By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the Lake Superior copper region had reached maturity and was, in fact, in the early stage of decline. The oldest operating mines in the region, the Quincy and the Calumet and Hecla, were already thousands of feet deep. C&H’s geology department was keenly aware that the company’s Conglomerate Lode was reaching the end of its ore reserves. Company geologists had determined that the Calumet Conglomerate Lode would be exhausted in the year 1932.

As the mines grew deeper, the bottom levels were, of course, increasingly distant from the surface. It required larger, more powerful hoists to reach deeper into the earth to raise iron, multi-ton capacity rock skips greater distances, which in turn, required longer trips up and down the shaft, and more tonnages of coal consumed in powering the machines. Large, steam-powered air compressors also required vast amounts of coal to fuel. Shipping costs on thousands of tons of coal per year also added sharply to expenses. As the mines went deeper, the copper content was also decreasing, which financially squeezed mining company treasuries tighter from both sides.

At the same time, copper regions west of the Mississippi River, with ore bodies exponentially richer than the native copper mines of Michigan, were competing against Michigan mines on a global level. In order to remain globally competitive, the Lake Superior mines needed to increase their mineral production, which required additional machines, larger employee payrolls and increased expenses. In a way, it was like a dog chasing its tail.

In 1908, the portion of the Conglomerate Lode mined by C&H produced 70, 427, 877 pounds of copper. By 1911, the production had fallen to just under 58 and half million pounds. The No. 4 Calumet Shaft had reached a depth of 7,995 feet; on the Hecla Branch, the No. 7 shaft was the deepest at 7,666 feet. while the South Hecla, or Numbers 9 and 10 shafts had reached a depth of 7,627 feet.

While C&H produced 58.5 million pounds of mineral in 1911, the Quincy Mining Company produced just over 22.25 million pounds of refined copper, an increase from the 20,600 million pounds the company produced in 1908. There is something interesting to note in the comparisons from the Quincy Mine’s annual report for 1908 and 1911: While the company produced just over 2.5 million pounds of copper in 1908, the mining expense for that year totaled $1,980,867. In 1911, while refined copper had increased by approximately 2 million pounds, total mining expense had decreased to $1,786,460, just under $2 million. Part of the increase was owed to the introduction of the one-man drills. Yet, while mineral sales totaled $2,900,00 in 1911, the company showed a profit of just over $507,500.

When William Paine organized the Copper Range Company between 1899 and 1901, organized it as a holding company. The Copper Range Railroad, the Trimountain and Champion mining companies, were separate entities, each largely responsible for their own successes and failures. At Quincy, the single company assumed the costs — and liabilities — of the mine, the company’s railroad, mills and its smelter. It stood or fell as one unit, whereas with the Copper Range if, say, the Trimountain mine failed, it would not take down the Champion or the railroad.

As was pointed out last week, in cutting costs, most of the Lake Superior copper mines let a significant portion of that fall on their trammers, who were forced to use old, worn out and antiquated tramcars, leaving the trammers to struggle with the resistance created by those cars while being faced with increased tonnage demands carted to the shaft each shift. But when it came to miners, that was not the strategy companies pursued.

“With a view of lessening the more arduous part of the miners’ work in handling the very cumbersome size of rock drilling machines long in use about the mine,” Charles Lawton wrote in in Quincy’s 1911 annual report, “different types and sizes of lighter weight machines have been tried out during the past several years. Thus, about one hundred of the light weight drilling machines have now been installed in the mine.”

As these lighter drills, coupled with high explosives, increased the amount of copper rock produced in a shift, trammers came to be expected to increase their production proportionately, but with their broken down, inefficient tramcars. While advanced technology of mechanical, air-powered drills brought down more rock, trammers still loaded it into cars with shovels or, with larger chunks, with their hands. It was just one more aspect added to tramming that led many trammers to simply give up and leave the mines.

In the face of declining copper content, and rising expenses in trying to maintain the production achieved in previous years, the companies were trying to maintain profit while expending less revenue. They needed to curtail expenditures wherever possible, which usually fell upon the workers. the Keweenaw National Historic Park’s Historic Resource Study, written by Larry Lankton, published in 2005, aptly pointed out in regards to European immigrants taking jobs as trammers:

“So as the mining companies expanded tremendously in the 1890s and beyond, and as they sought greater efficiency and productivity, the men coming for all the new jobs at the mines were not well suited for them, in terms of experience or skill. the men found themselves toiling in old, deep mines, in an environment that literally was most foreign to them and threatening. Consequently, many objected not only to the arduousness of the work, but to its hazards and the underground place where it was done.”

The Department of Labor’s report on the 1913 Lake Superior copper strike, under the leadership of Labor Secretary John A. Moffitt, stated that one-man drills (mentioned by Charles Lawton in his 1911 report) introduced into the mines was what was marketed as the water Leyner drill, were first experimented with in 1907, and “succeeding years, mostly in 1911 and 1912.”