America was a metals country before it was a country

The Virginia Company put ironworkers on Falling Creek near present-day Richmond in 1619. In March 1622 Powhatan warriors destroyed it, killed twenty-seven people and threw the tools in the creek. Whether it ever produced marketable iron is still not settled.

The works that stuck was Saugus, Massachusetts, from 1646 — a blast furnace, a forge, and a rolling and slitting mill that was one of perhaps a dozen in the entire seventeenth-century world. It ran on 35 skilled men, local farmers doing seasonal work, and Scottish prisoners taken at Dunbar who were paid in food and shelter. It made axes, saws, hoes, nails, pots and kettles — the hardware a settlement cannot exist without.

It failed. Not for want of ore or skill, but in litigation: the manager was removed in 1653, investors sued, workers petitioned for back wages they never got, and ironmaking ended around 1668–1670. Its real output was people. Saugus men — the Leonards, the Jenkses, the Pinnions — went out and started ironworks across the northeast. Pennsylvania built nearly fifty furnaces and forges between 1716 and 1756, and had roughly 200 charcoal furnaces by 1840.

By 1776, on a widely cited estimate of about 30,000 tons a year, the colonies were making roughly as much iron as Britain itself — which would have put them third in the world, behind Sweden and Russia. Parliament had tried to stop exactly that with the Iron Act of 1750, which banned new colonial slitting mills, plating forges and steel furnaces. It was barely enforced: no works is known to have been shut under it, and New Jersey's royal governor visited an illegal slitting mill and left declaring the report groundless.

Congress reserved mineral lands from public sale in 1807 and put them under federal management — the first American mineral policy, a full sixty-five years before the law that still governs hardrock mining today. The War Department took charge of the lead lands in 1821 and issued its first Galena lease in September 1822, with lessees paying the government a royalty in lead itself — one-tenth of what they smelted under the early system, cut to six percent by the 1830s.

It worked, then it broke. Upper Mississippi output went from five million pounds in 1827 to more than thirteen million in 1829. By 1829 over 4,000 miners worked southwestern Wisconsin; the ones who dug into hillsides for shelter got the nickname that stuck to the state. Then smelters simply refused to pay rent, the agency collapsed, and Congress sold the land off in 1846.

Copper came next. Michigan's state geologist described the Keweenaw deposits in 1840; the Ojibwe ceded the land in the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe; the Cliff Mine opened in 1845 and returned $2.5 million to its investors. By 1849 the Keweenaw supplied 96 percent of all American copper, and it remained the leading US copper district until 1887. Before Butte, before Bingham, the wire for the telegraph and the trans-Atlantic cable came out of Michigan.

Michigan iron was found in September 1844 when surveyors watched their compass needles swing wildly. The state marker credits William Burt. It also records that an Ojibwe chief, Marji-Gesick, guided the Jackson prospectors to the ore — a credit routinely dropped from the popular telling.

And gold: North Carolina from 1799, Georgia from 1829, then California. James Marshall picked up a piece of metal on the American River on 24 January 1848. California's non-Indian population went from about 14,000 that year to roughly 223,000 by 1852.

The silver and gold strikes near Virginia City in 1859 produced almost seven million tons of milled ore in twenty years. Virginia City and neighbouring Gold Hill held about 4,000 people in 1862 and some 25,000 by 1874.

What the Comstock really produced was engineering. The ore bodies were too wide and too soft to hold themselves up, so in 1860 Philipp Deidesheimer invented square-set timbering — interlocking timber cubes built up into the void as ore came out. Below the water table the workings flooded with hot water, so Adolph Sutro spent 1869 to 1878 driving a drainage tunnel through the mountain. By the time it was finished the mines were already deeper than the tunnel.

Nevada became a state on 31 October 1864, eight days before the presidential election. The constitution was telegraphed to Washington because the certified copies had not arrived — 16,543 words, seven hours on the wire, $4,313.27.

Then, on 10 May 1872, Grant signed the General Mining Act. It declared all valuable mineral deposits on federal land "free and open to exploration and purchase" by American citizens, at $5 an acre for a lode claim and $2.50 for placer ground. It codified the rules the western camps had already made for themselves. It is still the law. Hardrock mining on federal land is governed by it today — which is why it remains one of the most argued-over statutes in the country, criticised for charging no royalty and defended as the thing that makes high-risk exploration financeable.

On 23 February 1886, a year out of Oberlin, Charles Martin Hall found that molten cryolite would dissolve aluminum oxide — and made his first globules of aluminum with homemade batteries in a woodshed. A French chemist, Paul Héroult, found the same thing the same year, which is why it carries both names.

Smelting aluminum is really the business of turning electricity into metal. It takes about 45,000 BTU per pound, and power can be 40 percent of the cost. So the smelters went wherever the current was cheapest: Niagara Falls in 1896, then the Tennessee Valley, then the Columbia River. Bonneville came online in 1938, Grand Coulee in 1941.

At full stretch the Pacific Northwest ran ten smelters, 11,000 workers and 3,150 average megawatts — 40 percent of US smelting capacity and six to seven percent of the world's. Electricity from Grand Coulee alone made the aluminum for roughly a third of the aircraft built in the Second World War.

That geography is also the explanation for what happened later. The industry was built on federal power at federal prices. When those prices rose, the smelters had nothing else holding them in place.

The postwar decades are when everything peaked, and the dates are worth knowing because they are the benchmark every later number is measured against.

Steel peaked in 1973 at 137 million metric tons, when the United States was the world's leading producer. Bethlehem Steel alone made 23.7 million tons of raw steel that year and shipped 16.3 million tons of finished steel, both company records. Primary aluminum peaked in 1980 at 4.65 million metric tons from more than thirty smelters. Sixteen copper smelters were running in the late 1970s. The National Defense Stockpile, built after Korea, would peak in 1989 holding $9.6 billion of material across 91 line items.

Meanwhile the country poured itself a road system. The Interstate Highway System embodies roughly 1.5 billion metric tons of aggregate, 48 million tons of cement and 6 million tons of steel — more than half of all the sand, gravel and crushed stone used for construction in the United States in 2005, to put it in scale. The Bureau of Public Roads described the excavation in 1961 as moving enough material to bury Connecticut knee-deep in dirt.

Minnesota's ore also ran out and was reinvented. When the natural hematite thinned after the war, Dr. Edward Davis at the University of Minnesota worked out how to mine and pellet taconite — a rock nobody had previously considered ore. Minnesota voters approved the Taconite Amendment in 1964 with 86 percent in favour, and within a decade taconite had replaced direct-shipping ore entirely. It is still what the Mesabi ships today.