Scholar co-authors book on Iron Range

Somehow, through decades of boom and bust--in fact, centuries of such ups and downs--the company now called Cliffs Natural Resources has managed to keep surviving and even succeeding in the iron mining business.

A new book, Iron Will, documents how the company, known first as the Cleveland Iron Mining Co. and later as Cleveland-Cliffs before the change to its current name, made history and became intertwined with U.P. history through the years.

It's written by social sciences professor Terry Reynolds from Michigan Technological University, along with researcher Virginia Dawson. The title, the authors say, is a tribute to the company's "resilience in the face of panics, depressions, strikes, technical bottlenecks and bankrupt partners."

It hasn't all been flush times for Cliffs, as twice in the company's history, the U.S. steel industry collapsed, hurting iron mining hard; the most recent time was just in 2001.

While other books have been written on the company, Iron Will approaches the subject through a scholarly lens, as Reynolds and Dawson examined mountains of documents, correspondence, personal journals and news coverage of the day to put together a picture of the company's history, with the go-ahead from Cliffs to delve into its past as well.

Cliffs, in fact, funded the research, wanting a more complete picture than has been presented in more popular-oriented books.

"We didn't want the company looking over us all the time, and they didn't want a puff piece. So they left us alone," Reynolds says of the research process.

Dawson focused on writing about the more modern era of the company, from 1960 to the present, and covered the company's history in Cleveland from her Ohio home, while Reynolds concentrated on the U.P. and the earlier years of the company.

Writer: Sam Eggleston
Source: Terry Reynolds, Michigan Technological University