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.

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.

This is me, on Cochise County TV's Livestream feed, doing what I will be doing a lot of -- talking.

Its focus is “bringing Cochise County together and taking it to the world.”

The show is being produced by Margaret Dillard and its co-host is Gary Dillard, creator of this blog. The show debuted Jan. 26. Among the features on that show were a look at cowboy shooting matches, the origin of Cochise County and an exhibit of artist Ted DeGrazia’s Bisbee works.

The goal of Cochise County TV is to get the 125,000 residents of the expansive county, who live in seven cities and vast rural areas, better acquainted with everything that’s going on in the region. A secondary objective is to let the rest of the world know as well, in hopes of increasing tourism, an important part of the county’s economy.

The county is as large as a couple of northeastern states and with five newspapers serving the various communities, it’s not easy to know what’s happening in other cities.

Dillard has made arrangements with the various cable companies which serve the communities to get the half-hour weekly program showing in as much of the county as possible. As the infrastructure becomes available, more of the county will be covered; that is expected to happen this year.

But buy making the programming available on the internet as well, both as it happens and in an archive, over time a video “wiki” about Cochise County also will be created.

The program is making use of the talents of area videographers, photographers and video editors. Dillard also is planning training sessions for those who want to learn some of these skills.

The programming is to be supported by advertising and sponsorships.

This audio stems from a booklet Dillard first published in 1995 with the same title, but contains more than twice as much information. It take quite a bit of text to make up almost 60 minutes of talking!

A companion book is now being published, containing the text of the audio, more than two dozen photos, references, website links and other information that can’t be put on an audio disc.

This is the first of a series of audio books being published under the imprint of Western Audio History. The will concentrate first on Cochise County and then move into a somewhat broader geographic range, mostly in Arizona.

Titles now being prepared include The Bisbee Deportation and Cochise, the Greatest Apache. Research is being done on two more volumes, The Civil War in Arizona and The Buffalo Soldiers and the Mexican Revolution.

It is anticipated that each of these also will be accompanied by companion books with numerous photographs and other material.

Dillard also is bring back into print a book that was popular in years past: Bisbee’s Fabulous Queen, As a Working Mine and as a Tour. That is not scheduled to have an accompanying audio component.

The timing on future productions is about one every two months. Most will make use of the copious amounts of material Dillard already has researched and written, but some will break new ground to provide for interesting research.

To learn more about A Brief History of Bisbee and its contents, visit the Western Audio History website.

This is a typical photo of Bisbee turquoise offered on eBay. It generally brings a premium price.

Bisbee turquoise was encountered in great quantities in the late 1950s and 1960s, about the same time that Arizona Highways magazine started publicizing the gemstone,which at the time was being set in silver by Navajo craftsmen. The fame of Native American jewelry and of Bisbee turquoise soon went worldwide, along with the magazine.

Because the best Bisbee turquoise was a deep blue, with a matrix of chocolate brown, it often was the gemstone of choice for Native craftsmen, and as their fame increased, so did that of the stone they were using. Good turquoise is relatively hard (6.5 on the Mohs scale, with talc being 1 and diamond being 10, vs. only 5.5 for lesser turquoise), it polishes to a brilliant, deep blue color and will maintain its color over a long period.

While some small quantity of turquoise were found in Bisbee underground mines, which began operation in 1880, it wasn’t until a major pocket of the material was hit in the Lavender open-pit mine in the mid-20th century that it was available in large enough quantities to become a commercial success, rivaling the best Persian for millennia past.

Bisbee’s copper was almost entirely mined by underground methods, with thousands of workers, around the clock, going each day deep into the bowels of the Mule Mountains, for the first 70 years of operations. A small surface operations was conducted as a break-even project in the 1920s, but it wasn’t until the early 1950s that a significant surface, or open-pit, operation got under way. It was named not for a color, but for the executive who engineered its development, Harrison Lavender. Bisbee mines also continued to be worked underground during that period.

Truckloads of turquoise

Large (by the standards of the day) haulage trucks, capable of carrying up to 65 tons of broken ore, or metal-containing rocks, were loaded by large electric shovels. They carried the low-grade ore to a crusher, where it was further reduced in size and fed into a concentrator, where grinding and chemicals made it possible to capture most of the metal. An ore concentrate was then shipped to a nearby smelter, where 2,000-degree temperatures melted the material, allowing the metals (which included gold and silver) to be separated from other less-valuable materials.

