1921 Duluth & St Louis County MN, Van Brunt.pdf - Garon.us

550 DULUTH AND ST. LOUIS COUNTY
Municipal History
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tracted by
men first were drawn to
possibilities in lumber.
township 57-20,
Some men saw
they were at-
only lun)ber
nothing else meant "bread and butter" to them. Such a cruiser iuust
have been John Day, who, according to a well-authenticated story,
published in the "St. Paul's Despatch," May 20, 1918, stood upon the
site of Hibbing many years before it was settled, and actually knew
that there was iron in the immediate vicinity—knew it without being
in any way excited by the knowledge. The story is:
Twentj'-five or more j-ears ago, John Day, a land cruiser for the lumbaring
interests, stopped one evening, near sundown, to get his bearings. The
country was new to him, and to his companion. Neither had ever been in
that section of Minnesota before.
They decided to take their bearings, and so unslung their compass. But
the instrument was crazy; the needle danced this way and that. It whirled
round and round. It refused to perform its proper duties as a compass.
Wonderstruck, Day and his companion, carefully moved the instrument to
another place. But still it danced and whirled, and whirled and danced.
Never in his long life as a cruiser had old man Day experienced a similai
phenomenon. The two men cast anxious looks at each other, and then at
the sun, which was rapidly sinking in the west. Here they were, lost in the
great north woods, with a crazy compass.
Old man Day cursed softly to himself, and slowly scratching his head
boxed the compass.
"Son" he said, turning a sorrowful face to his companion. "We camp
rig-ht here. Build a tire."
He sat down on a log, lit his pipe and smoked for a while in silence.
Then:
"Son, I reckon I've got it. There's iron round about here somewhere,
and some day some tenderfoot is going to find it. But that ain't your business
nor mine just now, and I don't reckon it'll be of any use in your time or mine,
anyhow; so. after we've had a l)ite, we'll turn in and get away from here tomorrow."
And so they camped that night less than a mile from the mouth of the
great Mahoning open-pit mine, which, until the past few years, was the greatest
ore-producing property in the world.
Today, on the spot where old man Day stood, in impenetrable wilderness,
stdnds the city of Hibbing.
Day was not the only man who, in the eighties, knew that there
was iron along the Mesabi range. But there was little activity in
logging, or in mining exploration, until Longyear cut a road "westward
as far as Nashwauk." in 1891. The Wright and Davis logging
operations had been proceeding since the late eighties slowly northward
along their logging railroad, which started "at what was called
Mississippi Landing, across from the old Duluth and Winnipeg railroad
at Swan River Junction, eight miles east of the Mississippi."
The railroad, however, did not reach the vicinity of Hibbing until
1894, according to Joseph Moran, who was a cruiser for the Wright
and Davis syndicate at the time. And there was probably very little
logging done until the railroad was near, whereas hot-footed on the
heels of Longyear caine mining explorers, in 1891. So that after the
"tote" road had been cut through (and one seems to have been cut
through all the way from Mountain Iron, where mining explorations
were feverishly pursued at that time) there seems little doubt that
logging became of secondary importance, excepting to the lumbermen.
It interested the mining men only so far as logging was
necessary to clear the timber from the land they wished to explore and
develop. Yet, while mining was the direct and lumbering the incidental
activity in the first years of Hibbing, the place was to an
extent a lumber camp for some time after Frank Hibbing began "to
explore for iron, late in 1891, or early in 1892. Soon, the Hibbing
,