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MAR>+x APR, 1978 Page 36 ake when their wells glutted the market with oil and brought about ruinously low prices. Given Rockefeller's aversion to owning 0il wells, it seems odd that he should have chosen to buy up iron Ore mines, particularly since most of them looked hopelessly unprofit- able when he bought them. But aside from Standard Oil which demanded all his attention, his investments came about in an informal, almost haphaz- ard manner. Two fellow members of New York's Fifth Avenue Baptist Church invited Rockefekker to buy shares in their northern ore properties in the late 1880s. The banker Colgate Hoyt was also a former Clevelander, and his friend Charles Colby knew the new iron ranges well. It was the Colby Mine that opened up the new Gogebic Range in 1884, near Lake Superior at the Michigan-Wisconsin border. Lake Superior iron mining was spreading beyond the original Marquette Range then. The Menominee Range was opened up west of Green Bay in the late 1870s and the Vermillion Range north The launching of Whaleback barge #101, at Superior, Wisconsin. McDONALD Coll./DOSSIN MUSEUM of Duluth soon afterward. Colgate Hoyt was also president of American Steel Barge Company, and he persuaded Rockefeller to buy shares ti einer toon eli this enter - prise, Hoyt was the patron of Capt. Alexander McDougall, inventor of the whaleback. For many years geography schoolbooks would illustrate these unique ships in order to explain the Great Lakes. The deck of a whaleback was rounded so waves could roll over it harmlessly, without resistence. Cabins and working platforms stood on round turrets out of reach of the wash. The snout-shaped bow and stern inevitably made the ships known as "pigs," or "cigars." The hull was of the same cross section throughout except for these ends, with no con- cessions to sheer. This made whale- backs cheaper to build than other metal hulls. McDougall completely designed the ships down to such fit- tings as anchors and deadlights. Seaworthiness remained the greatest selling point. However, nearly sixty per cent of the three dozen pigs that were to pass through Rockefel-