KAISA: A Historical Novel of Michigan’s Copper Mining & Oil and Gas Exploration Industries

KAISA: A Novel of

Michigan’s Copper Mining &

Oil and Gas Exploration Industries: Calumet; Holland; Mt. Pleasant; Mackinac Island, and

Jekyll Island, Georgia.

Published by Jack R. Westbrook at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 by Jack R. Westbrook

Dedicated to all those people who patiently listened to me spout plot scenarios during the eleven years this story bounced around in my head ….. especially to Mary Lou, my proofreader, researcher, organizer and wife, who has suffered my ramblings most and longest.

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This book is available in print at most online retailers."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: Jekyll Island, Georgia – April 2002

CHAPTER 1 - Red Jacket, Michigan – June 10, 1913 – noon

CHAPTER 2 - Red Jacket, Michigan – June 10, 1913 – evening

CHAPTER 3 - Red Jacket, Michigan – June 10, 1913, later

CHAPTER 4 - Red Jacket, Michigan – July 10, 1913

CHAPTER 5 - Red Jacket, Michigan – December 23, 1913

CHAPTER 6 - Italian Hall - Red Jacket, Michigan – December 24, 1913

CHAPTER 7 - Holland, Michigan -April 20, 1914

CHAPTER 8 - Delaware, Michigan – September 1928

CHAPTER 9 - Delaware, Michigan – Wednesday, October 30, 1929

CHAPTER 10 - Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, Friday, July 17, 1931 – late night

CHAPTER 11 - Mt. Pleasant, Michigan Friday, July 17, 1931– later night

CHAPTER 12 - Greendale Township, Michigan, Saturday, July 18, 1931

CHAPTER 13 - Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, Monday, September 23, 1935 – morning

CHAPTER 14 - First Annual Michigan Oil and Gas Exposition opening day,

CHAPTER 15- Island Park, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan September 23, 1935

CHAPTER 16 - East Bluff, Mackinac Island, Michigan Friday, October 4, 1935

CHAPTER 17 - Mackinac Island, Michigan, October 6 through 13, 1935

CHAPTER 18- Brunswick, Georgia, Bureau of Naval Intelligence Office - Pre-dawn Thursday, March 26, 1942

CHAPTER 19 - German submarine Lone Wolf, Atlantic Ocean Near the Georgia Coast, Pre-dawn Thursday, March 26, 1942

CHAPTER 20 - Forward Hold, Lone Wolf, Thursday, March 26, 1942

CHAPTER 21 - The Netherlands, May 1940

CHAPTER 22 - Submarine Lone Wolf, Thursday evening,

CHAPTER 23 - Hollybourne Cottage, Jekyll Island, Georgia, pre-dawn, Friday March 27, 1942

CHAPTER 24 - Hollybourne Cottage, Jekyll Island, Georgia, early morning, Friday, March 27, 1942

CHAPTER 25 - Faith Chapel, Jekyll Island, Georgia, early morning, Friday, March 27, 1942

CHAPTER 26- Moline, Michigan, Tuesday, May 4, 1943, 1:55 p.m.

EPILOGUE - Faith Chapel, Jekyll Island, Georgia – April 2002

AUTHOR’S NOTES

ACKNOWLEGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PROLOGUE

Faith Chapel

Jekyll Island, Georgia – April, 2002

I still think it’s damn silly to have all these cathedral doo-dads in just a wood cabin. Kaisa, of Holland Michigan and Jekyll Island, Georgia, said to herself in the front row of the Faith Chapel of Jekyll Island’s Historic District. I’ve got more money than most of those Jekyll Island Club millionaires had when this was their island but I’ll be damned if I’d have gussied up a praying place this way.

She glanced around the chapel where she sat quietly alongside her husband Deiderick. They were oblivious to the coming and going of tourists demonstrating varying degrees of reverence for the sanctity of a historic house of worship. Some whispered, some spoke aloud, against a background of shushing by the volunteer docent stationed near the back door. Kaisa wondered if she had made her observations aloud and decided she probably had not, telling herself again that she was going to have to keep her thoughts more closely in check. Whether it was her eighty-seven years or the strain of the past few weeks catching up with her, lately the time span between thought and speech was a lot shorter … and she was saying damn a lot more.

