There are few cities in the world to-day in which romance and adventure have combined in more extraordinary ways with calamity, failure, and indomitable courage than in the upbuilding of Duluth. Chiselled back into the rocky hillsides, terrace upon terrace, and stretching for miles along the bay front where only a quarter of a century ago was the wild and rugged grandeur of virgin wilderness; built upon rock, and in rock; looking down upon one of the finest harbours in the world on one hand, and up over vast regions red with iron treasure on the other, Duluth is one of the most beautiful cities in the United States--one of the most wonderful and most interesting. Twenty-five years ago, only a village marked this stronghold of the iron barons. The deer, the wolf, the bear, the moose roamed unafraid over places now alive with commercial activity. Into the vast unexplored wildernesses, even less than a dozen years ago, prospectors went out with their packs and their guns, and searched and starved and even died for the “ugly wealth” hidden in the ranges that are now giving to the world three quarters of its iron and steel. And to-day many of these same men, “whose callouses of the old prospecting days have hardly worn away,” live in a city of eighty thousand people, whose annual receipts from its industries aggregate fifty-five million dollars, and whose invested wealth is over one hundred and fifty millions. While London, Liverpool, Hamburg, Antwerp, Hong-kong, and Marseilles have had eyes for New York alone in this Western World, while the ports of ancient and historic renown have been struggling among themselves for supremacy, away up at the end of the Lake Superior wilderness the second greatest freight-shipping port in the world was building itself, quietly, unobtrusively, unknown. That is the story of Duluth in a nutshell. [Illustration: The Ship Canal and Aërial Bridge, Duluth, Minn. Copyright 1908 by Detroit Photographic Co. ]