Christmas Eve in the Copper Country

The children came in from the cold on December twenty-fourth, nineteen thirteen. They had been waiting for this party all week. Their fathers had been on strike against the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company for five months, and the Western Federation of Miners had organized a Christmas celebration in the second-floor hall of the Italian Hall on Red Jacket Road. Someone had put up a tree. There was music.

Then someone shouted "Fire!"

There was no fire. The room erupted into panic. Seventy-three people were crushed in the stairwell trying to reach the exits. Fifty-nine of them were children.

The copper miners of the Keweenaw Peninsula had been striking for four months over three demands: recognition of their union, an eight-hour workday, and the elimination of the one-man drill, a piece of equipment that had already killed dozens by allowing a single miner to operate alone in the deep rock. The Calumet and Hecla Company, then the largest copper producer in the world, refused every demand and organized a company-funded group called the Citizens' Alliance to break the strike.

The Citizens' Alliance was the immediate suspect in the shouting at the Italian Hall. No prosecution was ever brought. No individual was ever charged. A congressional investigation found evidence of who had shouted but reached no legal conclusions.

The miners went back to work the following April. They won nothing they had struck for.

The arch of the Italian Hall's entrance still stands on Seventh Street, the building gone on either side of it, a park where the floor used to be. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about what happened here. You can still hear it if you look.