Three days before Christmas in 1910, Stephen Boijt was working as a trammer in the E Shaft of the Champion mine, in Painesdale. He had just emptied his tram car into the skip on the 9th level.

Two levels above, Alfred Davey, a trammer boss, and his crew rang the bell to signal the hoist operator to stop the skip at that loading station. Davey’s tram car filled the skip to capacity. As the tram car was being unloaded, a rock rolled out of the skip and fell down the shaft, an occurrence that was not unusual.

What was unusual was that in falling, the rock struck Boijt, who was still near the shaft with his empty tram car. Boijt was killed by the rock.

At the coroner’s inquest, Davey testified that rock spilling out of the tram car, or out of the skip, was “liable to happen at any time.” Nobody could avoid that, he said.

Two months later, on February 13, 1911, Joseph Kregulj was removing a wooden gate-piece at the 50th level of the No. 4 Calumet shaft. The gate-piece was a safety feature intended to keep men from falling into the shaft. Kregulj was struggling with it when a descending skip struck and killed him. The gate-piece had ropes attached to it to assist in removing it, but when the man cage was in use, the ropes were left hanging in the shaft, because leaving them in place was a safety hazard.

Peter Gostavic later said that he had put the ropes down the shaft, but had forgotten to put them back in their proper place when he reset the gate-piece after exiting the cage. Joseph Mersal, who witnessed the accident, said that the skip was at the gate-piece when Kregulj reached into the shaft to remove it.

Two days later, in the South Kearsarge mine, Albert Huovinen was killed by an explosion of powder that had had been left in the shot hole by the previous shift. Sam Uren, a member of the team that had worked the previous shift in that location, testified at the coroner’s inquest that the explosion must have been the result of what miners called a “John Hodge.” That was when powder packed into the depth of the shot hole does not explode.

“This may happen when the stick is too hard,” Uren said. “It may not explode and will stay in the bottom.”

While mining accidents that killed workers were common, mining companies desperately sought to exonerate themselves, or be exonerated, from any responsibility in the fatalities, which was one of the reasons for Coroner’s Inquests and Mine Inspector Reports. What the documentation of these mining accidents reveal is that in that some instances, the mining company was, in fact, culpable; in others, freak accidents simply occurred sometimes; in still others, carelessness or negligence of the workers resulted in their own deaths or the deaths of others. Regarding trammers, in the majority of instances, fatalities resulted in rock falling on them.

Fatalities, as the above examples suggest, were not limited to trammers. Miners, timbermen, track layers, pumpmen — were all at risk of crippling or fatal accidents underground. Yet, while fatalities were distributed across all departments and classifications, the most critical shortage of underground labor was in tramming. During the 1913-14 labor strike, the Department of Labor wanted to know why. John A. Moffitt, John B. Densmore and Walter B. Palmer headed the investigation into the issue. What their studies revealed led one of the investigators to include in the DOL report: “I believe there are real grievances, at least upon the part of the trammers.”

The grievances included being forced to work longer shifts than miners or others; the amount of physical labor demanded of them; a significantly lower wage scale in proportion to the damands and expectations placed on them by petty shift bosses; ethnic discrimination regarding working conditions; the sheer physical risk involved in the work; housing availability, as well as lack of upward mobility.

“Trammers, dissatisfied with their long hours, hard work, and low pay,” the DOL report states, ” hold on to their jobs hoping to be given jobs as miners, but the supply of miners is greater than that of trammers, and many trammers, after waiting in vain to be put to work on drilling machines, get disgusted and leave the mines.”

It is said that trammers, the report states, break down physically in a few years and there were no old men who trammed, adding that “only the young and strong can stand it.”

While mine managers were constantly on the lookout for improved drilling machines, better classes of explosives, and more efficient coal for the boilers, they paid little or no attention to the equipment trammers required to do their jobs efficiently.

The DOL investigation found that most of the tramcars used in the Lake Superior copper mines were antiquated, ill-suited for the mines, and were not properly maintained or updated.

“Most of them are old loose-wheel cars, the axles of which cannot properly be kept supplied with grease,” the report states. “These cars also have their forward wheels but little in front of the middle of the cars. This arrangement facilitates dumping, but throws the load unevenly on the four wheels. The two forward wheels carry the greater part of the weight, and this makes wheels bind on the tracks, especially in going around sharp curves.” Cars in some mines possessed a superior type of wheel truck, the report says, the axles of which were provided with roller bearings that greatly diminished the labor of pushing them. Most did not, however, and the DOL wondered why companies would not adopt the better quality trucks for the sake of their trammers.

“The expense of equipping all mines with this type of car would not be great,” the report states, “as these trucks cost only $24 each.”

After loading a tramcar by hand, it was hard enough work to push the 5,000 to 8,000 pound cars, with their loads, distances ranging from 1,000 to 1,500 feet to the shaft; having tramcars equipped with trucks and wheels that worked to make the job still more difficult only added to the problems trammers faced. After being subject to enough of the above treatments long enough without legitimate grievances being addressed, more and more trammers decided to let the petty bosses, mine owners and shareholders get their copper rock to the shafts themselves. They left the underground to find work elsewhere. These men were not afraid of hard work, they argued; they simply wanted reasonal working conditions and adequate pay.