One hundred miles north and west of Duluth lies the Iron Range, North America's largest iron ore region, made up of the Vermillion, Mesabi, and Cuyuna ranges. The Vermillion, extending from Tower to Ely, was the first in Minnesota to ship iron ore, beginning in 1884 at Tower-Soudan, where vertical deposits required underground mining techniques. The Mesabi Range, discovered in 1890 and stretching nearly one hundred miles from Grand Rapids to Babbitt, used open pit mining because its iron lay in shallow basins near the surface. The Cuyuna Range, between Brainerd and Crosby-Ironton, shipped its first ore in 1911 and featured both open pit and underground mining, with high grade manganese ores. More than 400 mines in Minnesota produced over three billion metric tons of ore that moved east across the Great Lakes on ore boats and were used to make the steel that built America's industries, transportation systems, and many everyday goods. Many mines later closed, and only those on the Mesabi Range continued operating, producing taconite, a lower-grade iron ore that required processing before shipment. The Soudan Mine, where the first ore was mined, became a state park after closing in 1962, and since 1963 visitors have gone more than twenty-five hundred feet underground to see how miners extracted ore at such depths. Across the Iron Range, visible remains of this mining past endure, and immigrants from many parts of Europe forged a regional identity through work in the mines and boarding houses and through frequent struggles with mining companies, leaving a fighting spirit that remains among the people known as Rangers.