If you are going into the North to study the ore traffic at close range, the first man you will probably hear of after leaving your ship is Thomas F. Cole, of Duluth. You must know Cole before you go deeper into the subject of the forty or fifty million tons of ore which the ships will carry during the present year of 1909. The United States Steel Corporation will use about thirty million tons of the total output of the ore regions this year, and Cole is the United States Steel Corporation in this big Northland. He is the head of the finest and most delicate industrial mechanism in the world. This mechanism, in a way, is so fine that it may be said to be almost non-existent. It is simply an “organized and capitalized intelligence.” The Steel Corporation will mine some eighteen or twenty million tons of ore in Minnesota alone this year. Yet it owns not a dollar’s worth of property in the State. As a corporation it does no business in the State. It might be described as a huge octopus, and each arm of this octopus, representing a big mining interest, works independently of all other arms and of the body of the octopus itself. Through these arms the corporation accomplishes its aims. Each huge mine has its own executive organisation, is responsible for its own acts--but it must obtain results. The “central intelligence,” or body of the corporation, is there to judge results, and Cole is the power that watches over all. Officially he is known as the president of the Oliver Mining Company, the greatest organisation of its kind in existence, which attends not only to the Steel Corporation’s interests in Minnesota, but in Michigan and Wisconsin as well. As the great eye of the world’s largest trust he guards the interests of thirty-one mines, employs fifteen thousand men, and gives subsistence to sixty thousand people. [Illustration: The “Montezuma.” The largest wooden ship on fresh water being towed out of the Maumee River, Toledo.]