Calm or Conflicted? Labor-Management Relations on Michigan's Iron Ranges in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Source: Charles K. Hyde, The Upper Peninsula of Michigan: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office/Historic American Engineering Record, 1978), xvi. Upper Peninsula Mining Districts Calm or Conflicted? Labor-Management Relations on Michigan's Iron Ranges in the Nineteenth Century by Terry S. Reynolds On Tuesday, July 11, 1865, Frank Mills, superintendent of the Cleveland Iron Mining Company, cowered in his office near the company's mining pits outside the Upper Peninsula village of Ishpeming, scribbling a panicked, disorganized, rambling letter to J. C. Morse, the company's agent in the nearby port city of Marquette. Mills described himself as "not in a proper frame of mind," for the company's men had gone on strike and the "state of things is frightful. They are just passing the office & all have a club (I should judge 150 men) on their way to the New York Mine."1 Nearly thirty years later on July 3, 1894, at Ironwood, Michigan, the Norrie Mining Company, represented by fifteen nonstriking workers who were protected by fifteen deputies, attempted to use steam shovels to load iron ore from a company stockpile, only to be surrounded by a mob of around fifteen hundred striking miners. A mining captain, seeking to determine if there was an escape route, was hit by a rock. He rolled down an embankment and was fired upon as he lay at the bottom, which caused both sides to begin shooting. No one was killed, but six men were wounded; one man had part of his ear shot off, and another had a bullet furrow across his forehead. Within five minutes, deputies I would like to thank both Marcus Robyns and the staff at Northern Michigan University Archives for their assistance in the opening stages of research for this article and the referees who read the manuscript in its early stages. In addition, portions of my research were undertaken with the assistance of a Faculty Scholarship Committee Grant from Michigan Technological University, a Grace H. Magnaghi Visiting Research Fellowship Grant from Northern Michigan University Archives, and a Visiting Research Fellowship Grant from the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I thank these institutions for their support. Finally, Iwould like to thank John Beck for reviewing an earlier version of this article. 1F. P. Mills to J. C. Morse, July 11, 1865, item 2770, MS 86-100, Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Mining Company Papers, Archives of Michigan regional depository (hereafter AM NMU), Northern Michigan University, Marquette. Michigan Historical Review 33:2 (Fall 2007): 1-45 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 2 Michigan Historical Review il ait Conflict on Michigan }s IronRanges 3 and nonstriking workmen were "obliged to fly for their lives." The miners then marched to downtown Ironwood, threatening to hang both the people who had attempted to operate the steam shovels and the hastily deputized officers who had tried to protect them. These events prompted Gogebic County's sheriff to ask Michigan's governor to send militia companies from outside the area to restore law and order. When the militiamen arrived on July 4, they were met at the station by strikers whom the soldiers had to force back with fixed bayonets.2 These images of labor-management conflict in the iron mines of Michigan's Upper Peninsula certainly fit the general picture painted by most historians of growing levels of labor violence in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.3 However, a number of commentators from that era paint amuch different picture of labor-management relations on Michigan's iron ranges. In 1894, a few months before the Ironwood strike, Charles H. Morse, Michigan's Commissioner of Labor Statistics, declared that no mining region in the United States "was more prosperous or contented" than Michigan's kon-ore-mining region. He noted "the almost entire absence of strikes or labor dissensions" as "conclusive proof that the relation between employer and employe [sic]was agreeable even unto cordiality."4 A decade later Horace Stevens, a special agent for the state Bureau of Labor who was investigating Michigan's Upper Peninsula mining regions, asserted...