A trim woman whose natural platinum blonde hair had slipped over to silver without much notice, Kaisa still bore the open-faced creamy complexion of her Finnish-Dutch heritage. Just a touch of ruddiness in the cheeks served as an ancestral beauty mark over a figure which had not changed significantly from her teen years. Her curiosity, slightly skewed view of the world, quick intellect and quicker tongue came from her mother. Combined with the eidetic memory, stubborn single-mindedness of purpose and dogged determination of goal inherited from her father, Kaisa had always been a handful.

Gothic gargoyles probably better suited to a soaring European cathedral spire than an April sun-drenched simple wooden structure on a Georgia barrier island adorned the cypress shingle-sided chapel where she sat. Like many overdone elements in this late 19th and early 20th Century winter retreat for the American moneyed, the architectural incongruities said this is the way we want it and we’re paying for it so do it.

Faith Chapel on Jekyll Island was inspired by the design of colonial meetinghouses, echoing with eloquence about life and death, delivered by the eras most prominent of clergy for the benefit of the world’s wealthiest families.

Completed for the Club’s 1904 season, the Faith Chapel, located not far from the elegant Jekyll Island Club Hotel in historic District of Jekyll Island, Georgia, had served as a worship site for ninety-eight years. At the east end, behind the worship area of the chapel, the Louis Comfort Tiffany-designed stained glass window - David Sings unto the Lord – glowed triumphantly in the afternoon sunlight.

In the front row, Kaisa returned her attentions to the low wooden cabinet behind the railing at the front of the chapel, under another magnificent stained glass window – Adoration of the Christ Child – recently restored by artists from Shadetree Studios of Petoskey in her home state of Michigan.

Oh well, she thought, even if somebody did hear me they would just chalk it up to the crankiness of an old lady, not knowing I have felt this way since I first saw the place in 1935.

I have to admit that it is a startling effect and is one of the few things about the Jekyll Island Club Cottage Colony historical area that has not changed in almost a hundred years. Silently she mouthed the comforting words of The Lord’s Prayer in Dutch, her third language, as her thoughts transported her back along the path that brought Deiderick to her at this spot sixty years before.

"Onze Vader, die in de hemel ....Our Father, who art in heaven"

1

Red Jacket, Keweenaw Peninsula,

Michigan – June 10, 1913 - noon

Excuse me. My name is Katrina Golder from Holland, Michigan. I have some questions.

Erik Koistinen, third-generation Finnish Michigan Upper Peninsula copper mineworker, stood in front of Italian Hall at the corner of Seventh and Elm streets in Red Jacket, Michigan. He was handing out printed flyers inviting potential supporters of a miner’s strike to a social that evening. The strike could change the destiny of his friends and fellows. He was so intent on the task he had missed the approach of the woman who would change his life forever.

A flash of light blue moved into his peripheral vision as the striking blonde young woman looked at him expectantly. He had seen a few pretty people in his life but this was the first woman he could truly describe as beautiful. She was dressed in a fashion not seen in Red Jacket normally except on members of the Calumet & Hecla Mining Company management and almost never in this workingman’s section of the mining town. Having her so near, he suddenly understood the term breathtaking. Her long blonde hair was styled with a single braid cascading over her left shoulder, giving her the look of a svelte fashionable Dutch milkmaid

Are you dumb? the vision asked impatiently.

Not many people think so up here or down in the shafts, Erik replied testily. Are you lost, Miss?

Excuse me. I didn’t mean that kind of dumb. I just wondered if you could speak, since you were taking so long to answer. She said. "I’m not lost. My father is here on business. He has meetings this afternoon. I got tired of lounging around the Michigan Hotel. Even though your two department stores, Vertin’s and Rupp’s, are nice, I am just not in the mood for shopping on such a beautiful day. I visited your St. Joseph’s church to say a prayer for Poppa’s success in the face of all this strike talk and decided to go for a walk.

Your town is much more sophisticated than I expected. But all day I’ve heard worried talk about a miner’s strike. Since you are handing out flyers about it, I thought you could answer some questions for me.

How is that any concern of yours Erik asked suspiciously. She was obviously a company spy.

