Fifth Street, looking North. Red Jacket, Michigan c.1910
View of Calumet & Hecla Company town
The town of Calumet in the Keweenaw peninsula of Michigan was settled
in 1864, during the American Civil War.
Calumet was originally founded under the name of "Red Jacket" - named
for a Native American Chief of the Seneca tribe.
The name "Calumet" was actually used by the nearby town of Laurium,
Michigan, until 1895, so Calumet as we know it today was not legally
named as such until 1929.
The town of "Red Jacket" grew because of the copper mines in the area.
It was incorporated as a town in 1867; three years after it was first
settled.
"The period following the Civil War was one of great difficulty for the majority of the mines, and yet in these years came the discovery and development of one of the richest mines in the world, the Calumet & Hecla.
The demand and price for copper decreased following the war, closing most of the smaller and newer mines. Most of the fissure mines (those relying solely on mass and barrel copper for their production) were also unable to sustain themselves, and investors were slowly realizing the importance of the amygdaloid and conglomerate veins (and also the large amount of capital required to open these). But due to a nationwide depression following the stock market crash of 1873, financing became more difficult. The great C&H mine almost did not make it through its early years of 1866-1870." - Copper Country Reflections - Postwar years 1865-1880
It seems though that the copper mines were mineral-rich, and the
Red Jacket-based Calumet & Hecla Mining Company evolved and
produced about half of the USA's copper in the 1870s and 1880s.
In addition to copper mining and smelting, this area of the Keweenaw peninsula
also supported the dairy industry and truck farming.
By 1900, Red Jacket and other nearby company towns had a population of
about 60,000.
Fifth Street, looking North. Red Jacket, Michigan c.1910 |
View of Calumet & Hecla Company town |
In the Michigan copper country around the turn of the century, the giant corporation Calumet and Hecla Mining Co. also created ethnic conflict. In 1904, two-fifths of the population in Houghton County were foreign-born; one recent feature of this group was the comparatively large representation of non-English-speaking people. Economic historian William Gates writes: "The mining companies encouraged this new immigration development in the hope that language barriers would forestall the growth of unionism and that the new workers would prove to be easily manageable." During a strike led in 1913 by the Western Federation of Miners, "Calumet and Hecla imported about 1,600 men - an effort being made to obtain nationalities different from those in the Copper Country." On the iron country of both Michigan and Minnesota, writes Vernon Jensen, "a conscious policy of mixing nationality groups appeared destined to keep workers divided." On the iron range the percentage of foreign born ran as high as eighty-five percent, mainly from Finland, Italy, and the Slavic countries. - A Short History of American Capitalism - by Meyer Weinberg
Aided by the Montana-based union The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), the strikers fought against local law enforcement, strike breakers, and even the Michigan National Guard. Months of vandalism, terror, harassment and violence followed. - Copper Mine Strike of 1913-1914The strike began on July 23, 1913, and three days later, a six-foot, two-inch Annie Klobuchar Clemenc stepped onto the strike scene. Everyone knew her as Big Annie. She carried a ten-foot-long staff which held the American flag. This woman was to be the glue that held the strikers together through the long months that would follow.
Two weeks before the strike began Houghton County Sheriff James Cruse received secret approval from C&H gen- eral manager MacNaughtonwho also sat on the Houghton County Board of Supervisorsto hire professional strike- breakers. Cruse called in the Waddell-Mahon Company whose staff of strong-arm men, thugs and murders came from the tenements of New York City. The Waddies, as they were known, openly carried guns. - Standing Tall With Big Annie
On August 14, two Waddies and several of Cruses deputies killed two strikers in a shooting spree at a boardinghouse in Seeberville, south of Calumet. Warrants were issued for the suspects arrest but Cruse made no effort to track them down. Annie, carrying her trademark American flag, led the funeral procession of five thousand people. - Standing Tall With Big AnnieI read that ten Croatians were tried for murder following the death of the deputy sheriff (West Virginia History). Perhaps this is in relation to the shooting spree on August 14, 1913?
