Bisbee: Queen of the Copper Camps

The story of Bisbee begins with a man who made almost nothing from it. In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, a civilian Army tracker named Jack Dunn was accompanying a cavalry patrol through the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona when he spotted a mineralized outcrop near a formation called Castle Rock. Dunn filed the first claim in the Warren Mining District on August second, eighteen seventy-seven, then brought in a man named George Warren as his agent to handle the paperwork.

Warren, a laborer and prospector of considerable personal ambition and uncertain judgment, filed claims for himself instead. The story of how Warren then lost those claims is one of the great cautionary tales of the Arizona mining era. He reportedly bet that he could outrun a horse in a foot race, lost, and surrendered his share.

The district nonetheless bears his name, and so does the townsite to the south. The town that grew up in Tombstone Canyon was named not for any of these prospectors but for DeWitt Bisbee, a San Francisco banker who helped finance the early development. By most accounts, Bisbee himself never visited the place that carries his name.

It did not need him. The Copper Queen Mine and the other workings in the Mule Mountains produced copper ore of staggering richness. The earliest ore ran twenty-three percent pure copper, at a time when ten percent was considered worth mining.

Phelps Dodge, the New York mining conglomerate, recognized what it had and moved to consolidate control. By eighteen eighty-five, the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Company was in Phelps Dodge's hands, and Bisbee was on its way to becoming one of the largest cities in Arizona Territory. By nineteen ten, its population exceeded nine thousand people, making it one of the most significant urban centers between El Paso and Los Angeles.

Over its lifetime, the Warren Mining District yielded roughly eight billion pounds of copper, more than one hundred million ounces of silver, and nearly three million ounces of gold. It was one of the richest mineral districts on Earth. All of it came from these steep canyon walls, from mines worked by men who drilled in the dark with compressed air and dynamite, earning wages and breathing dust.