Transportation in Its Relation to the Mining Industry.

BY DR. JAMES DOUGLAS, OF NEW YORK.

Nothing can express more emphatically the immense importance of mining to the railroads and of railroads to mining than the fact that of the total traffic of the United States, 53.09 per cent was in 1906 the product of the mines. We are supposed to be a great agricultural country, but from the table which I have copied from the Statistics of Railroads of the United States of the Interstate Commerce Commission, we see that agriculture supplies to the railroads only 8.56 per cent of its traffic, the animal industry 2.32 per cent, and forestry only 11.24 per cent. Nor is this a purely accidental occurrence, for if we go back to the year 1900 we find that the figures correspond by only a slight difference with these. In 1906 there was one-half of one per cent more manufactures carried by the railroads, and nearly one-half of one per cent less, as the product of the mines. Recollect that these figures do not include metals in manufactured form derived from minerals. The following is the summary showing freight traffic movement by class of commodity, originating on lines of reporting roads.

This interdependence of the transportation and mining industries has been brought about by the great distances which separate the largest deposits of iron and other metals from the fuels necessary to their reduction. If we go

back to the first industrial statistical records published in the census of 1840, we find that in that year there were 286,903 tons of pig iron made in 1804 furnaces located all over the inhabited country, from Maine to Minnesota, the average production per furnace per day being only 2,170 pounds. At that time the 2,818 miles of railroad built in the United States were confined to the eastern and southern States. There were, therefore, no means of transportation except over bad roads from place to place, and wherever there was a little iron ore, some water power, and wood to make charcoal, there a little furnace, with sometimes a forge, was erected for the purpose of making iron for local use.

Now all this is changed. There are now in blast less than one half the number of furnaces that existed then, say, on June 30, 1906, 323 furnaces, to enable us to produce in 1906 25,307,191 tons of pig iron. But this large figure of finished product does not express the service which the railroads extend to the iron interests, for this tremendous quantity of iron could not be made if adequate facilities were not provided at a cheap rate for the transportation of ore to the fuel, or of fuel to the ore, and of the finished product to the market. The quantity of iron ore mined during 1906 was about 55,000,000 short tons, of which 40,000,000 tons came from Lake Superior, and most of this was transported a thousand miles to Pittsburg for reduction, simply because the best coal for metallurgical purposes is in the neighborhood of your good city. In round numbers it takes two tons of iron ore to make one ton of pig, and this is made with one ton of coke. As long as the market for the ton of pig is where the coke is made, the iron ore will be shipped for treatment to the coke and the market; but were the market to be at or near the iron mines, it would be eminently more advantageous to ship the fuel to the ore. In any case the ore and the fuel are so widely separated, there must be three tons of freight moved to make one ton of pig iron, even out of such extraordinarily rich ores as those of Lake Su perior.

The East affords, however, no longer the exclusive market for pig and the products of pig iron which it did. The

market is shifting westward, and westward it will continue steadily to shift, and the centers of trade will move westward with the movement of population in that direction. In response to this inevitable condition, the United States Steel Corporation is building at Gary, Indiana, on Lake Michigan, the largest iron and steel works ever erected. But even they are not built upon a coal bed; and therefore the volume of crude material handled will have to be the same, though the finished product will be nearer the source of consumption. On the accompanying maps the principal regions where coal and iron are mined are indicated, though not their relative importance. It will be seen that in the neighborhood of the largest iron deposits-those of Lake Superior-there is no fuel, but in carrying the Lake ores to either the shores of Lake Erie, to Buffalo, Cleveland and elsewhere, or to Pittsburgh, they are carried to points in the vicinity of coking coal. In carrying them to South Chicago, the new works at Gary, Indiana, or even to Joliet, they are carried to another fuel yielding area.

But when you look to the southern states, which made between 13 and 14 per cent of the total pig iron product of the country in 1906, you will see that the iron and the fuel are in close juxtaposition. There are even instances where, within eight miles of one another, coal, iron and the necessary limestone for flux are mined. Similar conditions exist in limited districts elsewhere, as in Bradford County, Penn., but there the ore exists in limited quantities. Nowhere, except in the southern states, does iron ore exist in sufficient quantities near to coal to influence the price of the metal and eliminate transportation. But in the southern iron regions, as a counterbalance to this advantage, the iron is of a lower grade, besides being of poorer quality, and the coke is inferior, both in structure and in ash contents, to the best cokes of Pennsylvania and the neighboring states.

The westward movement of population, and of the market for all commodities, has as yet created only one large iron manufacturing center within the Rocky Mountain region. The Colorado Fuel & Iron Company's furnaces and mills at Pueblo turn out about two per cent of the country's

total product. They are built nearer the coal than thei iron supplies, which come partly from southern New Mexico, Wyoming and distant parts of Colorado. Here again the railroad is an essential factor to their very existence.

In the case of the only other metal in which this country pre-eminently leads the world, namely, copper, the met

The Distribution of Copper in the United States.

allurgical conditions are different. While the average iron ores of the United States contain nearly fifty per cent of metal, the average copper ores contain only about 21⁄2 per cent. And therefore, to make the 900,000,000 pounds of copper a year which we turn out, there are mined about 11,250,000 tons of ore, or about one-fourth the quantity of iron ore mined. From this point of view the copper industry does not bear an insignificant proportion to the iron industry. The small amount of only fifty pounds of copper to the ton of ore is recovered partly though mechanical and partly through metallurgical processes, which require fuel for generating power and fuel for reducing the ore to metal. In both cases the quantity of ore to be handled, namely, forty tons of ore to make one ton of metal, necessitates treatment at or near the mines; and therefore inevitably the transportation of fuel to the ore instead of the transportation of ore to the fuel. In the case of the ores of

Lake Superior, which average less than 212 per cent, the fuel, both for concentration and for smelting, is transported 700 or 800 miles from Ohio and Pennsylvania. Arizona looks to Colorado or New Mexico for its fuel supply, which has to be hauled on an average 700 miles. The Montana copper mines find an inferior fuel nearer home, which supplies most of their needs, and in that respect they enjoy an advantage