the United States. American steel companies greatly expanded their iron ore operations around the world during the 1940s and 1950s, especially in Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, Chile, Liberia, Gabon, and Australia. Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry, 4:1481–86; Eckes, The United States and the Global Struggle for Minerals, 125–26.
34. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 181, 191; Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry, 4:1487.
35. Thomas R. Huffman, “Exploring the Legacy of Reserve Mining: What Does the Longest Environmental Trial in History Tell Us about the Meaning of American Environmentalism?” Journal of Policy History 12:3 (2000): 340, 345.
36. “The Taconite Rolls,” Newsweek (October 24, 1955), 78. See also Gerald Manners, The Changing World Market for Iron Ore, 1950–1980: An Economic Geography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 159–72.
37. “Ore Pellet Plant Near Capacity,” New York Times (September 1, 1967).
38. Thomas E. Mullaney, “Steel Industry Cheered in Quest for New Raw Materials Sources,” New York Times (January 11, 1953).
39. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 194.
40. LeCain, Mass Destruction, 179.
41. Hovis and Mouat, “Miners, Engineers, and the Transformation of Work in the Western Mining Industry,” 434–35; LeCain, Mass Destruction, 150.
42. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 187.
43. Strictly speaking, the plants were not all profit-maximizing entities. Most of the plants in the Lake Superior district were directly owned by steel companies, either individually, as in the case of U.S. Steel, or as joint ventures, as was the case for Reserve Mining, jointly owned by Armco and Republic Steel.
44. On the general history of high-throughput mass production, see Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 240–82.
45. “The Taconite Story,” unpublished manuscript, University of Minnesota Mines Experiment Station, July 25, 1952, University of Minnesota Archives, Minneapolis.
46. Sarah B. Pritchard and Thomas Zeller, “The Nature of Industrialization,” in The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, ed. Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 86, 91–92.
47. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 125; Hogan, Economic History of the Iron and Steel Industry, 4:1488.
48. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 43.
49. Ibid., 127–28.
50. E.W. Davis, “Pollution,” unpublished manuscript, 1971–1972, pp. 7–8, Lake Studies Folder, Box 1, Edward W. Davis Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul. Ecology students at the University of Minnesota later discovered a key flaw in these experiments. Davis had suspended the tailings in cold water and used room temperature water in the holding tank. The situation in Lake Superior was reversed. The lake water was very cold and the tailings were suspended in warm water. As a result, the tailings behaved very differently in the lake than they had in the test tank. Bastow, This Vast Pollution, 33.
51. Schaumburg, Judgment Reserved, 46.
52. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 135.
53. Davis, “Pollution.”
54. Huffman, “Exploring the Legacy of Reserve Mining,” 340–41; Bastow, This Vast Pollution, 8.
55. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 55.
56. Wendy Adamson, Saving Lake Superior: A Story of Environmental Action (Minneapolis: Dillon, 1974), 1–2.
57. Bastow, This Vast Pollution, 82.
58. Ibid., 36–40. Environmental groups argued that the tailings were much finer than sand, more like fine silt or clay.
59. Ibid., 104–6.
60. Huffman, “Exploring the Legacy of Reserve Mining,” 342–44. Reserve Mining’s shutdown was also precipitated by consolidation within the steel industry. Joint owner Republic Steel was considering a merger with another steel company that owned a larger and more profitable low-grade iron ore plant. See Thomas McGinty, “Competitive Status of Reserve Mining in the Current Iron and Steel Environment,” unpublished report, 1983, Box 30, Hogan Steel Archive, Fordham University Archives, New York, NY.
61. “Ore-able Fate? He’d Treat Old Cars Like Dirt,” St. Paul Pioneer Press (January 20, 1968).
62. Carl Hennemann, “He Hopes Amendment Will Pass—Dr. Edward Davis: ‘Mr. Taconite,’” St. Paul Dispatch, October 21, 1964; Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 197. Speculation that atomic blasting could be used for mining was widespread in the late 1950s and early 1960s. See Frederick Reines, “The Peaceful Nuclear Explosion,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March 1959), 121–22; and Scott Kaufman, Project Plowshare: The Peaceful Use of Nuclear Explosives in Cold War America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013).
63. See, for example, E.W. Davis, “The Walleyes and Val,” unpublished manuscript, September 28, 1949, Box 4, Edward W. Davis Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul.
64. Smith, Mining America, 42–46.
65. LeCain, Mass Destruction, 148.
66. Davis, Pioneering with Taconite, 126.