Vermilion Iron Range

The Vermilion Range, with its distinctive hard and high-grade iron ore deposits, looms large in the history of the mining industry in Minnesota. It was the first range to open (1884) and also the first to cease commercial mining operations (1967) due to changes in the steel-making process and the rise of cheaper-to-produce taconite on the nearby Mesabi Range. After mining ended, the area’s protected wilderness spaces—including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—took center stage in a new regional economy based on tourism and conservation.

Millions of years ago, the land known as the Vermilion Range (between the present-day cities of Tower and Ely) was covered by an inland sea. Volcanic rock decomposition produced rich iron deposits of inter-bedded chert, magnetite, and hematite that later defined the region. By the mid-1700s, Ojibwe people lived there, especially around Onamuni Zaaga’iganiin (the lake with the sunset glow, later also called Lake Vermilion). When French traders arrived, they called the surrounding forests Bois Forte (Big Woods) after the local Ojibwe, who called themselves Zagaakwaandagowininiwag (men of the thick-fir woods).

The Bois Forte Ojibwe knew about the minerals in their homeland and shared that knowledge with the Europeans who visited during the fur trade era (ca. 1679–1854). In 1849, Minnesota’s territorial governor, Alexander Ramsey, called for a road to be built from St. Paul to Lake Superior to open up northeast Minnesota’s rich mineral lands to trade.

In 1866, state geologist Henry Eames confirmed the discovery of gold, silver, and iron deposits in Bois Forte, and the Vermilion Gold Rush began. Miners and settlers cut through woods and swamps using Ojibwe travel routes from Duluth to Lake Vermilion. Minnesota’s governor, Stephen Miller, asked the Commissioner of Indian affairs to remove the people of Bois Forte from the potentially valuable land around the lake, forcing them to move to a new reservation at Nett Lake. By May of 1866, Winston City was established on the south shore of Pike Bay with a sawmill, fourteen houses, mines, and three stamp mills. When the gold never materialized, this settlement became the area’s first ghost town.

American interests in the Vermilion Range shifted to iron ore as Pennsylvania lawyer and businessman Charlemagne Tower funded an expedition in 1875. He acquired extensive lands in the area, bought the Duluth and Iron Range Railway, and founded Minnesota’s first commercial iron mine, spurring the growth of his namesake city (Tower). More than sixty other iron mining companies incorporated in Minnesota between 1887 and 1889, most of them on the Vermilion Range.

Most of the wealthier people on the Vermilion Range—professionals, business owners, mining executives—initially lived in Tower. Soudan was intended to serve as a residential location for workers. There were no commercial establishments; beyond housing there were a mine hospital, a school, churches, a club house, and a Finnish temperance hall. Ely became the largest community on the Vermilion Range, with a population that peaked in 1930 at 6,150 citizens.

Alongside the mining industry, logging shaped the local economy and landscape. Commercial logging began on Rainy Lake in the 1880s, and the first sawmill opened in Tower in 1884. The Knox Lumber Company incorporated in 1893 and focused operations east of Ely. Within two years, 300 people had formed the settlement of Winton next to the sawmill running on Fall Lake. Dams were constructed on Rainy and Namakan Lakes in 1910, launching the pulpwood industry.

After World War I, the workforce in the mines on the Vermilion Range had declined significantly. Electrifying and mechanizing underground mining had addressed labor shortages during the war itself and now served as a cost-saving measure for companies. Soudan was permanently mechanized in 1924, making the labor of individual miners less important.

Travel and outdoor recreation boomed in post-World War II America, with rising incomes and greater leisure time for the growing middle class. Federal legislation going back to 1902 had supported protecting large sections of land in and adjacent to the Vermilion Range district. Tourism near the Superior National Forest became a vital and growing source of income. By 1964, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) had received additional federal protection, while the Soudan Mine in Tower had ceased operations and been converted into a state park. The last mine on the Vermilion Range closed in 1967.

Economic officials in Ely tried attracting new industry to town while simultaneously adapting the area for a new service and tourism economy. Wages in the service industry, however, did not equal that of mining. Environmental regulations (such as the 1949 prohibition of air travel into the boundary waters) aided some aspects of the tourism industry while styming others. By the 1970s, the perception that urban environmentalists from the Twin Cities did not care about local livelihoods was well established. The 1964 Wilderness Act and related efforts were referred to as “class legislation” by Stan Pechaver, secretary of the Ely Chamber of Commerce.

By the early twenty-first century, tourism influenced by nature conservation was at the heart of the area’s economy. The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa ran a successful resort, casino, and golf course at Fortune Bay, which was one of the area’s largest employers in Tower. The Dorothy Molter Museum, the International Wolf Center, and Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park served as principal attractions surrounded by protected lands in the Superior National Forest, BWCAW, and Voyageurs National Park.

In 2012, Twin Metals Minnesota sought to renew mineral leases on copper and nickel mining in the Rainy River basin, renewing a generations-old debate about who has the right to use the lands surrounding the Vermilion Range. On one side, new mining ventures promised good-paying jobs to a community in need of them. On the other, they threatened to pollute water in federally protected lands and the Bois Forte reservation, as well as discourage nature-based tourism. Local communities were divided over the prospect, and attempts to build a new mine failed to clear regulatory hurdles.