open cars, neatly deposits its booty. It is not surprising that
ore can be produced at lower cost in the United States than even
in those countries where the most wretched wages are paid.
Evidently this one iron field, to say nothing of others already
worked, gives a permanence to our steel industry.

Not only did America have the material resources; what is even
more important, she had also the men. American industrial history
presents few groups more brilliant, more resourceful, and more
picturesque than that which, in the early seventies, started to
turn these Minnesota ore fields into steel--and into gold. These
men had all the dash, all the venturesomeness, all the
speculative and even the gambling instinct, needed for one of the
greatest industrial adventures in our annals. All had sprung from
the simplest and humblest origins. They had served their business
apprenticeships as grocery clerks, errand boys, telegraph
messengers, and newspaper gamins. For the most part they had
spent their boyhood together, had played with each other as
children, had attended the same Sunday schools, had sung in the
same church choirs, and, as young men, had quarreled with each
other over their sweethearts. The Pittsburgh group comprised
about forty men, most of whom retired as millionaires, though
their names for the most part signify little to the present-day
American. Kloman, Coleman, McCandless, Shinn, Stewart, Jones,
Vandervoort--are all important men in the history of American
steel. Thomas A. Scott and J. Edgar Thompson, men associated
chiefly with the creation of the Pennsylvania Railroad, also made
their contributions. But three or four men towered so
preeminently above their associates that today when we think of
the human agencies that constructed this mighty edifice, the