As mining progressed in the ever-deepening pit, it frequently encountered boulders of Bisbee turquoise, its beauty making it easy to pick out from the gray and brownish rock that hosted it. Miners frequently grabbed as much of the turquoise as they could and it left the jobsite with them.

Throughout the history of the mines, the company had a policy of letting miners take away whatever attractive minerals they could find. (That is fortunate, became many of those “rocks” are today’s fine museum-quality minerals and show the beauty of Bisbee to the entire world.)

And Bisbee offered lots of minerals. With more than 330 species of minerals found in the Bisbee mines, it’s one of the richest, most diverse ore bodies in the world. (Some of that mineral diversity can be seen today at the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum, which hosts an extensive exhibit developed in affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution.)

The mining company eventually halted the collection of Bisbee turquoise because some miners were taking great safety risks to get to it.

Today many jewelers in Bisbee actively seek local turquoise from families of miners who collected it decades ago. One company, Bisbee Blue, has the rights to mine turquoise from the old dumps and offers local material, set by Native American silversmiths, at its store at the Lavender Pit viewpoint.

Bisbee turquoise is a souvenir of local mining heritage that a visitor to the historic mining camp can take home and be proud to show off for years to come.

What is now the museum, in center foreground in this 1918 photo, was once surrounded by commercial buildings when Bisbee sought to use every possible foot of flat land

Visitors are amazed to find a facility like the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum in rural Arizona.  And they should be surprised.  It’s not your typical small town facility.

A few years ago, the Bisbee museum became the smallest institution to ask the Smithsonian Institution to participate in its affiliation program.  That meant our community would get access not only to the fabulous Smithsonian collections, but also to its expertise at creating exhibits, which is the best in the world.

The Bisbee museum, led by executive director Carrie Gustafson, went to the Smithsonian with a clear-cut plan: Bisbee’s mines produced some of the finest mineral speciments in the world, and the community wanted not only to get some of the back, but to showcase them in a manner they deserved.

The Smithsonian did far more than just say okay — it jumped on board with great enthusiasm. By any standard, Bisbee has spectacular minerals, and the opportunity to show them off was inviting to the exhibit designers. The Smithsonian’s own National Museum of Natural History displays many Bisbee stones, including a crystal cave.  But here was a chance to have much more space to make the minerals the focus of a more-encompassing exhibit.

And it was to be done in the community whose copper mines were the source of the minerals; it was to be much more than just a distant look at another piece of nature’s art.

And “Digging In” is certainly more than just pretty rocks.  It weaves together several stories beyond the minerals: the work lives of the men who mined them, the advances in technology that demanded more copper and advances that allowed the mining of lower and lower grades of ore and, finally, why we need so much copper.

As a visitor passes through the exhibit, starting “underground” and working her way toward the open pit, perhaps she doesn’t notice the progression of devices, as if on a timeline, that use copper: telephone, radio, television, air conditioning.  And perhaps she doesn’t notice the medallions that show progressively lower-grade ores: 40%, then 10% and finally down to less than 1%.

And perhaps she doesn’t realize that she has left the underground and it has become the 1950s in Bisbee and she’s now back in the sunshine, amidst the huge equipment used in the open pit.

But the message subliminally sinks in.  The men she has seen working have managed to squeeze ever-more copper out of ever-poorer rock, and in the end she sees a pile of rock that represents just how much ore it take just to care for her personal demand for the metal.  And she faces a wall of appliances: toasters and vacuums and stereos and so many more that account for her use.

This turn through a century of mining in Bisbee is only half the story, however.  Another exhibit downstairs, just recently brought up to date, shows daily life of the citizens of a copper mining town over its first 40 years.

But with the creation of Lavender Jeep Tours by Bisbee native Tom Mosier back in 2001, there became almost no limit to which parts of greater Bisbee the visitor could see.

Tom grew up in Bisbee in its heyday, got a start in the heavy-equipment business here and then moved on to own his own equipment dealerships in Phoenix and Tucson. He sold those in the 1990s and returned to Bisbee, to the home that his parents had build here.

Ever restless, he and wife Ginger, after returning from a trip to Sedona where they had taken a Pink Jeep Tour, decided that Bisbee needed the same service. Thus was born Lavender Jeep Tours.  They chose the name because it alluded to the other bright color on a Jeep tour and because it played off Bisbee’s famous Lavender Pit, named after a company executive.

