The following text may have been generated by Optical Character Recognition, with varying degrees of accuracy. Reader beware!

MAR +x APR, 1978 Page 42 new stiee] ships. In 1896 Cleveland- Cliffs had four steel steamers, and M. A. Hanna Company controlled ten. The largest fleet among the mining firms belonged to Minnesota Iron Company, second only to Rockefeller among mining enterprises and active on the Vermillion Range. In 1896 its Minnesota Steamship Company owned nine steel steamers and five barges. Inga class «by, 1tselt, of course, was McDougall's fleet of whalebacks. In 1896 its fleet numbered nine steamers and twenty-four barges. The year before, the Cleveland mining and ore marketing firm of Pickands, Mather & Company had taken over man- agement of the whalebacks. Pickands- Mather also managed the Minnesota fleet. The firm also owned three of the largest lake freighters, a steel barge and several wooden ships, the start of today's Interlake fleet. Rockefeller started with no ships of his own to carry his Masabi ore. Whaleback JOHN ERICKSSON with an unidentitied Whaleback barge in tow. He had investments in the whaleback fleet, of course, but they weren't his. One night late in 1895, Rocke- feller made one of his rare personal interventions in his ore business. He asked his old Cleveland friend Samuel Mather of Pickands-Mather to call at his New York townhouse just before dinner. Rockefeller announced that he wished to build a dozen of the largest lake ships to carry his ore, and he asked Mather to nego- tiate with the lake shipyards on his behalf. Mather replied that since he was "in the ore carrying trade himself, he had no desire to encourage us to go into it," Rockefeller recalled in his memoirs. "We explained to him that as we had made this large in- vestment, it seemed to us to be necessary for the protection of our interests to control our own lake Carriers, so we had decided to mine, that ship and market the ore; we McDONALD Coll./DOSSIN MUSEUM