By Aaron J. Brown
The Iron Range is a string of tight knit, working class communities strung along several iron ore formations in northern Minnesota. The hills, trees, and waters of this place have held significance to humans for centuries, but since the end of the Industrial Revolution the Iron Range has been the backbone of American progress, fueling the World War II war machine and the postwar economic expansion with millions of tons of iron ore for steel.
The past weighs heavy on the Iron Range horizon. On the edge of each town lies mine dumps, piles of overburden dug from the ground by five generations of Iron Rangers as they chased fingers of ore through the ground in open pits and underground mine shafts.
Historians describe a sea of ancient lava that covered the earth in its formative years. A bubble rich in minerals, especially in iron, rose to the top and was frozen in rock as the surface cooled into the world that humans came to know. The iron ranges, among them the Mesabi, Cuyuna and Vermilion, formed a great rise in the topography that the Native America called Big Man Hills or sleeping giant, which in the Ojibwa language translates from missabe, the name of the largest iron range. In the prehistoric times indigenous tribes battled over the region’s valuable resources and strategic location. By the 1600s, French voyageurs were trading with the natives for furs. Through the 1800s, Europeans and tribal wars forced people west and loggers moved in to harvest the region’s massive white pines. A gold rush in the 1860s and ‘70s yielded no gold, but iron was discovered and by 1884 mining operations had begun.
The region since has formed as a wholly unique place, an industrial center with no large city, scarred by immigrant strife, labor and political battles that wrought the 20th century. The outcome has been an Iron Range known to the world as the home of the labor movement, floodwall of the national economy and deeply mindful of its history. When natural iron reserves were depleted innovative scientists pioneered the taconite process, allowing lower grade iron ores to be mined and turned to steel. Today taconite remains the Range’s largest industry with other iron ore products being constantly developed. The Iron Range faces many of the same challenges of globalization and demographic change as other places in the country, but charts a future, like its past, that is entire unique. Its people still shape the land and, in turn, become forever changed by the land. The Iron Range’s complex history suggests a compelling future that’s being written every day.
Aaron Brown is the author of “Overburden: Modern Life on the Iron Range,” winner of a 2008 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award. He is a writer, college instructor, and community organizer living on the Iron Range. Read more at his blog MinnesotaBrown.com.
