Why America Left 1,200 Workers to Die in the Desert for Demanding Fair Pay: Bisbee, Arizona

In 1917, Bisbee, Arizona was the largest city in the territory — a copper boomtown built from scratch by the Phelps Dodge Corporation, complete with a $100,000 hotel designed by New York architects, forty-seven saloons on Brewery Gulch, the first public library in Arizona, and the company's own thousand-mile railroad. Phelps Dodge owned the Copper Queen Mine, the hospital, the mercantile store, and the El Paso & Southwestern Railroad that connected all of it to the outside world. When World War I tripled the price of copper, the mines ran around the clock and the profits were staggering. The miners — immigrants from more than thirty countries — asked for six dollars a day and safer working conditions. On the morning of July 12, Sheriff Harry Wheeler and 2,200 armed men rounded up 1,186 workers, marched them to the Warren Ballpark, loaded them into company-owned cattle cars, and shipped them two hundred miles into the New Mexico desert without food or water. A federal investigation led by Felix Frankfurter called it wholly illegal. Nobody was ever convicted. This is the story of what a company town really means — told through the buildings, the money, the decisions, and the one mountain that isn't there anymore. Sources Katherine Benton-Cohen, Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2009) University of Arizona Libraries, "The Bisbee Deportation of 1917" Digital Exhibit and Archival Collections (AZ 114) Cracchiolo Law Library Digital Collections, Bisbee Deportation Case — trial transcripts and depositions taken by Cochise County Attorney John F. Ross, 1919 SAH Archipedia entries for the Copper Queen Hotel and Phelps Dodge General Office Building, by Heather N. McMahon Phelps Dodge Corporation company history, including Encyclopedia.com corporate profile and Republic of Mining archival records Arizona Memory Project / Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records — transcription of army officer's report containing demographics of deportees at the Columbus, New Mexico camp