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Chapter two continues taconite's story into the mid-1960s when Minnesota added a taconite amendment to the state constitution. The amendment prevented taconite taxes from rising disproportionately to other business taxes. The amendment dispute cleaved Minnesota's DFL Party throughout the first half of the 1960s. Eventually, the forces in favor of the amendment won, but it set the stage for future arguments against corporate taxation that continue today. Also woven throughout this chapter are examples of decline on the Iron Range during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chapter one describes how taconite technology was offered as a painless fix for the declining region in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on engineer Edward W. Davis, known as “Mr. Taconite,” this chapter describes the decades of work required to perfect low-grade taconite ore milling and shift the iron ore industry from older hematite mines to new taconite mines, which required work in politics and marketing as well as engineering.

Chapter three describes the major pollution lawsuit that affected the mining region, Reserve Mining Company v. USA. I argue that the trial must be understood within the context of taconite's development as a technological fix for decline on the Iron Range. Taconite's technological and engineering feats were only possible because they shifted costs onto the environment. When those costs could no longer be ignored—as when spreading taconite tailings began discoloring Lake Superior—people reassessed industrial development. For many miners, the case was also their first glimpse of the new environmental movement that would challenge their livelihood.

Iron was a key component of steel, and steel was essential for industrial and military purposes. Postwar concerns about iron depletion led American mining interests to promote technologies and tax incentives to exploit taconite ore bodies. As the Reserve Mining case shows, taconite required expensive new processing technologies to be profitable, while creating new environmental consequences, particularly concerning finely ground tailings and the use of water. As taconite iron ore mining boomed in the Lake Superior basin in the three decades after World War II, faith in cooperative pragmatism began to clash with new industrial developments and new understandings of pollution mobility.

In 2011, a company named Gogebic Taconite (GTAC) formed in order to develop the largest open-pit mine in the world—just upstream of the Bad River Band’s reservation on Lake Superior. Owned by Cline Resources Development (a company largely focused on coal), GTAC announced that, even without experience in iron mining, it would mine and process Wisconsin’s taconite ore body to take advantage of Asia’s building and steel commodities boom. The mine would have been sited just upstream of the reservation boundary, and the waters flowing out of the mine site would have contaminated water, fish, and Indigenous communities living downstream. After a multi-year battle, the tribe managed to stop the mine.