The mine carried the name of Frederick Pabst, the Milwaukee beer baron who had briefly held the mining lease in the late nineteenth century. By the time of the disaster, the operation had long since passed through a chain of corporate owners. The Oliver Iron Mining Company, a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation since 1901, ran the Pabst Mine as part of the Gogebic Range's iron industry -- the same ore belt that had drawn thousands of immigrants, many of them Finnish and Italian, to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. In 1904, Oliver Iron added the G shaft, which became one of the mine's most productive. It descended steeply northward, its walls reinforced with concrete and wood planks held by steel brackets, with a mine elevator running on rails along one wall. The shaft was engineered for efficiency, not for what would happen when the rains came.

Forty miners were trapped on the eighth level. Two more were stranded on the thirteenth, and one on the eighteenth. Their food ran out before the second day. With nothing left to eat, the men turned to the materials of the mine itself. They scraped birch bark from the wooden planks lining the shaft walls, heated water with their carbide lamps, and brewed a thin, bitter tea -- their only nourishment for the duration of the ordeal. Above ground, rescue teams worked around the clock. The collapse had made national headlines, and the country followed the progress with the same anxious attention that would later mark the Quecreek and Chilean mining rescues. For 129 hours the trapped miners waited, rationing their lamp fuel, listening for the sound of picks and drills cutting toward them through the rock.

The breakthrough came on the fifth day. Rescuers reached the trapped men and began bringing them to the surface one by one. The last miner emerged from the rubble at 11:22 PM, alive. Of the 46 men working in the shaft when it collapsed, 43 survived -- a remarkable outcome given the scale of the cave-in and the days spent without food underground. The rescue made front-page news across the United States. In Ironwood, the mine's community of immigrant families, many of whom had come from Finland and southern Europe to work the iron ranges, experienced a collective relief that became part of local legend. The disaster reinforced the mortal risks that defined iron mining on the Gogebic Range, where the wealth pulled from the earth came at a human cost that the corporate ledgers rarely acknowledged.

Today Ironwood is a small city of roughly 5,000 people, the iron mines long since closed. The Gogebic Range, which once shipped millions of tons of ore to steel mills in Gary, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland, fell quiet as richer deposits in Minnesota's Mesabi Range and foreign imports shifted the industry elsewhere. But the memory of the Pabst Mine disaster persists. The Miners Memorial Heritage Park in Ironwood honors the men who worked and died in the region's mines, and the story of the 1926 rescue remains a touchstone for understanding the Upper Peninsula's identity -- a place shaped equally by the hardness of the rock and the resilience of the people who tunneled through it.