Look, mister, Katrina sparked I resent your tone. You must be one of those who think women my age should be content to sit around waiting to be swept off our feet by somebody like you. Then we should be happy with a nice place to live, breeding heirs for you while thinking about nothing more complex than whether the napkins clash with the drapes between babies while you men folk make all the big decisions. I’m here to tell you that I am a teacher, a first year one at that, who is interested in the way the whole world works. You seem to be the one who can tell me about the miner’s side of all this strike talk I’ve heard ever since we got here. But if you can’t tell me, tell me who can. Then I’ll be on my way.

"Whoa…..whoa…whoa, lady, hold your horses. You may think you are talking to some bohunk just fresh aboveground who can’t see farther than the end of his pickaxe or think beyond where to swing it next. Let me tell you. I have been beyond Red Jacket and I am back here by choice. For three generations the men of my family have worked Upper Peninsula copper mines and my mother has been a schoolteacher for many years, so I’ve probably read more books than you have. Our library has several thousand books. Red Jacket is the central village for several surrounding communities within walking distance so the area has a population of over 30,000 people, I dare say that’s more than wherever you are from."

You are right. The girl admitted grudgingly, with a tinge of blush on her face. We have only about 12,000 people in our Holland, even counting nearby Zeeland.

Then don’t start rawing on me because you’re stuck out here among the savages while daddy does the big boy stuff. Just what does he do, anyway?

Poppa is the largest wholesale grocer in Michigan. He is here meeting with your local merchants to get their orders for what they think they will need for next winter. He comes here twice a year: once for them to place their orders directly, then to supervise delivery of their orders in September. I came with him this trip because the school where I teach in Holland, Michigan, has just finished the school year season. I thought it would be a pleasant outing. It was until a few minutes ago.

Look, I’m sorry. Erik apologized, now satisfied she was not an agent of Calumet and Hecla. We got off on the wrong foot here so let’s start all over again ….. Hello, I’m Erik Koistinen. I already know your name.

Apology accepted Katrina replied, her deep blue eyes quickly changing from frosty to sparkly warm. I guess I was a little quick on the trigger too. As you can probably tell, I get a little feisty when I think I’m being dismissed as a lightweight.

Amen to that Erik laughed. Hey, it’s almost lunchtime. Let’s go down the street to Curto’s. I’ll buy you a pasty while I answer your questions. I guess the cause can spare me a few minutes to preach at a different altar to a new audience.

What is a pasty?

Let’s just call it your introduction to the tastes of Upper Peninsula mining country. Let’s go.

Mario Curto’s Saloon, built in 1895, boasted a stained-glass canopy over the bar. By 1900, the saloon was one of forty-eight bars in Red Jacket and by 1908 there were seventy-eight such establishments in the community. Recognizing a need to distinguish his place from his seventy-seven competitors, Curto expanded the scope of his potential clientele by separating his barroom from an annexed restaurant. While the main emphasis of the popular eatery was on northern Italian cuisine, the menu included a number of local dishes, including the miner’s favorite, the pasty.

Pasties, large thick pastry shells filled with meat and vegetables, dated from ancient times in northern Europe but in the United States were primarily associated with Cornwall, the westernmost county of Great Britain. Cornish miners favored the hand-sized crescent-shaped portable meals. They traveled well, stayed warm for a long time, did not need tableware and reheated easily in the mine by warming on a shovel over a candle or miner’s lamp. The restaurant-style pasty, lavished with gravy, consisted of a higher grade and wider selection of meat as well as a greater variety of vegetables and spices than the workingman’s version.

Erik and Katrina found a table in a quiet corner of the crowded restaurant. Both ordered beef pasties with potatoes, celery, carrots and the ubiquitous rutabaga, one of the few vegetables easily locally grown. They were served faster than they expected. The lunch hour crowd was rapidly clearing while the pair exchanged personal information.

I am an only child, Katrina said "and I was born in Holland, Michigan, twenty years ago. I think Poppa wanted a boy so that there would be a second generation of Golders to carry on the wholesale grocery business but it will not be. My mother had a very difficult time with my birth. She was told she could have no more children.

