While there were thousands of men throughout the Copper Country who had joined the Western Federation of Miners and were in favor of the strike in 1913, there were also thousands who had not joined, did not want to strike, and wanted nothing to do with the union or its members.

The first two days of the strike had brought rioting, which resulted in no less than 16 men being hospitalized after having been assaulted either on their way from or to work. The arrival of the Michigan Militia in the following days quelled the rioting. Houghton County, along with several mining companies, employed men from the Waddell-Mahon agency of New York to guard property and in many instances, intimidate strikers.

With the relative quiet that followed the arrival of militiamen and Waddell men, some non-strikers felt the area was protected enough that in August a few of them began to return to work.

At first, there were few enough men returning that only the day shift was resumed, but that was enough to convince the strikers that some form of action was needed, and the action they chose was demonstrating.

Referred to as “parades,” the parades were simply mass picketing. Parades were scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the work shift, and were intended to persuade men not to work. With the failure of persuasion, strikers next reverted to intimidation, in the form of verbal attacks, insults, and threats. If intimidation failed, there was often violence.

Militia men attended the parades, keeping the lines of picketers in constant motion, to prevent them engaging in violent demonstrations, but soon after the picketing began, arrests for various infractions and crimes increased as strikers became more frustrated.

Charged with protecting property and people who wanted to work, after the work shift began, neither soldiers nor law enforcement interfered with the parades once the work shift had begun and was under way. In a number of cases, however, physical clashes between strikers and soldiers began to occur. In many instances, the crowds of strikers were disbursed, either by mounted cavalrymen with sabers, or by infantry with bayonets.

The frequency and intensity of these clashes gradually increased, particularly around the mines of Calumet and Hecla and its subsidiaries. As the clashes began in more arrests, women began leading the parades, and violence, in many instances, increased more.

Men on their way to work one morning were assaulted with rocks and sticks at Red Jacket. Women severely beat a worker at Copper Range; at the nearby armory others severely beat two other men. Fifteen strikers assaulted a worker at Centennial Heights near the Red Jacket Shaft.

By the middle of September, violence and rioting had become so intense, mining companies finally filed a complaint in the state circuit court.

On Sept. 20, Judge Patrick O’Brien issued an injunction restraining the WFM, or any one of its members from “interfering with, molesting, or disturbing any person or persons now in the employ of said complainants above mentioned, or any of them, by way of threats, personal violence, intimidation, or by any means whatsoever, calculated or intended to prevent, against their will, any of them from entering in, or continuing in the employment of said complainants”

The injunction also restrained picketing on, or near, mining company property, or on roads or passes used by workers while they were on their way to or from work.

Whether the timing of the issuance of the injunction was coincidental with the Quincy Mining Company’s actions, that company did something that would escalate the rioting into something the Copper Country had not before seen.

On Sept. 19, a train arrived in Hancock, carrying 31 imported German workers hired through the Austro-American Labor Agency of New York. Once in Hancock, the car in which these men rode was switched to a spur that would take the car to the Quincy mine. When the train arrived at the mine, the men inside were kept aboard for several hours before being escorted out and led to one of the mine shafts under the guard of a several militiamen and Waddell men. Many of these men would later sign affidavits stating they hired under false pretenses. They did not know they were being hired to work in a strike zone, and the contracts were written in English, a language few of the imported workers understood. The contract stipulated the men would be paid, as it turned out, less than pre-strike trammers’ wages. They would be paid $2.50 per day for a nine-hour day, regardless of the jobs they would be assigned, and they would reimburse the company the $24.50 transportation cost from New York from the first six months’ wages. Also typed on the contract was the word “strike.” But while some of the contents of the contract were written in German, the word “strike” was typed in English.

In the weeks that followed, both the Copper Range Company, and the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, would follow suit in hiring imported workers, or strike breakers. That was something the Western Federation of Miners could lay down for.