Until the Civil War in 1861, the copper mining companies in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan had success only in limited fits and starts. From the 1840's up through the end of the Civil War, hundreds of mining ventures were launched, but only 2 mines would produce anything impressive. These were the Cliff Mine and the Minesota Mine. However, even those two mines didn't turn out enough copper by the late 1860's, and they closed down in 1870.

Other ventures followed, but a strong enough interest for copper just wasn't there, and it wasn't justifiable to launch such an expensive venture into the wilderness of the Upper Peninsula. Companies literally ran themselves bankrupt trying to produce a profit to pay off construction of mine buildings and roads, not to mention clearcutting and the effort of mine workers to build their own homes.

About a decade after the Civil War ended, the telephone had been invented and copper wire was needed to string the nation up with phone service. So mining companies began settling into the Upper Peninsula once again, this time more determined to make a profit from their efforts, and backed this time by national interest in copper.

Calumet & Hecla was one such mining company that evolved to bring forth the leading copper-producing mines in the area, and this is who Frank Zawada worked for.
Frank moved from mine to mine, having to re-apply for work every 6 months to a year. Frank worked at one of the Osceola mines, and at the Calumet & Hecla #6 mine, from what records show.
By 1900, Frank was one amongst an estimated 60,000 people living in Red Jacket and other nearby company towns. Copper Country had been in a boom since the 1880's and appeared to still be going strong.

To get to one's job in the mines, one had to take a man-car with fellow miners down hundreds or thousands of feet below the ground through the mine shaft. This first act alone before starting the day could prove deadly if one was not careful on the man-car.

Figure 1. Man-car at the Osceola Mine, 1896.

Figure 2. Man-car at Quincy #6 shaft.

There were no seatbelts or safety measures put in place. A man would be told by his fellow miners to keep his hands in his lap and keep very still during his ride down into the mine shafts.
If a man or a teenaged boy was tired at the start or end of his shift, he could easily get killed. There was a story about a boy who had his drill sticking out too far and it caught on part of the mine wall, flipping him out of his seat and down hundreds of feet to his death, for example.
Once down in the mines, the danger to one's life and limb did not subside.
In the 1890's up through 1910, Michigan miners only had small paraffin-based fue l lamps to light their way in the mines. Electricity was unheard of in Michigan mines even after 1912. With limited light to work with, accidents could and did happen.

Frank Zawada, copper mine laborer
During his career in the mines, Frank was a timberman, oil hose man, dryman, and lab helper.
Being a timberman is a pretty impressive job, and meant that Frank had some useful skills. From the look of his employment records, Frank seems to have started out his career as a timberman, rather than working lower paying jobs above ground, or pushing a tram car down in the mines.

Inside the mines, a timberman had to haul large pieces of tree trunk lowered down into the mine, and the timberman would cut it to the size of the shaft he was in to support the walls that had been excavated (stoped out). The timber also had to be fastened as overhang (roof) in some areas. Being a timberman came with great responsibility and danger. A timberman had to protect his fellow co-workers against deadly rockfalls from above, so he would lay horizontal timbers, which extended across each passageway under the roof of the mine. The ends of these timbers rested on vertical timbers, which formed walls and doorways within the mine. - see also http://www.maden.hacettepe.edu.tr/dmmrt/dmmrt1233.html#d25886

"As we were passing one level we met a large log about twenty-five feet long and about two feet in diameter, that had just been let down into the shaft to be ta ken to another part of the mine, and used as a support to the walls. A double li ne of men, each with a candle stuck in front of his hat, about twenty in number, were pulling away and struggling along with the piece of wood, like as many ind ustrious ants laboring to carry a kernal of grain through their little mines to the storehouse. There could hardly be a more impressive and singular appearance than these men bearing their lights like stars amid the darkness..." - Mining Ma gazine 4, speaking of the Minesota mine, 1855, p. 189.

Figure 3. A timbered drift in a mine.

