If you drive along the western portion of US Rt. 2 into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan you will, as you approach the Village of Vulcan in the Norway Township, come across a big, big, man. This man carries a pickaxe, wears a yellow raincoat, and stands forty feet tall as he advertises tours of the Iron Mountain Iron Mine. 

At forty feet tall, this Big John is slightly bigger than the 6’6″ described in Jimmy Dean’s famous song. I mean that’s tall, but it doesn’t really strike me as legendary.

On my recent visit to the UP, I had the opportunity to experience this tour, which is a pretty cool one that takes visitors 2600 feet through an exploratory tunnel into a large man-made cavity from which much of the mine’s nearly twenty-two million tons of retrieved iron ore were taken.

Along the way, an expert guide, who in our case was an extremely knowledgeable retired high school history teacher, tells the harrowing tale of the many miners who risked, and often lost, their lives during the operation of the mine between its opening in 1877 and its final closure in 1945. The tour includes demonstrations of some of the ingenious but terribly dangerous equipment used in different eras of mining and plenty of stories about the awful conditions in which of men worked over the years to supply the iron needed to build a burgeoning industrial world power. 

That’s an awfully big wheel barrow.

What the tour does not include is anything about Big John who stands so prominently in the parking lot, is featured on the tee shirts for sale in the gift shop, and about whom the 1961 hit song by Jimmy Dean was written. The song plays on a loop in the visitor’s center, which made me suspect that it might somehow be related to the iron mining industry in the area.

It occurred to me too late that I should have asked our knowledgeable tour guide, so instead I posed the question to the young lady selling tickets for the next tour. Her face grew a little red as she sheepishly admitted that there was absolutely no connection between Iron Mountain, or any iron mine as far as she knew, to Jimmy Dean and his song, or to the legendary figure of Big Bad John. “It just attracts attention,” she said. 

It was a disappointing answer, as I thought maybe I had stumbled onto a hidden gem of a story. Still curious, I looked into the background of the song, and discovered that the co-opted folk legend hero of miners everywhere was inspired by a real life man who, as far as I know, may never have set foot in the UP, or in an iron mine, or in any mine at all. 

Dean’s Big Bad John sprang instead from the musician’s acquaintance with an obscure, but tall, actor by the name of John Minto. Dean started jokingly calling the man, who was six feet five inches tall, “Big John,” and as the name rolled around in his head a hit song emerged, and a new American folk hero was born. 

While Vulcan’s Big Bad John holds the world record as the tallest, you can also find Big Johns in Whitwell, Tennessee and Helper, Utah. The song, and the legendary tale it tells, has no connection to those locations either, but each statue serves to honor the early miners who worked in incredibly dangerous conditions to obtain the materials necessary to build the industrialized world we live in.

In my book that makes this big, big man a gem of a story.