The Report of the Directors of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company for 1913 stated that the company owned 903 houses, which were rented at about $1.00 per room per month, which included all repairs and the removal of garbage. All houses, the report stated, had running water and the large majority had stone or concrete basements.

The company also leased 969 lots, at $5.00 per year, on which men had built their own homes. That nearly a thousand men had built their own houses on company-owned land was a statement of the faith employees of C&H placed in the company.

The report, published in 1914 for the year ending on Dec. 31, 1913, stated that owing to the shortage of labor for the first six months of the year had hampered production on the company’s Keasarge Lode and that all work had been stopped because of the strike that began on July 23.

The report also stated that less than 15 percent of the company’s employees had joined the union, the Western Federation of Miners, and many of those were forced to join by intimidation. Also stated was that during the strike, 95 percent of the employees asked the management, by petition, not to recognize the WFM nor to employ its members.

While this may sound like an exaggeration, Second Vice President of the company, James MacNaughton discussed the petitions during his testimony during the Congressional Hearings on the strike, then produced them to the committee conducting the hearings.

One of the petitions, MacNaughton testified, from the Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. employees, contained more than 4,300 names and was dated Dec. 31, 1913. The petition read, in part: “…We do not want to work with any man who is a member of that organization (Western Federation of Miners), on account of what they have done during the last five months. We also think the company ought to take steps to get these men out of the company houses and give them to the men who are working.”

The 1913 C&H annual report stated: “The public opinion of 90,000 inhabitants of the copper country,” the report stated, “repeatedly expressed in public meetings, representing every class of employment and business, emphatically disapproved the introduction into the community of an organization whose history, principles and recent performances make it a continuous menace to peace and prosperity of the country.”

According to other accounts and documents, there was indeed a high percentage of Copper Country residents who publicly voiced their opposition to the union and its strike. But this needs some clarification. A high percentage of residents also thoroughly sympathized with the strikers.

Conditions underground had become unacceptable, and the number of fatal accidents underground was continually rising. It was not the cause for which the men were striking people objected to as much as they objected to the union they had chosen to represent them.

The evidence admitted into the record of the Congressional Hearings, however, does not accurately reflect that viewpoint.

A report compiled by George E. Nichols, Special Prosecutor, dated Feb. 17, 1914, included a long list of criminal cases against various strikers, the charges of which ranged from carrying concealed weapons to assault with intent to kill and murder. Following the list was a record of dismissals of charges.

“At this term of court,” Nichols’ report stated, “conditions were such that we found it almost impossible to get a conviction, as the juries seemed to line up on the question of their views of the strike, rather than upon the actual facts in the case presented…”

The report included the annual reports of each of the subsidiaries under C&H’s management, each of which contained the same general report of conditions, including this in the report of the Allouez company: “As many strikers occupy company houses and have not been evicted, it was found necessary to build three new houses to accommodate new men.”

The report for the Ahmeek company contained the same sentence, but in that report, it was stated “boarding houses.”

During the hearings, MacNaughton gave one of the many reasons for refusal to recognize the WFM was due to its history of violence and the violence its members committed in the Copper Country since the strike began.

To be fair, MacNaughton did not mention violence committed upon strikers by company-hired guards, the most well-known became known as the Seeberville Murders.

In Aug. 1913, a Croatian boardinghouse in the neighborhood of Seeberville, adjacent to Painesdale, was fired into by six deputies and guards hired by the Champion Mining Company to protect mine property. The attack resulted in the deaths of two boarders inside the house.

In Dec., three strikers fired rifles into a boarding house in Painesdale, killing two boarders and the boarding house operator.

The list of assaults, attacks, shootings, and other acts were common to both sides of the strike, but MacNaughton did not discuss that. The Congressional hearings contain pages of testimony of victims of violence.

Violence related to the Copper Country strike of 1913 was not unique during the labor movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, however. Philip Taft and Philip Ross, authors of “American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome,” The History of Violence in America: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, stated that the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world.

Much of the violence is credited to Socialist revolutionaries who had their start in the late 1800s.

Taft and Ross wrote that in the 1880’s a branch of anarchism emerged that claimed a connection with organized and unorganized labor and advocated individual terror and revolution by force, referred to as “propaganda by the deed.”

“First promulgated at the anarchist congress in Berne, Switzerland, in 1876,” they wrote, “(it) was based upon the assumption that peaceful appeals were inadequate to rouse the masses.

This view could be interpreted as a call upon workers to create their own independent institutions, such as trade unions, mutual aid societies, and producer and consumer cooperatives. However, almost from the beginning this doctrine was interpreted to mean engaging in insurrectionary and putschist activities, and in terror directed against the individual.”

This was little different in the Copper Country as eastern European and Scandinavian immigration increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

At the time, labor unions were considered “Red” or Socialist, which many of them were. But at the same time, as MacNaughton had pointed out in his testimony, he did not consider the vast majority of Copper Country members of the WFM Socialists. And it is probable that they were not.

They were using the union as a means of collective bargaining to get what they thought was a “better deal.”

On the part of American Industrialists and government, however, including C&H, they viewed the strike more as a Socialist attack on Capitalism and democratic institutions.

Compared to labor strikes in other mining districts, the Copper Country strike of 1913 was not a particularly violent strike.

What became known as the Battle of Blair Mountain, which occurred in the West Virginia coal mine region of the Tug River (of Hatfield and McCoy fame), from Aug. 25 to Sept. 2, 1921, was the largest armed labor uprising since the American Civil War.

Coal mine strikers formed what was called the Miners’ Army, numbering into the several thousands.

The Logan County Sheriff, a man name Chafin, was in the pay of the coal companies, in five days operating over 12 miles, fought the miners with machine guns and dropping bombs on them from airplanes. The battle finally ended when Federal troops were brought in to break up the army, whose members were referred to as “insurrectionists.”