Figure 4. Timberers at one of the Calumet & Hecla mines, 1897

In figure 3, "Note the large size of the timbers supporting the roof of the mine . The mines reached a vertical depth of 6000 feet and large timbers were necessa ry to support the large pressures wanting to close the openings. The angle of th e back (roof) follows the dip of the ore bodies in the mines. Trammers would pus h ore carts along the rails between the stopes where the ore was being mined and the shaft (it was cheaper to hire men to push the ore carts rather than using m ules or locomotives)". - http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/collectors_corner/vft/mi3c.htm

The timbermen didn't always have enough time to make the mines look so well crafted, and many times they would just fasten some tree trunks into place and move on to the next stope.

Figure 5. Timbers propped up in a mine.

Figure 6. More timbers in a mine.

The danger of being a timberman was that the roof or walls of the mine could collapse on one as he worked. The newspaper was full of obituaries of local miners, including timbermen, reading with such notices as, "...both timbermen were instantly killed by falling rock at the North Tamarack mine".

Figure 7. Calumet & Hecla #6 at the 62nd level stope, with the timbers cracking under pressure.

Figure 8. Michigan School of Mines (now Michigan Tech) students in the Pabst Mine, Ironwood, Michigan. Note the cracked timber above their heads!

"In the 1850s, 12 men died underground; in the 1860s, 54. The death toll nearly doubled to 106 underground fatalities in the 1870s, and it almost doubled again in the 1880s, when 195 men died. In the 1890s, 284 fatal accidents occurred. Then, early in the twentieth century, the death toll rapidly escalated. Between 1900 and 1909, the mines claimed 511 lives. Starting in 1905 and running through 1911, the region averaged nearly 61 underground deaths per year, or more than one per week." - Cradle to Grave; Life, Work and Death at the Lake Superior Copper Mines, by Larry Lankton, p. 110.

Can you imagine having to go into work each day and wondering if you will be the next person to die on the job that week?

As a matter of fact, Frank worked in Calumet during several tragedies - the first possibly being when 10 men fell 3,300 feet to their deaths in 1893.
The men were riding in a huge rock-hauling bucket to get back above ground after their shift, but the rope pulling the bucket snapped, sending the men to their deaths.

Then, on September 7, 1895, a fire started in the Osceola Mine in the No. 3 Shaft. The fire began in the 27th level (2,700 feet under ground) somewhere around 11:30 a.m..

While the employment record I have found for Frank indicates he began work at Calumet & Hecla as a timberman on January 11, 1896, he had to already have been in Calumet before that time, because he was married and had a son born to him by July 11, 1895.
But was Frank working in the Osceola Mine at the time of the fire?

Since the mines were so full of timber to hold up the walls, fires were bound to happen, and it seemed there were a rash of them in 1895.
However, the tragic part is that when the miners smelled smoke, they did not run! For some reason, they thought they had plenty of time to get out of the mines.

Unfortunately, the fire in the No. 3 Shaft worsened, and the airflow to the other parts of the mine was choked off. The workers who remained asphyxiated to their deaths.

"That more did not escape, doubtless, due to the feeling said to exist among employes underground in the Osceola, that a fire endanging life in the Osceola was not possible; some remarking that there was not timber enough in the mine to make a good bon fire. This feeling of security, it is feared, has largely been responsible for the fearful loss of life, resulting in the rendering of many homes fatherless, and casting a gloom over the entire copper district." - The Native Copper Times, September 10, 1895.

Did Frank know any of those miners? Did any of those miners live in his neighborhood?

Figure 9. Friends and relatives gather outside the Osceola No. 3 shaft as smoke billows from the shaft house. Sept. 7, 1895

Figure 10. Family and friends waiting to identify the dead a fter the Osceola Mine Fire. Osceola mine carpenter shop, Sept. 1895

In general, accidents in the mines claimed one or two people at a time, and this was for a long time accepted as part of the risks people took with this sort of job. An accident or death of a miner just didn't make front page news unless th ere were half-a-dozen or more people involved in one accident, at which point it became 'a tragedy'.

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Last updated 19 September 2004
© Copyright Steph Wades, 1999 - 2022