The Copper Queen Mine calls

While we were having breakfast this morning (Thursday, March 20) we called and got a reservation to go on a Copper Queen Mine tour.  We were told to wear warm clothes as the temperature would be 47 degrees down in the mine.

We wandered around town and visited a museum in the morning, which was all about how Bisbee was started.  Of course, it was a mining town … known for copper, silver, gold and even turquoise (now called Bisbee Blue).  But copper was queen, and maybe king. 

The museum is the building in the middle of this photo, and the Copper Queen Hotel is to the right of it.  Back then, Bisbee was a hustling, bustling town.  (Photo courtesy of the Bisbee Museum, for which I don't have the proper name.)

We took our mine tour in the afternoon after learning a great deal in the museum, so this blog is a combination of information from both of our excursions. 

Two of the tour guides at the Queen.

 

All geared up to go down into the mine.

At the mine we were decked out with hard hats, battery-powered lights on belts, visibility vests and a flat brass round that had a number on it.  The brass tag was used by the miners each day when they went into the mines.  At the end of the day they returned the brasses to the office.  If one was missing, crews went down into the mine to look for them.  So it was kind of cool to be wearing one.  We rode bicycle-style on a little train that took us 1,600 feet into the mountain, and 940 feet into the bowels of the mine.  What a trip.

This is what the brass tags look like.

 

Our little train carrying maybe 45-50 of us. 

About the time copper was discovered here in Bisbee, everything contained copper … from a ship’s hull sheathing as the copper resists corrosion from the sea water and boring worms; roofing as copper lasts longer than other roofing material; cooking utensils as copper is an excellent conductor of heat; wire by the mile for generators, motors and transmission lines for electric and telephone; appliances and copper munitions.

To get the ore mined in Bisbee to the marketplace it was transported by freight wagons around the western edge of the Mule Mountains to Benson, where the nearest railroad was.  When the wagons returned to Bisbee, they hauled timber, coal and coke for the smelter, and other supplies.  The trips were shortened by 25 miles in 1881 when the New Mexico and Santa Fe Railroad connected with another railway and more when a toll road was built across the Mule Mountains. 

This is the type of wagon that was used to haul everything.

Between 1865 and 1900 there was a fivefold increase in railroad expansion, most of it west of the Mississippi.  Transporting all the goods, industrial supplies and people, railroads stimulated the economy and establishment of towns, of which Bisbee was one.

Railroad expansion was happening all over.  (Photo taken from the Bisbee Museum.)

Mining was a hard and treacherous business.  Men worked at various jobs with only dim candlelight, hammers and large “nails” or steels.  Conditions were nearly inhumane as the dust caused disease, there was a lack of light, the pounding of hammers, cave ins.  It was a business only for the very hardy.

Yet, miners sometimes broke into caves full of crystals, beauty that must have stunned them when they came upon it.  Or maybe they didn’t care as I would think being in the mines day-after-day, month-after-month, year-after-year would be full of misery, yet you had to earn a living to support yourself and your family.

Malachite, one of the items found down in the mines.

And about the time you thought the miner's plight could get no worse, here's where they did their business under the ground.  It was cleaned every three-to-four weeks.  UGH!!!

In the early days you had to use dynamite to extend a mine shaft or remove the ore.  Using dynamite required great skill.  A pattern of closely-spaced holes was drilled to hold the dynamite.  It was often done by one person, and called single-jacking.  He would use the steel and a four-pound hammer.  Double-jacking was a two-person team, one holding and rotating the steel, the other swinging the hammer.  And it was all done in very low light.

Single jacker ... one person, one steel, one hammer.

Each piece was put in a series of holes drilled by hand and a fuse was attached to each.  Different lengths of fuses were calculated and used to set the dynamite off in a precise and orderly fashion, with each stick going off in a domino effect.  If done properly, the rock would be broken up and then tossed forward out into the shaft where muckers would shovel it to be hauled away. 

Muckers had to shovel the ore to go to the carts.

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Old ore cart.

By 1905 compressed-air drilling machines were first being used in Bisbee, and had completely replaced the hand drilling by 1908.  The speed improved productivity, but with it there was a silica dust produced which caused lung disease that resulted in many deaths.  It was then discovered when you used the drills with water, the dust problem was solved.

A stick of dynamite would be attached to the fuse and stuck into one of the holes drilled in the rock.

An old explosives box.

 

Our little train took us through the shafts, where you could have reached out and touched the walls on either side.  We were warned not to if we didn't want to lose a finger to the rough walls.

While I’d always thought that miners were miners, in fact, there were quite a number of jobs.  The miners were the ones who blasted the tunnels or mined the ore by drilling and setting off dynamite.  They also set timbers as they moved through the tunnels.  Timbermen reinforced the tunnel walls and shafts, muckers shoveled the blasted rock into ore cars for removal to the surface, trammers pushed the cars with the ore to a hoist used for hauling cars to the surface.  And there were still others who worked with tools.  It was way more complicated than thought.

There wasn't much room to walk through the tunnels. 

In 1907 mules were taken underground and used to haul the ore cars to the hoists to take them to the surface.  Mules were more economical than men because mules could pull four cars while men could only push one at a time. Mules are quite intelligent, quick to adapt, sturdy and generally even-tempered, which was why they were used rather than horses.  Interestingly, that intelligence came to the forefront in the Queen Mine as there was one mule who knew when the men tried to attach five cars to the mules rather than four.  She would sit down, as would the others, and they would not move.  So, four was the max.  The mules were treated well and a vet was on hand underground to treat them for minor injuries.  They were brought back to the surface each night as it was discovered they could go blind when left underground for lengths of time.

A mule in the mine with the four carts.  (Photo used from the Bisbee Museum.)

In earlier years miners brought out only the highest-grade ore (10 percent or better), but by the 1920s better equipment and higher prices made 6 percent ore worth digging.  A grade of 10 percent means that a ton (2,000 pounds) of ore contains 200 pounds of metal.  A grade of 6 percent means that there is 120 pounds of copper in a ton of ore.  These days with the latest in technology, some mining operations will mine ore with a grade as low as 0.1 percent, or 2 pounds of copper to a ton of ore.  What it all means is that the lower the grade of ore, the more rock you have to dig out to make money.

But it wasn't all bad.  Here's a typical miner's lunchbox.  Two sandwiches and an apple.  One sandwich was for the miner; the other for the rats.  The rats were fed because if some condition became the rats would run and abandon the shaft, as would the miners then., sometimes avoiding death or injury due to a cave in.  Also, notice the two red lengths in the bottom of the box, which is not sticks of dynamite.  It's pieces of copper.  Many miners took these home, and many early homes in Bisbee were entirely  plumbed with 9-inch lengths of copper pipe.  It was not frowned upon by the company.

Copper mines transformed the rough-and-tough Bisbee of the late 1800s to one of the largest and most cultured cities between St. Louis and San Francisco by the early 1900s.  Now it’s a place for artists, many of which seem to be throwbacks to the old hippie days, hawking their wares underneath the graffiti-covered stone walls.  It’s charming, it’s quaint, it’s a fun place to visit.  And it’s a way of life here now after the last of the underground mines closed years ago in 1975.  But not before the surrounding mountains yielded more than 8 billion pounds of copper, and also gold, silver, lead and zinc.  It was one of the most productive mining districts in the world. 

We found this outside while walking around Bisbee, a bed, chair and items painted to look like a room.