It’s easy to see the development of towns of the Old West of the late 1800s as being related only to local issues, such as a railroad, a cattle trail or a silver mine, but despite its out-of-the-way location in extreme southern Arizona, Bisbee history exhibits a direct parallel to that the the nation.
Main Street, Bisbee, in the 1920s, showing streetcar tracks.
A copper-mining city that sprang from an 1877 discovery, just as Tombstone, its neighbor to the north, came from an 1877 silver discovery, Bisbee soon became an urban center, more on par with El Paso or San Diego than the host of other boom-bust communities of the West.
The Bisbee mines produced so much copper in their early years that the community was able to display the trappings of great wealth, unlike other such towns, especially after the railroad arrived in 1889. Its women’s fashion stores, for example, were able to offer the same goods that the elite of society in New York City were wearing, and just as soon as they were on the market, so ladies in Bisbee could read the ads in out-of-town newspapers and go to the locals stores expecting to find the same offerings.
High-end sea-food restaurants
Because of the city’s proximity to Guaymas on the Sea of Cortez and to Los Angeles, both of which had a straight show to Bisbee by rail, seafood was offered fresh in many of the community’s better restaurants. Bisbee history shows that because there was such a demand for upscale purchases, whether dresses or shrimp, there was sufficient competition to keep prices down.
Bisbee never was the largest city in Arizona, always behind the much older Tucson during its first half century of Bisbee’s existence, but it was the wealthiest during much of this period. Bank deposits and assessed valuations were higher than those of any other city or mining camp in the territory (till 1912) and the state.
The copper mines produced the rich copper ores that gave the big companies tremendous profits, and many shares of stock were traded at the local office of the New York Stock Exchange, and allowed for free spending, whether for salaries to attract the best workers or supplies to enrich a large group of merchants. (Shares also were traded at local pawn shops.)
The wealth of Bisbee mines didn’t just trickle down; there was a cascade of money that reached most all parts of Bisbee’s society.
Bisbee and the electric revolution
Copper production in Bisbee grew apace with the revolution begun by Thomas Edison in the early 1880s. The city’s copper mines were the fountain from which the Age of Electricity erupted, but the benefits of ever-growing technology — in the form of devices that ran off electric power — came back to the city as well, to be used in the mine and around the community.
As other cities around the nation were transformed by the new industrial age, so was Bisbee. And this went deep into the society. For example, the two major mining companies — Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Co. and the Calumet & Arizona Mining Co. — didn’t compete directly in the production of copper, but rather on another level. Each sought to have the best baseball team or the best hospital, employing the latest technology available.
Social issues also played out in Bisbee history just as they did in other urban centers around the nation. While the nation was debating the right of women to vote, in Bisbee women got the right to vote in a school bond election as early as 1904.
Its great early wealth has given Bisbee history an intensity and variety far beyond that of most Western mining camp. Bisbee mines were known throughout the industry worldwide for their richness and productivity. This makes the study of Bisbee history far more exciting than its location and size would normally indicate.
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