America's first mineral rush in the mid-1840s drew speculators, scientific men, capitalists, and miners to Michigan's Copper Country, where many sought employment or a better life rather than sudden wealth. At Union Mine, which opened in 1846 under the Union Copper Company, miners in a small wilderness community faced the hardships of daily life and the dangerous labor of underground mining, experiences recorded in the journals of miner William W. Spaulding. His entries tell of arriving for work at forty dollars per month, blasting in the shaft, taking out about two tons of ore and some fine specimens of silver, enduring black flies, snow, and isolation, sharing a Christmas dinner, and witnessing both birth and death in the mining country, including a man found frozen to death near the mouth of the Iron River after starting from Lake Gogebic. The mine was abandoned as unprofitable in 1847, reopened near the end of the Civil War under the direction of Thomas Hooper when copper prices seemed promising, and closed again in 1865 when prices plunged. In 1908 the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company briefly dewatered and explored the old workings, found some copper in the shafts, but not enough to resume operations.