‘Big Annie,’ the ‘Joan of Arc’ of the Michigan copper-mine strike, lives on

The towering figure of Anna Klobuchar Clemenc has returned to the streets of Calumet, Michigan, 70 years after she died.

Standing at 6’2″ tall, the woman known as “Big Annie” became the face of the copper miners’ strike in Copper Country, the northwestern counties of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where copper mines sprang up in the middle of the 19th century.

On Christmas Eve 1913, the plight of the strikers turned unthinkably tragic.

The conditions in the mines were brutal. With shafts reaching more than a mile underground, the darkness was deep and thick, and the cost of miners’ equipment, including the candles for their hats, was deducted from their wages.

Shifts sometimes lasted 10 or 12 hours, six days a week, and almost always involved back-breaking physical labor. According