Graham Jaehnig

Over the past couple of visits, Copper Country’s Past and People has focused on the political, social and economic situations in Europe’s past, going all the way back to the Carolingian Empire created by Charlemagne and progressing forward in time leading up to the first decade of the 20th century.

The immigrants who peopled the Lake Superior copper region were, for the very most part, from the regions, countries and nation-states we have discussed. This is because I believe that in order to understand the development of the copper region, and the people who worked to develop it, we need to form a clearer understanding of the reasons they left their native homes, along with the reasons they chose the copper region as their destination, and how they influenced the local culture we know today. The customs, religions, foods available to them, governmental impacts on them, both as a society and as individuals, all influenced their attitudes, perceptions, cultures and outlooks. Upper Peninsula residents consider the pasty the official food of the U.P., with other dishes such as pickled herring, pig’s feet, povitica, nisu and pannukakku, as standard fare. These are just a few examples of cultural elements that have been handed down through the generations by our ancestors, the first-generation immigrants. On a collegiate level, the considering of foods in this instance is a study of what anthropologists and other social science disciplines refer to as foodways. Foodways, as a discipline, examines the role of food and food-related behavior in cultural groups, and the ways in which “food knowledge” is transferred within and varies between different societies. Cornish pasties, Finnish nisu, pannukakku, Croatian povitica, Polish pickled beets — and their relation between the Copper Country today and the European immigrants of the 19th century fall under the discipline of foodways.

Foodways are just one study that help us to better understand the history of Western Civilization and how it effects us today.

For instance, what has come to be known as the “Strike of 1913” was just short of a labor war waged between mining companies on one side, and employees, who were nearly all central and eastern European immigrants, on the other side. The strike has remained embedded in the minds of Copper Country residents for 108 years. There were other strikes, before and after, but the 1913 strike is both talked about and not talked about. Very few people alive today knew firsthand anyone involved in the strike, yet to this day, it remains a source of controversy and fascination. To this day, descendents of the labor conflict takes sides in the century-old debate. The questions why and what are necessary in approaching the reasons for the event and its aftermath, some of which are still felt today. If we want to form a deeper understanding of why the strike still causes anxiety today, we need to look back on what influenced the immigrants to arrive in a foreign country to improve themselves, then engage in conflict to change the place they came to. Who was to blame, the mining companies or the strikers — or the labor union? The questions are never easy to find answers for.

So, we have been focusing on Croatia and Slovenia the past number of weeks. What these countries, along with Cornwall, Ireland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Italy, and others we’ve mentioned, all shared one thing in common: They were members — and, for the most part — unwilling participants of European leaders’ wars and struggles to build and maintain empires. From the Carolingian Empire to the French, German, Austrian, Ottoman, Hungarian, Russian and Swedish empires — the First Reich, Second Reich and Third Reich, the Soviet Union — each of the countries that experienced mass-scale emigration, was due to unsustainable conditions imposed on the peoples in the nations of the empires that controlled them.

When considering emigration and immigration, we must look at reasons why ethnic groups left their homelands (referred to as “push” factors), and reasons they traveled to a particular destination such as the Lake Superior copper region (“pull” factors). As Walfred Jokinen stated in his 1955 dissertation, “The Finns in the United States: a Sociological Interpretation,” noted, the push factor gives the initial impetus to migration; the pull factor determine its direction. The push factors include such things as famines, population pressure, and political oppression. Within the individual person, these factors give rise to “a feeling of frustration and inadequacy.” The “pull factors, on the other hand, represent the existence or imagined existence of opportunities to relieve the frustration.

In looking at these factors, we also look at immigration patterns themselves.

In her 2004 Senior Thesis, “Croatian Immigrants in the Keweenaw,” Jennifer Lynn-Franks Stajdl included a very significant statement:

“Most of the Croatians who made their way over were from the same area in Croatia, Ravna Gora,” she wrote. “This immigration pattern is an example of chain-migration, people helping those from their country, from the area of the country that they are from, come over to the States.”

Why her statement is significant is that chain-migration was actually typical of most of immigration patterns to the Lake Superior copper district from 1845 on. While the Croatians are one example of this pattern, the Cornish, Irish and Finns are others.

James Kurtii, wrote in his Jan. 24, 2018 article, “Finns in Michigan,” that “Finns first arrived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula after the Civil War, when a copper mining company recruited them from mines in Norway because of their reputation as hard workers.”

While it was not actually due to their reputation as hard workers, it was because of their reputation as experienced mine workers.

The mining company Kurtii was referring to is the Quincy Mining Company, just north of Hancock on Portage Lake. The American Civil War had created a rush of investors to the copper region to unwater and re-activate old mines, long abandoned, hoping to capitalize on the wartime inflated prices of copper. The newly re-opened mines created a severe shortage of miners employed at productive mines, as the miners were siphoned off to these new companies. The Quincy Mine experienced the shortage, as did the Cliff, Central, Minesota, and other producers.

In the spring of 1864, the company sent one of its office workers to Norway to recruit skilled laborers from the mining districts in that country. It was probably this office employee who had come up with idea of recruiting Norwegian workers. His name was Christian Taftes and he was an immigrant from the Tornio River Valley of Norway; he spoke both Swedish and Finn fluently and he knew the mining districts there.

A few months later, over 100 of Taftes’ recruits arrived in Hancock. Most of them were Norwegians from the Kaafjord and Alten mines of Finmarken and Tornio. Among the Norwegian recruits were a few Swedes, but also a few Finns, and these were the vanguard of thousands of Finns that would soon follow.

The numbers of each, as recorded by Michigan Technological University’s Interior Ellis Island, were about 80 Norwegians and 20 Finns.

“Taftes contracted the workers at the English-owned Kaafjord and Alten mines,” states MTU. “On May 17, 1865 a sailing ship from Trondheim, Norway departed with 30 more kvaenar (Norwegian Finns) destined for Quincy Mine. Landing in Quebec, a lake steamer brought the all-male workforce into port at Hancock on the eve of Juhanipaiva, St. John’s Day, a Finnish holiday on June 24th.”

MTU continues, saying that although between only 700 and 1,000 Norwegian Finns immigrated, they “introduced through correspondence with family and friends in Norway, Sweden and Finland the possibilities for relocating in Michigan and in Minnesota.”

Returning to Jennifer Lynn-Franks Stajd’s reference to the Croatians being an example of chain-migration, Finland, Cornwall, Ireland, Norway and Sweden, too, are further examples: friends and family corresponding with those back in “the Old Country” inviting others to the region. But why?

The Library of Congress, in its essay, “Immigration to the United States, 1851-1900,” gives us the opening for our next week’s coffee chat:

“Fleeing crop failure, land and job shortages, rising taxes, and famine, many came to the U. S. because it was perceived as the land of economic opportunity,” the article states. “Others came seeking personal freedom or relief from political and religious persecution, and nearly 12 million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1870 and 1900.”