Bisbee Deportation: Twelve Hundred Workers in Cattle Cars

Before dawn on July twelfth, nineteen seventeen, Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler handed out white armbands.

He had spent the previous several weeks organizing what he was about to do with the management of Phelps Dodge, the copper mining company that effectively controlled Bisbee, Arizona, and the surrounding region. The Industrial Workers of the World had called a strike at the Phelps Dodge mines on June twenty-sixth. More than three thousand miners, roughly eighty-five percent of the workforce, had walked out. They were demanding higher wages, safer conditions, and the end of the "Mexican wage," the two-tiered pay scale that paid Mexican and Mexican American workers less than Anglo workers for identical labor.

Wheeler deputized approximately two thousand men, many of them company employees paid with Phelps Dodge scrip. Before sunrise they moved through the streets and homes of Bisbee, pulling out miners by name from lists the company had provided. By mid-morning, they had gathered more than twelve hundred men at the Warren Ballpark, where Wheeler announced the charges: being members of an organization inimical to the war effort. The United States had entered the First World War three months earlier, and the strike had been framed as sedition.

The men were loaded at gunpoint into cattle cars, the manure-coated, open-slatted kind used for livestock. One thousand two hundred and eighty-six of them were transported under armed guard roughly two hundred miles east across the state line to Hermanas, New Mexico, a crossroads in the desert with no facilities, no food, and no water. They were ordered out of the cars and left there.

President Woodrow Wilson condemned the action. His Mediation Commission documented it in detail. A federal grand jury did indict twenty one Phelps Dodge officials, but a federal court dismissed the case before trial, ruling that no federal law had been broken. Arizona state prosecutors never brought charges at all. No one was ever convicted.

It remains the largest single deportation of labor organizers in American history. The workers who were deported included Mexican, Mexican American, Eastern European, and Anglo miners. Most of them never returned to Bisbee. The copper mines resumed production.

Bisbee today is a historic district, its Victorian storefronts intact, the Lavender Pit open-pit mine a gaping hole visible from much of the town. The deportation is acknowledged in the local museum. The legal accountability is acknowledged nowhere, because there is none.