The Bisbee Deportation

Nearly 100 years ago, a quarter of Bisbee's population rounded up and deported another quarter of Bisbee's population. It was known contemporarily as "The Great Wobbly Drive" if you were sympathetic to the 'patriots' who rounded up their neighbors. It is now known as the Bisbee Deportation of 1917.

It started with a strike at the mines, where miners wanted safer practices in their inherently dangerous jobs, and a fair wage system in which the same work would warrant the same pay. It ended with almost 1200 Bisbee citizens being abandoned in Hermanez, New Mexico. What happened in between  - and why - is still debated.

For a critical analysis of the events, click over to my essay on the Deportation and its causes, here https://archersbones.wordpress.com/2016/04/26/bisbeedeportation/

Also, if you're in town, you can check out the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum's exhibit on the Deportation. They're open 10-4 every day.

The University of Arizona has a great web exhibit, too. You can find it here http://www.library.arizona.edu/exhibits/bisbee/index.html

Jim Harrison, Scarface, and Bisbee

Two days ago, on 28 March 2016, the world learned that author Jim Harrison had died in his home in Patagonia, Arizona. New York Times author Margalit Fox has done a wonderful article describing the life and personality of Harrison, which you can find here.

In 1984, Thornton, along with the other directors of the Bisbee Poetry Festival, invited Harrison to participate in the (then annual) festival. His response, shared by Thornton on the 29th of March, sums up his humor quite succinctly.

(Scarface, in fact, is not an autobiography of Jim Harrison.)

Story: Harry E. Wootton

Bisbee tidbit: did you know that Harry E. Wootton, owner of Wootton Hardware on upper Main St and a member of the Knights Templar, was the only person charged for kidnapping in the Bisbee Deportation case? He lived at 408 Tombstone Canyon until the late 1940s or early 1950s, and his name is set in the concrete on the sidewalk in front of his house. The house cost him about $6000 to build. The retaining wall cost almost another $6000.

Robert Lenon, author of It Seems Like Only Yesterday, tells these stories about Harry Wootton (which Mr. Lenon spells "Wooten").

"Harry was a fine gent and ran a first-class hardware store downtown. I don't know how he kept his business going because he was so kind-hearted that he would often give stuff away when somebody came along with a sob story. One day a fellow came by who had a patent for an appliance that he wanted to mass produce. So Harry looked at it and asked, "What's this?" "It's a double line; it's a clothesline without pins." It had two lines, one of which had metal clips to catch and hold the laundered clothes. Instead of handling loose pins you'd snap your clothes onto a fastener on the parallel line. The inventor had made a thousand of them or so, and Harry bought maybe 300. He used a pair for display in his store, but I don't think he ever sold a single one!

"Some years earlier Harry had had a Model T Ford. Most people know what the old Model Ts looked like, but nowadays not so many know how they worked. The had three pedals - reverse, brake, and low gear. Years earlier Harry had gotten his car in a real jam on a dead-end Bisbee street. I remember seeing him sitting on a chair at a party showing guests how he contrived to turn his 12-foot car around in a 14-foot driveway. Another time, in similar fashion, he demonstrated how he had been forced to turn around fast because of a grass fire at the dead end of a narrow alley. He was moving his feet the right way, spinning the (imaginary) steering wheel in the proper direction, and looking over his shoulder at the fire. He did all that on a kitchen chair and told the story, all at the same time. It was quite a workout, as good an exercise as you'll see - going through all those driving maneuvers on a kitchen chair. He was in the wrong profession. He should have been in a circus!

"Even though he was a nice guy and a soft touch, Harry lost favor with some of the townsfolk after an incident during World War I - the Bisbee Deportation... Phelps Dodge deported several hundred men (including my friend Harvey James) because of their alledged involvement with the Industrial Workers of the World. Harry Wooten was one of the armed PD "deputies" who rounded up the "troublemakers" and herded them into railroad cattle cars to be run out of town. Some of the deportees eventually returned to Bisbee, and they and their families refused to trade with Wooten because he'd been a Company man."