...In early December, tensions were raised even higher in the Keweenaw. Two nonstrikers had been killed at a boarding- house in Painesdale, south of Calumet. Each side in the labor dispute accused the other of the murders.
It was in this atmosphere that the WFM [Western Federation of Miners] Womens Auxiliary No. 15, led by Annie, planned a Christmas party for the strikers children. Families had suffered during the almost five-month-long strike. Many Calumet businesses had with- drawn strikers credit privileges and the WFM never made good on its promise of strike relief pay. C&H was raising the strikers rent, cutting off their utilities and evicting those who refused to work.
On Christmas Eve, children and their parents turned out in droves for the party in the second-floor ballroom at Calumets Italian Hall. A union card was required for entrance to the party, but by midafternoon almost seven hundred people had arrived and identification checks became impossible.[The Citizens Alliance was a group organized by the Calumet & Hecla mine to show support for the mines, and opposition to the strikers. They set up roadblocks so that the strikers couldn't reach the mines, among other things.]
The party was at a feverish pitch - so many children and so much noise.
Then a buzz went through the crowd. Had someone yelled Fire!? Some people swore they saw a man dressed all in black with his collar turned up and a hat pulled low, yelling Fire! and motioning the crowd toward the narrow stairwell that led to the street. Some witnesses claimed the man was wearing a white Citizens Alliance button.
But there was no fire in Italian Hall. Annie tried to calm the crowd. The way the women and children were screaming, it was almost impossible to make your voice heard, one miner recalled. Terror and panic reigned. The children turned from the stage and headed for the stairwell. Frantic, people pushed, stumbled and fell down the stairs.Another amazing account of the copper mine strikes can be found at http://www.hu.mtu.edu/vup/Strike/.
An alarm was sounded in Calumet. Rescuers who opened the doors to the stairwells street-level entrance found a tangle of bodies piled five feet high. Even as rescuers arrived, chil- dren and adults were throwing themselves head-first into the blocked stairwell. When the stairwell was finally cleared sev- enty-four people were dead, all but eleven were children. The only way you could breathe, one survivor recalled, was to push yourself off the wall with all your might and then quickly suck in a breath of air before the force of the other bodies pushed your face back against the wall. Two young fathers died in the stairwell but saved their infant chil- dren by holding them high above the crush of bodies. The magnitude of the loss was staggering. On Christmas Day, as the families were still in the early stages of shock and despair, WFM president Charles Moyer was beaten in his Hancock hotel room, shot, dragged through town and thrown onto a Chicago-bound train. The perpetrators, who openly wore white Citizens Alliance buttons, told him never to return to the Keweenaw.
...Thousands of miners left to find work in the Detroit auto industryHenry Ford was paying his workers an unheard-of five dollars a day. Under pressure from the feder- al government, C&H offered striking workers an eight-hour work day at three dollars per daybut refused to replace the widow-maker. On April 13, 1914, the strikers voted to return to the mines. - Standing Tall With Big Annie
References
wikipedia.org - Calumet, Michigan
wikipedia.org - Laurium, Michigan
A Short History of American Capitalism - by Meyer Weinberg
West Virginia History Mentions the 1913 strike in Calumet, MI
Calumet: Polish Miners In Michigan
Ancestral Cemeteries
The Italian Hall Disaster
The Italian Hall Disaster - another site
Copper Country Reflections
Finnish history
Houghton County MIGenWeb
The Finnish of Houghton Co. and the U.P.
Standing Tall With Big Annie
Copper Country Heroine
Documentaries about the Italian Hall Disaster
Other notes
Michael Novak, The Guns of Lattimer: The True Story of a Massacre and a Trial, August 1897-March 1898 (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 75-76;
Greene, Slavic Community on Strike, 137-39; and Prpic, Croatian Immigrants, 156-58.
For other notorious and bloody miner-operator confrontations of the period which were far worse and quite different from Farmington, see Paul M. Angle, Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962) on the Herrin, Illinois massacre (1922) and Long, Where the Sun Never Shines, 91-92, for Ludlow, Colorado (1914). - West Virginia History