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supported the Merritts in rebuilding their empire as thé*Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mining Company. To this company in 1884 the Merritts entrusted their railroad and docks and their principal Mesabi mining companies. Rockefeller contributed two million dollars and his Gogebic Range holdings. In the lingering depression the Merritts remained in- solvent, and they sold most of their interests to Rockefeller in 1895. The Merritts had one other patron in a spearate Mesabi mining venture. This was Henry Oliver, a minor steel man of Pittsburgh who had been a boyhood chum of Andrew Carnegie. He was in Minneapolis as a delegate to renominate Harrison in the Republi- can National Convention of 1892 when he learned of the Mesabi riches. He quickly threw over politics and paid the Merritts $5,000 for a partner- ship in an Oliver Mining Company. He went home to dig up more capital. Carnegie wasn't interested. He had TELESCOPE Page 39 lost money on the Marquette Range years before, and he still regarded mines as Rockefeller once thought of oil wells. "If there is any depart- ment of business which offers no inducement, it is ore," he scoffed. "It never has been very profitable, and the Massaba is not the last great deposit that Lake Superior is to reveal." Over Carnegie's forebod- ing objections, Oliver persuaded the Carnegie Company just to lend him half a million dollars in return for what became a five-sixths interest in Oliver Mining Company. Journalists were soon predicting a frightful collision between Carnegie and Rockefeller over control of the whole process from the iron mine to the steel mill. But for the moment there was no such confrontation. In late 1896 Rockefeller and Carnegie startled the mining and steelmaking industry with an unthinkable joining of their interests in an Agreement. Rockefeller ore and ships would make A Pesha photo of the ROBERT FULTON, probably in the St. Clair River. McDONALD Coll./DOSSIN MUSEUM