which would have been easy to develop. Actually, of course, there is a city there, but it is not Duluth but its small sister city of Superior, of which greater things were once expected than ever were expected of Duluth. But an easy way out was not for the settlers of Duluth : they demanded challenge and obstacles to overcome to make their victory more glorious. Officially, Duluth is 26 miles long, 2 miles wide, having grown up and back along the hillsides. In terms of area, since World War II it has been larger than Boston or Pittsburgh. The natives describe it simply: 26 miles long, 2 miles wide, and 1 mile high. And yet, one of the fascinations of the city is that one never knows when a bear will come by for breakfast: in the 1950s, 84% of St. Louis County was still in its natural virgin state, and that natural state extended up to the very boundaries of the city.

In this city of Duluth, 50% of the more than 100,000 inhabitants are of Scandinavian descent, and the 1950 statistics list more than 20% of them as having been born in Norway, Sweden or Finland. For the Finns, Duluth was originally a gateway - like Red Wing, and at a later period Minneapolis - through which they arrived in Minnesota; however, Duluth was a place where they stayed no longer than necessary before moving on to whatever their real destinations were: construction work on the Crow Wing railroad, farming in the New York Mills area and the Dakotas, or lumberjacking in the camps of northern Minnesota.

Reports of the first Finns to have used Duluth simply as a gateway are not precise. Ilmonen mentions that a few Finns came to Duluth as early as 1868, "but they did not settle down to stay in that unruly town," while John A. Mattinen, on the basis of interviews made for a study, claims that the first Finn to come to Duluth was one Matti Moilanen, from Puolanka, in 1869. An unpublished WPA study, on the other hand, claims that the Finns arrived in Duluth in 1870, when a few fishermen first came to "Minnesota Point," the natural breakwater within Duluth's present harbor area, and that only after that event did the Finns of whom Ilmonen and Mattinen make mention arrive at Duluth from Midway. Regardless of who was first, in very short order large numbers of Finns began to move through the Duluth gateway. Mention has already been made of the group of some 200 Finns who came in 1873, direct from Finland to Duluth, where they then dispersed. And that same year, it was reported from the London office of the Northern Pacific Railroad that another

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