The Bisbee Queen Mine Tour gets more than 50,000 visitors each year, and has been pulling them in at this level for several decades. It’s the most popular destination in the southeastern Arizona city, with the highest numbers visiting in the first four months of the year.
Bisbee and the Queen are almost synonymous. The first company of any size was the Copper Queen Mining Co., which started working in 1880 in the general location of today’s tour. Another company, developing the nearby Atlanta claim, was merged into the Copper Queen in the mid-’80s when both hit the same ore body at the same time. The merged company was the Copper Queen Consolidated Mining Co., which became Phelps Dodge Corp. in 1917 and recently was acquired by Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold.
With that name dominating the community, many other businesses (often started by the mining company), carried it on, including the Copper Queen Hotel, the Copper Queen Community Hospital and the Copper Queen Library. Whether it’s called the Copper Queen, the Bisbee Queen (which actually was a separate mining claim) or just the Queen, the mine tour takes visitors by — and back into — some of the earliest mining done in the Bisbee mines.
Bisbee’s mines produced more gold and silver than any others in Arizona, even gold mines or silver mines such as Tombstone, and in almost a century of operation, provided more than 8 billion pounds of copper to the nation’s industry. There was a period early in the 20th century when Bisbee was producing about 10 percent of the world’s entire copper supply.
That’s why Bisbee was known as “Queen of the Copper Camps.”
The mine tour goes back about a quarter of a mile into Queen Hill, just outside of Old Bisbee. Between the Copper Queen mines and the city runs the Dividend fault. At some remote time in geologic prehistory, the north side was faulted upward, some of it as much as a mile. In subsequent eons, almost all of the rich mineralization on the north side was eroded away, being washed into the alluvial plain south of town. That’s why – unlike No Name City — Bisbee has virtually no mine tunnels running under the town, while more than 2,200 miles of workings are on the south side of the fault.
The Bisbee Queen Mine Tour was developed in the mid-’70, when it became known that mining would be ending in Bisbee because the company was running out of ore, or material that could be mined at a profit. Local leaders and miners took it upon themselves to rehabilitate the old workings closest to. Though this particular part of the mine hadn’t been used for decades, it would serve as a look at historic mining.
Bisbee would still be Queen in some ways. The mine tour shows mining heritage from the 1920s and 1930s, but it’s easy for the tour guides to point out the parts of the mine that date to 50 years before that. Bisbee and its Queen help visitors bridge the gap of understanding how men worked underground in the days before electricity, before safety equipment meant that mining could be a save occupation, before automated machinery took much of the “thrill” out of being a skilled miner.
The Bisbee Queen Mine Tour is open every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas and it runs several tours a day.
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