"We live very close to downtown. Soon we will have a new post office building just across the Centennial Park from where we live. After completing high school, I took the teacher course at Central Michigan Normal School at Mt. Pleasant two years ago and had my first year of teaching at Maple Grove School this last year. Poppa thought I should go to Hope College in Holland, right across the street from where we live. It is more of a liberal arts Christian school that seems to be more about training clergy and I wanted to teach, so I guess I disappointed him again, along with not being married yet.

What about you?

Not much to tell. Erik said. I’m strictly a hometown Red Jacket boy. I….

Before you go any further, Katrina interrupted. why the strange town name?

Red Jacket was incorporated as a town in 1867. Erik replied. "The settlement came into being because of the copper mining in the area. Since Alexander Agassiz, president of Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, did not want stores or houses on company property, mineworkers settled nearby and so did the stores to serve them. Red Jacket became the center of commerce for people in the surrounding areas of Allouez Anmeek, Blue Jacket, Calumet, Hecla, Larium, Osceola, Ray-baultown, Red Jacket Shaft, Tamarack and Yellow Jacket.

"The town was named for a Seneca tribe Indian chief who was Otetiani when he was young and Sagoyewatatha, translated as ‘he who keeps them awake’ in his later years. Known as a great orator, he lived from 1750 until 1830. He was Chief of the Wolf Clan of the Seneca. He negotiated for the rights of his people with both the Americans and the British, became known as Red Jacket for an embroidered jacket the British gave him for his services during the war.

"After the Americans won their freedom and became a nation, Red Jacket spoke with both George Washington and John Adams in the presidential home in the temporary national capital, Philadelphia. In 1805, Red Jacket addressed the United States Senate with a speech called ‘Religion for the White Man and the Red.’ In his later years, he lived in Buffalo, New York. When he died, his remains were placed first in an Indian cemetery, then moved to Forest Lawn Cemetery, at Buffalo, where his monument now stands. Chief Red Jacket is my longtime all-time hero. Imagine being such a great negotiator that both sides of an issue would honor you for your oratory skills. I’ve read his speech to the Senate many times."

Well that certainly answers my question. You must have swallowed a history book.

My mother always encouraged all of us six boys to read. As I said before, she still teaches school at Franklin School just across the street there. Since I was the youngest, I’m twenty-four, she had more time to spend with my education than when everybody was home. She thinks it is very important to know where you came from, to be proud of your heritage, especially when you belong to one of only three Finnish families who attend St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. I think Mom’s right. You need a clear vision of who you are. Some say we should not be Catholics at all. We are Finnish and should be Lutherans according to them. My mother and father were raised Catholics, as were their parents, so Catholicism is more or less a family tradition.

So I guess I picked the right person to complete my education about mining and this strike business. Katrina said, smiling. She had never met someone quite like this history spouting man. Usually people who talked like him were old, monotoned and boring. Erik seemed to bring history to life however, as though the people he spoke of were joining them at the table.

I’ll do my best. Erik replied, beginning his narrative.

For centuries before Europeans, American Indians dug for and processed copper on the Keweenaw Peninsula of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Erik told her. "The copper, a geological residue of the volcanic forces forming Lake Superior, caused the United States’ first mineral rush in 1842. Michigan’s first State Geologist Douglass Houghton mentioned its presence in his report on his 1840 geological and geographical survey of the Upper Peninsula with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft.

"The U.P., as it is known to native Michiganians, or Michiganders to those not finicky, was awarded to Michigan by the United States Congress as a ‘booby prize’ in exchange for the Toledo Strip, an area that was subject of a three-year war so ridiculous that Congress made ending the dispute a condition of Michigan statehood in 1837. Most citizens of the new state were not happy to have possession of a big slab of land accessible from the Michigan mitten only by crossing the waters of the Straits of Mackinaw.

