The story is of doubtful authenticity, but it is nevertheless a fact that the Minnesota schools own large acreages of ore land, and their enormous receipts of royalties on ore shipped therefrom make them probably the richest in the world. A mine, in the commonly accepted sense of the word, is a deep shaft in the ground from which tunnels, or “drifts,” radiate through the ore bodies. But nature, in the Mesaba region, has saved the steel maker the trouble of burrowing under the earth’s surface to get at her riches. The majority of the mines here are not mines in the accepted sense at all. They are what a veteran of pick-and-shovel methods called them when he first saw one in operation. “Mine?” he exclaimed. “Why, that isn’t a mine, it’s an ore farm.” Imagine a vast amphitheatre hollowed out of the ground half a mile wide and a mile and a half, or more, long--these are the dimensions of the Hull-Rust mine at Hibbing--and descending in a series of deep terraces to 120 feet or more from the surface, every terrace, save the first, being dug out of iron ore, and you will get a vague idea of what one of these Mesaba “ore farms” is. The mines are graded toward one end to permit the entrance of trains, and big steam shovels burrow into the soft ore, scooping up, some of them, seventeen tons of ore at each lift, and dumping it into the waiting cars. Under these conditions mining becomes principally a matter of speeding up steam shovels and of transportation. At the beginning of the century no mine had ever shipped 500,000 tons of ore in a season. The Hull-Rust mine has shipped more than that a month, a ton of ore every two seconds, allowing for a ten-hour working day. Exclusive of the mines covered by the now abandoned Hill lease the Corporation has developed more than seventy mines in the Mesaba range. In the Vermilion range it has three; in the Menominee, seven; in the Marquette, twelve; in the Gogebic, thirteen, and in the Baraboo range in southern Wisconsin, one. This does not include twenty-one mines of the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. in the South. In a single year, 1916, the Corporation mined 33,355,169 tons of ore, of which 30,255,616 came from the northern regions. Some idea of the immensity of the Corporation’s mining operations may be obtained from the fact that the excavations involved in “stripping,” or removing the surface earth overburden from the open pit mines, aggregates about a quarter of a billion cubic yards of earth, or more than the excavation made in digging the Panama Canal, in the Mesaba range alone. Total excavation in this range, including mining operations, amounts to about a half a billion cubic yards.