Some American steel makers import part of the ore they use from Sweden, Cuba, Spain, and Chile. But the Steel Corporation’s subsidiaries have depended so far upon the Lake regions for their ore supplies, except the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co., which uses Alabama ores. Although iron had been made in America long before the War of Independence nothing was known of the immense deposits in the region of the Great Lakes until 1845, in which year Philo M. Everett was guided by Indians to “a mountain of solid iron,” to which he gave the name of the great missionary explorer, Marquette. Shortly afterward a surveyor named Stunz set out to seek gold in the wild region north of Superior, and came back to civilization with a tale of vast iron deposits in what is now known as the Vermilion range. But so far and hard to reach were these deposits that it was not until the early seventies that capital, as represented by the late Charlemagne Tower, could be interested in the exploitation of these deposits. Still another gold seeker was responsible for the discovery of the greatest of all the ranges, the Mesaba. Some years before the Civil War Louis H. Merritt, a prospector, struck out into the woods in quest of the yellow metal, but brought back with him nothing but a few samples of iron ore. Little did he dream that he had found what would one day prove more precious than gold. Merritt told of his discovery only to his four sons, and it was not until 1885 that these young men staked out their first mine in the desolate region. The Merritts were lumbermen, and the mining fraternity, having proved to its own complete satisfaction that iron deposits in the Mesaba section were geologically impossible, scoffed at their enterprise, but in one single year since the Steel Corporation alone has taken 24,928,039 tons of ore from this range, a single mine yielding 3,500,000 tons. There is a legend told in Minnesota, the story of a practical joke which had a different end from that expected by its perpetrators, and the result of which has been a great boon to the cause of education in that state. The story had its beginnings before the Civil War. At that time, it goes, the public school system of Minnesota, neglected in State appropriations and impoverished, clamored long and loud at the door of the legislature for a share in public lands, and eventually gathered enough popular support to wring from the law-makers a promise of ten sections. The promise was kept, but to the discomfiture of the educators and the amusement of everyone else it was found that the sections lay beyond the pale of civilization far in the northeastern corner of the state, an uninhabited, unexplored territory. And then Merritt discovered the Mesaba range, and the implements of the steel companies began to shovel gold to the credit of the Minnesota school system.