The Queen Mine: Ninety-Five Years Underground
Near Bisbee, Arizona
The Queen Mine produced copper for nearly a century, from eighteen eighty until nineteen seventy-five, and when it finally closed it had carved a complex of tunnels stretching in every direction beneath the Mule Mountains. In the early years, mules lived and worked underground, pulling ore cars along the mine's internal rail lines. The animals worked roughly four years in the tunnels before their eyesight began to fail, and handlers then fitted them with blinders to help their eyes readjust to daylight.
The ore grade started high and dropped steadily over nearly a century of extraction. The richest surface ore ran around twenty-three percent copper. By the mid nineteen sixties the ore grade had fallen to roughly four percent, and underground operations ended in nineteen seventy-five.
The closure threw the town into crisis. What saved the Queen Mine from demolition was the decision to turn it into a museum. In nineteen seventy-six, the Queen Mine Tour opened, with help from community volunteers who rebuilt the mine's original infrastructure.
The guides were retired Phelps Dodge miners who had worked these tunnels for decades. Visitors today still ride the original narrow-gauge mine train fifteen hundred feet horizontally into the mountain, wearing yellow slickers and hard hats, while former miners describe the drilling and blasting operations that once defined daily life here. More than a million people have taken the tour.
