great industrial prosperity, is an offense which the popular mind
associates almost exclusively with the Standard Oil Company, yet
the Carnegie fortune, as well as that of John D. Rockefeller,
received an artificial stimulation of this kind.

Though incomparably the greatest of the American steel companies,
the Carnegie Steel Company by no means monopolized the field. In
forty years, indeed, an enormous steel area had grown up,
including western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois,
practically all of it drawing its raw materials from those same
teeming ore lands in the Lake Superior region. Johnstown,
Youngstown, Cleveland, Lorain, Chicago, and Joliet, became
headquarters of steel production almost as important as
Pittsburgh itself. Two entirely new steel kingdoms, each with its
own natural reservoirs of ore, grew up in Colorado and Alabama.
The Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, which possessed apparently
inexhaustible mineral lands in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New
Mexico, and California, itself produces not far from three
million tons a year, almost half the present production of Great
Britain. The Alabama steel country has developed in even more
spectacular fashion. Birmingham, a hive of southern industry
placed almost as if by magic in the leisurely cotton lands of the
South, had no existence in 1870, when the Pittsburgh prosperity
began. In the Civil War, the present site of a city with a
population of 140,000 was merely a blacksmith shop in the fork of
the roads. Yet this district has advantages for the manufacture
of steel that have no parallel elsewhere. The steel companies
which are located here do not have to bring their materials
laboriously from a distance but possess, immediately at hand,
apparently endless store of the three things needful for making