"The Houghton survey was launched primarily to appease those Michi-Citizen’s who still had big eyes for possessing the Toledo Strip. The ‘strip’ commands the mouth of the Maumee River at Lake Erie, thus controlling a lot of shipping. Michiganders wanted this, rather than a big hunk of seemingly worthless wilderness carved out of the Wisconsin Territory, peopled by folks who owed more allegiance to their land neighbors in Wisconsin than to a government hundreds of miles away south across the Straits. Houghton’s report of the presence of copper and mention of the possibility of iron mining in Michigan’s new upper addition was exciting. In 1841, Douglass Houghton, predicted, ‘There can scarcely be a shadow of a doubt that the Keweenaw Peninsula will eventually prove of great value to our citizen’s and to the nation’.

"After the Chippewa Indians signed the Treaty of La Salle, ceding the mineral rights to the western half of the Upper Peninsula to the United States in 1842, the copper rush was on, six years before the more famous California Gold Rush began with the Sutter’s Mill discovery.

"Speculators, miners and other stalwart individuals from everywhere in the United States and parts of Europe flocked to the ‘booby-prize-turned-land-of-opportunity.’ Many of those early mining ventures closed, mostly due to short financing and shoestring budgets. After the Civil War, Calumet & Hecla Company dominated Michigan’s copper mining. C & H was formed to develop the 1864 copper discovery in the area by Edwin Hulbert. Hulbert was a nephew of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who impressed upon Hulbert the copper potential of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

From 1847 until 1887, Michigan’s mines produced more copper than any other state while prices fluctuated from twenty-two cents a pound to a price of forty-six cents a pound in 1864, before sliding to nine cents a pound in 1894. Meantime, annual copper output rose from 12.492 million pounds in 1864 to over 250 million pounds in 1912. In 1887, Montana began to produce the most copper in the country. Meantime, this area’s copper output began a decline, with a resulting drop in population.

Stop Katrina interrupted, My head is swimming. How in the world do you remember all of these things and organize them as if you are reading from a page. With that talent, you should be a teacher.

"I don’t know. I just read things and they stick with me. As for doing anything but working the mines, I can’t imagine any other life, which is why I’m dedicated to bettering conditions for the miners. A few years back, I took a job on the railroad ferry running from Ludington to ports in Wisconsin. The steel ferry Pere Marquette was the first to begin operating in 1897 and was capable of carrying thirty fully loaded freight cars. Later such ferries were numbered. I crewed on the Pere Marquette 18.

"My third roundtrip voyage started in September of 1910. On September 9, twenty miles off the coast of Wisconsin, the boat sank when huge Lake Michigan waves crashed over the stern. We found several feet of water in the hold, with more coming in all the time. We began to push railroad cars off the back to lighten the load, trying for four hours to save the ship. Our captain put out an SOS to our sister boat nearby, the Pere Maquette 17, to come to our rescue. Then the water reached the level of the boilers and put out the coal fires providing power to the steamship.

"As we were getting ready to transfer passengers and staff from our boat to the 17, water suddenly swept into the 18, sinking it. I was one of thirty-five survivors. But twenty-nine weren’t so lucky. That was when I figured God telling me something about ignoring the call of the copper, so I came back to the mines.

"Shortly after that, the companies began use of one-man drills instead of the traditional two-man drills. This is causing a lot of controversy about safety since a single worker may be drilling in an isolated area with no back up. If he is injured, he is far from help. If he is killed, as he well could be working a drill alone, he could go undiscovered for a long time.

"Aside from safety issue, the use of one-man drills over the traditional two-man drill eliminates a job and displaces a trained driller. The unemployed driller must take a lower paying job or look for another mine to work in, likely uprooting his family to live in a new place. Nobody but the companies and their stockholders, like the one-man drill

I lost seniority. When the layoffs started, I was one of the first to go. Then the Western Federation of Mines asked to help organize the miners in this area. That is why I am standing on the corner passing out flyers about a WFM social tonight. As a bonus, I met a delightful pretty young lady I hope will accompany me to tonight’s event to hear more about what a strike here could mean.

Well, I think Poppa has a meeting tonight so I think I’d like to come and learn more. What time should I meet you?

I don’t think the Michigan Hotel wants the likes of me in their lobby. We should meet here about 6:30. Erik said. "We’ll be at Italian Hall for the seven o’clock social.

2

Red Jacket, Keweenaw Peninsula,

Michigan – June 10, 1913 - evening

I’m sorry I’ve had to leave you on your own so much today. Hermann Golder said to his daughter