On May 5, 1886 thousands of protesters in Milwaukee were nearing the Bay View Rolling Mill when the first shots rang out. The protesters were part of the 8-hour movement, seeking better working conditions for laborers in Milwaukee and beyond.
State militias had been tasked with guarding the mill.
Historian John Gurda, explains, "A crowd of roughly 1,200 strikers, largely Polish, gathered at St. Stanislaus Church on 5th and Mitchell, marched down Mitchell Street first and then Kinnickinick to march on the rolling mill. They found the militia waiting for them and at a distance of roughly 200 yards the militia opened fire."
As the smoke faded, the devastation became clear. At least 9 people had been shot. The event became known as the Bay View Massacre or Tragedy. But who were the victims and where were they buried?
That’s what listener Brenna Akert wanted to know. She began her own research into the victims, but wrote to Bubbler Talk after reaching some dead ends.
"So I was curious if anyone could find any information because I certainly couldn’t. Sometimes we can find names but that’s usually about it, that’s as far as we could go, at least in my digging," says Akert.
But let’s take a step back and look at what led to the massacre.
The 8-Hour Movement
The 8-hour movement was born out of the poor working conditions for factory workers in the mid-1800s. Laborers were expected to work 6-days a week for 10 to 12 hours at a time in grueling conditions.
"Their goal was an 8-hour-day without a cut in pay. So if you’re working 12 hours a day for a buck and a quarter a day on the labor side, that’s a big deal, you know. So it was a major request. And Milwaukee and Chicago became the epicenters of that movement in the entire country and the first week of May, 1886, was really among the most volatile in Milwaukee’s history," says Gurda.
Starting on May 1, Laborers in Milwaukee and Chicago went on strike. Both cities were filled with strikers, united by a common cause. But on May 4, these protests turned deadly in Chicago, when an unknown man threw dynamite into the crowd, killing at least a dozen people. At the same time, tensions were rising in Milwaukee.
Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Jeremiah Rusk had ordered the National Guard into Milwaukee to quell the protests. As the protesters neared the mill, the orders were given.
Gurda explains, "The captain of the militia said, ‘Pick out your man and kill him.’ So this was not shooting over their heads to frighten the crowd and have them go back to the south side. This was certainly intentional."
According to news reports from the day, the street looked like a battlefield. People lay dying, bleeding.
Researching the Victims
Since 1986, the centennial anniversary of the massacre, the Wisconsin Labor History Society has held a ceremony honoring the dead with seven beats to represent the seven people believed to have died that day.
There are a number of named victims, but the names change depending on the source. What remains consistent is the number: seven. I started by researching the most consistent names listed among the victims: Frank Kunkel, Frank Nowarczyk, John Marsh, Martin Jankowiak, Robert Erdman, Johann Zazka and Michael Ruchalski.
After a quick, targeted search on Ancestry.com, I was able to find death certificates for four of the victims: Frank Kunkel, Frank Nowarczyk, Martin Jankowiak, and Michael Ruchalski. These death certificates are very helpful because they include other identifying information, including where they were buried.
But that was where my good luck ran out. As I started to search for other names, it became clear this would be a difficult task. John Gurda notes, that’s kind of how this research goes.
"Tedious, granular. And I think the lesson from a lot of this research is that history is messy," says Gurda.
To dig into the mess, I used three main resources in the Milwaukee Public Library’s Zeidler Room: city directories, historic newspapers, and local history books. I started by trying to find these men in the city directories, with mixed success.
That’s when I headed to the historic newspaper database, to find contemporary accounts of what happened that day.
But these newspapers, while helpful, are only as reliable as the author, as librarian Heather Smith explains, and uses the census as an example.
"You have to understand how this information is collected and recorded. So if a census worker is a complete stranger to you, comes to your door — they’re going to write down what you tell them in their record. So if they get some detail wrong because they perceived that you spoke with an accent and they didn’t clearly understand what you said to them, that’s what gets put into the census records that we now are using for research decades later," Smith explains.
A few things became clear in reading the accounts from that day: the scene was chaotic and American journalists weren’t great at deciphering Polish names. Some victims I had confirmed through death certificates had entirely wrong names listed in the papers.
In one article on the day of the massacre from the Milwaukee Daily Journal, Frank Nowarczyk was listed as Jacques Narackack; Martin Jankowiak was instead called, Marcus Jokoveski. It also included John Marsh among the victims.
John Marsh was one of three remaining names that I was searching for, along with Johann Zazka and Robert Erdmann.
But as the dust settled the following day, there was an updated list in the Daily Journal with the proper names of everyone who had been shot. John Marsh was now John Maszk. And John Maszk had a death certificate.
The misspelling of his name wasn’t an anomaly, as librarian Heather Smith notes.
"All of this stuff was in many cases communicated verbally. If things were written down, they were written down in non-standardized fashion, which is why you’ll find variations in spelling in historical records," says Smith.
