Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 December 1893 — WISCONSIN MINERS STARVING. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

WISCONSIN MINERS STARVING.

Without Work, Money or Food In a Wild Mountain Region. It was a cheerless Thanksgiving Day on the great Gogebic range of iron miners, where 5,000 able-bodied miners —Finns, Cornishmen. Austrians, Italians, Poles and Irishmen—with 15,000 women and children dependent upon them are out of work. There is no money, there is little food and less clothing, and until the people of the State responded to Gov. Peck's appeal for aid, those -0,000 miserable folks were suffering all the horrors of starvation. For many years, until last spring, the great iron mines of this region have been working full blast. Those were days of prosperity and the miners were flush with money. This spring the

mine owners were forced by overproduction to shut down the mines. Iron ore lay piled all about and there was no one to buy. One by one the great iron mines of the Gogebic range reeled up their hoisting cables until not a pit in the whole" range was working. Then the miners did not know which way to turn. Not one of them had a penny saved for such a day. Some of them had cut wood from neighboring forests and others had raised potatoes to eat during the winter. But the majority of these hardy men were left destitute when the mine superintendents announced that the pits would not be worked for an indefinite period. It is no exaggeration to state that 1,000 children on the Gogebic range are to-day without food, clothing or shoes except for the limited supply forwarded by charitable, people elsewhere. A-nd these poor creatures do not belong to miners alone. For years and years hundreds of men have been chopping wood in the black forests to the nor th and south for the big furnaces at Hurley, Ironwood, Bessemer, Saxon and Ashland. When the mines shut down these woedmen were ordered to stop work, and thus 500 or more men were forced to return to their homes and await the time when the whistles and bells of the shafts should announce the opening of the pits. It has been six months since the bowels r.f the Gogebic range were whacked by the picks of the men who now stand round in the snow and biting winds and wonder whether it’s to be beets or potatoes that the good wife is to cook at noon. The little children running about the bare floors cannot answer the question, for the cold wind from the broken windows drives them into corners and makes them talk about the stockings they should be wearing and the shoes father can not buy. Belief committees at Ironwood, Hurley, Bessemer and Ashland are doing all in their power to relieve tbo distress, but they are scarcely able to take caro of so great a charge. It is not probable that the mines on the range will be opened this winter. This means that 20,000 people must be taker care of if the graveyards in that storm swept section of W isconsin and Michigan are not to bo crossed and rocrossed by the black hearses of the village livery. Then, too, the doctors say that typhoid fever has broken out in settlements along the snow-capped range and that the broken picket fences oi the graveyards must be drawn farther away if the dead are to be kept within the inclosures.

A STREET IN THE STRICKEN DISTRICT.