This excerpt is from Robert Lenon's book, It Seems Like Only Yesterday: Mining and Mapping in Arizona's First Century (Vol.2: Bisbee and Patagonia), pages 55-57.

Story: Baseball teams, 1944

I'm reading "Chihuahua Hill: Bisbee, Arizona" this morning. It's a memoir by Chris Dabovich, about his life in Bisbee. I came across this passage about the baseball teams they had as kids. Anybody else know a story about these teams?

(June 1944)
"At this particular point in my life, I was seventeen and would be eighteen in six months. I was going to start my senior year at Bisbee High School, but for now I was more interested in going to town to see what was going on. There were always guys hanging around. I'd go there, tell a few jokes, look at the girls, etc. Sometimes we, (the guys and I) would get together to play a baseball game. We use to play a lot of baseball in those days. Everyone had a glove, bats and balls. These were the names of the teams: The Chihuahua Hill Indians, The Tin Town Rats, The Warren Pretty Boys, The Don Luis Bastards, and The Brewery Gulch Gangsters. I lived on Chihuahua Hill, but played on The Brewery Gulch Gangsters team. Why? I guess it was because most of the guys I palled around with were on the Gangsters team."

Story: Collecting Jurors, 1913-1915

In 1913, Percy Bowden was the deputy to Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler. One of their tasks was to serve summons for jury duty. They had a hard time finding people, because people seemed to "make themselves scarce" when juror selection time came around. Percy and the sheriff drove all over the county, several times, looking for folks.

"After this chore was over, Harry Wheeler told Percy that he believed that there must be a better way to round up jurors for duty than this method... The next year at about the same time, he told Percy that they would attend a rodeo and see if they could find some men to serve on the jury for the coming fall term of court and save a lot of time they both needed for other places. They arrived and mingled with the crowd for a while, then went back to the car where he started writing in names on the summonses. They took them and very quickly served twelve picked men, half the number they needed. Later, they went to a well-attended dance and got the other twelve served in the same fashion; one of the sponsors said it might hurt attendance at their next dance. Knowing this was not the legal method of handling this, the little sheriff told Percy they would think up some other way to do it the next year." (Bond p18)

And indeed, the next year, Sheriff Wheeler sponsored his own dance. He and Percy were the musicians; between the two of them, they could play one song, called "Turkey in the Straw." They played that song the entire evening - with only one early failed attempt at some other song - varying the speed and tone to make it work for various types of dances.

"At each intermission Harry would write a few names on the summonses. Close to one o'clock the ladies put a table in the center of the dance hall and piled it with good-looking sandwiches and drinks... Harry said that this was the time to serve the jury summonses. He handed Percy part of them, and they soon had their twenty-four jurors ready for the next term of court. Percy noticed that almost all the selected jurors were young baseball players that they had been playing against in different towns... Percy asked him why he wrote in so many ball players, and he said that after court each day they could get up a game with this crowd." (Bond p19-20)

The judge wasn't happy with Wheeler's method of jury selection, and he almost got in trouble. The following year, they did it the legal way.

(This story happened in Cochise County. The Sheriff's office was still in Tombstone at that time, and the dance sponsored by Sheriff Wheeler was probably held in Pearce. I don't know where the ball game and the other dance were held.)

[Excerpts from the book Percy Bowden, Born to be a Frontier Lawman, by Ervin Bond, p18-20]

About the Bisbee Historians Project

The Bisbee Historians Project begins with the idea that everyone is a historian. We all collect our own stories as we live them, and history is made of our stories.

Written histories are usually pieced together from the things we leave behind - official records, newspaper articles, that sort of thing. The daily lives of people often are formed by conjecture, except in those relatively rare instances where there is a diary or journal available.

The goal of the Bisbee Historians Project is to collect the stories of Bisbee, Arizona, USA, - to give future generations a clearer picture of the people who lived here before them: us. 

"If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history."

-Carl Becker, in his annual address of the president to the American Historical Association, 1931

It's History, by the people, for the people.