In fact, different papers would write names differently. Although he was known as John Maszk in the Daily Journal, he was called Johann Maszka in the Sentinel. Overtime, it’s likely that John Maszk had been split into two separate victims, due to the variance in how his name was spelled.
The victims
After a lot of research, here is what I found on each of the believed victims, with alternate names and additional information in brackets:
- Frank Kunkel [Franz], 69-years-old, lived at 43 S. Bay St, buried at Holy Trinity
- Frank Nowarczyk [Franz, Jacques Narackeck, Nowatzak], 13-years-old, lived at 485 Maple St., buried at Holy Trinity
- Michael Ruchalski [Kukalski, Ruholski], 37-years-old, lived at S. Bay St., buried at Holy Trinity
- Martin Jankowiak [Marcus Jokoveski, Jankowia], 24-years-old, lived at 768 8th Ave, buried at Holy Trinity
- John Maszk [Johann Maszka, Zazka, Marsh], 23-years-old, 700 4th Ave., buried at Holy Trinity
- Albert Erdmann [Robert Erdman, Urtmann], believed to be 19-years-old, lived at 677 Windlake [Paul Erdamnn lived at the same address, according to the 1885-1887 directories], shot in the abdomen [no death certificate found]
- Casemir Dudek [Casmer, Dultt], believed to be 20-30 years old, lived in the town of Seymour, shot in the arm and face and lost half his jaw
- Fred Golbeck [Friedrich], age unmentioned, lived at 696 Railroad St., shot through both thighs but survived [name found at the same address in the 1887-1888 city directories]
- Johann Osinski, believed to be 28-years-old, lived at 700 Grove St., shot through right shoulder
A Controversial movement and event
Reading through the newspapers of that time shines light on another reality: many did not view these protesters as victims. And that’s born out in their death certificates.
"The certificate of Michael Ruchalski, the cause of death is listed as “shot in a mob.” That’s editorial. That’s saying this is a guy who is out with the rabble, and it was a fairly accurate reflection, I think, of how people in the mainstream thought of the disturbances that first week of May," says Gurda.
That gets to another reality: most newspapers seemed more concerned about the threat to public order than they were about the fate of those who had been shot. Updates on the injured sunk lower and lower in the newspapers.
Most had stopped covering them entirely less than a week after the massacre. Instead, they focused on the trials of those who had led the movement.
Gurda explains, "Any threat to law and order is met with resistance by the establishment. That’s why it’s called the establishment, you know, both the corporate side and the media side, as well. So you have a city shut down by strikers who were marching from one employer to another to dramatize their demands. That was clearly a challenge to the status quo."
The majority of protesters were recent immigrants and not all of them had ties to the community. These were people who could go missing without much notice, making it very difficult to track them down.
The massacre had also pitted neighbor against neighbor. The local Kosciusko Guards were among the militiamen who fired on the protesters. They were also Polish immigrants who lived in the same community.
While the newspapers lauded the bravery of the militia, many in the Polish community came out against them.
"They were boycotted by people on the south side and at the same time, people of Polish background in general were kind of stigmatized as, 'Polanders and drunkards need not apply to jobs.' So they were kind of the troublesome workers. But also internally, there was division about the people who were being shot at and the people who were doing the shooting," says Gurda.
It’s unclear what happened to the four other victims with serious injuries. But after a lot of research, I can definitively say at least five people died that day and I know where they’re buried: Holy Trinity Cemetery, now part of St. Adalbert’s Cemetery in Milwaukee’s Morgandale neighborhood.
The final resting place: Holy Trinity Cemetery
With this information in hand, I went to the cemetery with our question-asker Brenna.
We checked in at the cemetery office and asked them to look up records from the 1880s. There wasn’t a single record left from 1886. The exact location of the Bay View Massacre victims’ graves seem to have been lost to time.
But the people they represented are still there and their stories still resonate with our world today.
"The larger picture is absolutely, incontrovertibly correct, where you have an oppressed workforce resisting oppression, and the forces of capital clamping down, closing in. That’s the story and we need to keep sight of that and the impact it had on politics later on, on families, certainly. So whether it’s five, whether it’s seven, whether nine — people died and they died violent deaths at the hands of their neighbors," says Gurda.
At least 9 people were shot that day in May. Many were severely injured. Most victims were laborers whose livelihoods depended on their good health and those who survived were never the same after that day. But neither was Milwaukee.
"The larger picture is absolutely, incontrovertibly correct, where you have an oppressed workforce resisting oppression, and the forces of capital clamping down, closing in. That’s the story and we need to keep sight of," says Gurda.
Although these protests were incredibly controversial, the massacre had helped shift public opinion on labor rights. The sacrifices of the protesters led to better working conditions in the mills and factories, and the rise of a new political party.
Gurda explains, "It broke the back of the 8-hour movement, but also galvanized those workers to organize politically. So they established the People’s Party that swept the next elections, the fall elections and that was a very important catalyst for the rise of the socialists in Milwaukee."
And maybe learning all of that is worth a bit of digging.
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