Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
Here in the seventeenth century came the early French, and in 1680 a
trading-post was established by Daniel du Lhut, afterwards becoming a
Hudson Bay Company Station. The mouth of St. Louis River and its bay
were naturally recognized as important points for trade, and when the
Northern Pacific Railway was projected Superior City got its start.
The first railroad scheme failed, the panic of 1857 came, and the
railway project was abandoned until after the Civil War; and then,
when it was renewed, the terminus was located over on the other side
of the river, the place being named Duluth, after the French trader.
While there has been great rivalry between them, and Duluth has
outstripped Superior, yet the latter has an extensive trade and thirty
thousand people. Duluth, the "Zenith City of the Unsalted Seas," as it
has been ambitiously called, was originally projected on Minnesota
Point, a scythe-shaped natural breakwater running out seven miles into
the lake, which protects the harbor, but the town was subsequently
built farther in. There were about seventy white people in the
neighborhood in 1860, and in 1869 its present site was a forest, while
the railroad, which had many set-backs, had only brought about three
thousand people there in 1885. The completion of other railway
connections in various directions, the discovery of iron deposits, and
the recognition of its advantageous position for traffic, subsequently
gave Duluth rapid growth, so that it now has eighty thousand people,
and is the greatest port on the lake. It is finely situated, the
harbor being spacious and lined with docks and warehouses, and it has
many substantial buildings. Back of the city a terrace rises some four
hundred feet, an old shore line of Lake Superior when the water was at
much higher level, and here is the Boulevard Drive, giving splendid
views over the town and lake. The vast extent of wheat lands to the
westward and the prolific iron-ore district to the northward give
Duluth an enormous trade. Its railways lead up to the Messabi and
Vermillion ranges, now the greatest producers of Lake Superior
iron-ores, the red hematite, most of the output being controlled by
John D. Rockefeller and his associates. These mines yield the richest
ores in the world, and have made some of the greatest fortunes in
Duluth. Yet they were not discovered until 1891, and then the lands
where they are generally went begging, because nobody would give the
government price for them, $1.25 per acre. One forty-acre tract, then
abandoned by the man who took it up because he did not think the pine
wood on it was enough to warrant paying $50 for it, is now the
Mountain Iron Mine, netting Mr. Rockefeller $375,000 annual profit,
and his railroad bringing the ores out gets more than that sum for
freights.
THE CITY OF MILWAUKEE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account