The short-wheel-base Wrangler can go anywhere in Bisbee there’s even a hint of a road. The city is different in that it’s build on steep hills and the streets were laid out in a time before automobiles. Some of the community’s “two-way” roads are barely wide enough for a single vehicle, and driving etiquette in Bisbee has to take into consideration who backs up when two cars meet on the road.  (Bisbee’s fire department maintains a 1940s vintage fire engine so it can have one narrow enough to negotiate some of the streets.)

Tom’s Jeeps can go anywhere visitors want to go and his most popular tour has been the “historic Bisbee” trip, back and forth across and up the side canyons and streets that most people never see.  Even many long-time residents take the tour to get views of the town they haven’t seen since they were kids on bikes.  Tom and his drivers end up making quite a few stops since the scenery from the higher roads and trails is almost universally photogenic.

Another trip that has had regular customers from the beginning has been the “sky island” tour.  Southern Arizona is basin-and-range country, with mountain islands popping up out of the valleys every few dozen miles.  These are the Chiricahuas, the Huachucas, the Dragoons and the Mules, just to name a few in the neighborhood.

Because these sky islands are isolated, each has some differences in flora and fauna.  Bisbee sits in the Mule Mountains, and just north of the town is an area known as Juniper Flats.  It’s host to much of the county’s communications towers, but there’s also lots of backcountry filled with alligator juniper, Apache pine and other trees that grow well at 7,000 feet but not at the 5,300-foot elevation of the city.

Tom discovered that visitors wanted to see “all” of Bisbee.  The town is divided by the pit into three areas, Old Bisbee, which was the only part of town in the first couple of decades, Warren, built during an expansion of the mines just after 1900, and San Jose, built as a bedroom community for Ft. Huachuca during its growth spurt in the 1950s.  The latter two areas were incorporated into the city in 1959.

And a few miles further south is Naco, a community that is home to Turquoise Valley Golf Course and which sits right on the border with Mexico.

The “greater Bisbee tour” takes visitors through all of that area, highlighting the executive mansions in the Warren area, along with the Warren Ballpark, the oldest major-league-size ball field in the nation.

Lavender Jeep Tours offers several other trips, as well, and can customize tours to meet the visitor’s needs.  Tom has had numerous folks return time after time, either to take friends or family on the same trip they took earlier or to take the next in the series of tours around the Bisbee area.

Two projects highlighted the early years of tourism, the Queen Mine Tour and the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum.

Fast forward to 2009. Some things haven’t changed. The Mine Tour and the Museum still are the premier draws. Government is still the major employer. But the intensity has been ratcheted up.

The Museum, for example, is now affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution. The world’s best exhibit designers came to town and put together the top-floor exhibit, called “Digging In,” which takes the visitor on a tour of Bisbee’s fabulous minerals, the miner’s life in the early days, the demand that drove the copper market over the decades and much more, including the famous “wall” of copper’s use in everyday life.

An overview of this exhibit can be seen in a video I created for the Museum.

The Mine Tour also has been taken to new levels of interpretation and safety, while retaining the wonderful stories of the tour guides, all of whom have worked in the mines.

A number of other opportunities also have come to Bisbee in the intervening years. It’s possible, for example, to seen the entire town — from the top of the mountain all the way to the Mexican border — from the back seat of Lavender Jeep Tours.  Or take a guided historic walking tour.  Or a ghost tour.

Also over the years, Bisbee has developed some restaurants whose offerings would be a draw in any city.

Since the city began attracting (or should I say “drawing”) artists in the mid-1970s, Bisbee has become known as the place to go to find a wide variety of artistic styles, many of which are created locally.  A host of galleries offer a wide diversity of art.  Not to mention antique shops.  And you can still find jewelry shops that create their own variety of art using Bisbee’s famous turquoise and other stones.

Staying overnight in Bisbee is a treat far removed from the standard cookie-cutter motels of so much of America. The Copper Queen Hotel, one of Arizona’s premier lodging establishments since its opening in 1902, it still going strong, but so are numerous other places, including a number of B&Bs.

More information on all of these, and more, can be found of the websites of the Bisbee Visitor Center and the Bisbee Chamber of Commerce.  Or if you’re on the road, go to bisbee.mobi on your cell phone.  Then come back here for more details and color.