Touring Bisbee's Underground

Touring Bisbee's Fabulous Underground

If, like many Southwestern history buffs, you've longed for an opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the hardrock miner of yesteryear, as he picked, shoveled and blasted his way deep into the bowels of the earth, Bisbee has the answer to your dream.

Located just off U.S. 80, approximately 40 miles south of Interstate 10, Bisbee today is a quiet, peaceful and scenic town, where time seems to have stopped somewhere around 1910, at the height of its boom. But the boom ended by Robert W. Jones abruptly in 1974, when the PhelpsDodge Company announced that effective with the completion of the night shift on December 14, the huge Lavender Pit, which began operations in the 1950s, would cease. The reason? Depletion of high grade ore. Six months later, the second biggest mining operation in the area, the fabulous Copper Queen Mine, an underground series of shafts also owned by Phelps-Dodge, put a padlock on its 95-year history and called it a day. (See AHM, Sept., 1975, pg. 38: "Towns Too Tough To Die.") In its time the fabulous "Queen" had produced over $2 billion worth of copper. How could anything this big come to an end, the benumbed miners asked themselves. But come to an end it did, and many waited for the domino-effect to occur, as it had done so often in the past, wiping out whole communities overnight.

Would the hardening of the mines' arteries mean the death of Bisbee, once a close rival of its sister-city Tombstone?

Like Tombstone to the north, Bisbee has had other things going for it. First, there's its comfortable all-year-round climate, which has attracted home buyers from the nearby Army base at Ft. Huachuca; and then there's the town, itself, which has been called one of the most photogenic and picturesque towns in the Southwest, a fact which has lured professional and amateur photographers as well as vacationing sightseers from all over the world.

Banking on this tourist attractiveness local businessmen, instead of folding up their tents, invested in refurbishing businesses. The famous old Copper Queen Hotel was renovated. And the old Phelps-Dodge office building, with its mining and history museum, was declared a National Historical Site.

Local stores and banks also did their part in helping the town stabilize. Some created historical displays to attract tourists, while others featured some of the choice mineral specimens found in the old mines. One such display in a local bank was so attractive, in fact, that when the bank was held up it was the mineral specimens that were taken and not the money in the vault!

But to those who really want to feel the heartbeat of the past, all this is just a prelude to the adventure that awaits in the mines themselves.

A key aspect of the tourist business being developed in Bisbee are the mine tours, designed to appeal to all. The Lavender Pit tour, a comfortable bus ride, primarily, starts at the overlook by the now silent pit and provides an insight into above-ground mining techniques.But the real thrill is the underground tour of the historic Copper Queen, leased to the town for a dollar a year. A pet project promoted by Mayor Chuck Eads and his staff, the preparatory work required the aid of dozens of volunteers, including many of the town's officials. Eads and his volunteers went at the task with vigor. Retired miners lent their skills to muck out the tunnels underground. And wives and widows of miners pitched in

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(Below) Bisbee's Civic Center is also the mining and historical museum, where yesteryear comes alive through a variety of displays and historical artifacts from the town and its once rich mines.

(Right) Bisbee in its early days was a typical western frontier mining town, complete with huge ore wagons and 20 mule teams. In the foreground is some of the first ore to be taken from what would later become one of the largest open pit mines in the world.

(Right, below) The same area as above, after nearly a century of operation, shows the town of Bisbee perched precariously on the lip of the huge Lavender Pit it brought to life.

Punched into Bucky O'Neill Hill is the entrance to the once fabulous Copper Queen Mine, now the starting point of a new underground tour. Bob Jones (Left, below) Great sections of the 2000 miles of shafts beneath the town had to be mucked out by retired miners before the mine could be safely toured. Bob Jones

UNDERGROUND from page 2

To clean out the old building to be used for a tour office.

History becomes a living, breathing almost tangible thing down in the mine. Here in the cool dampness, you get a real look at the subterranean world of the miner and his mules, as he toiled deep in the recesses of the earth, when Arizona was growing into its new statehood. It's the home of the Tommyknocker, the prankish elf Cornish miners feared as they strained for yet another big strike, another glimpse of a jewel-lined cavity of precious and colorful copper minerals.

Your tour starts at the tour office, a building originally used as a miner's changing room. The structure itself rests on the site of Bisbee's first smelter. The tunnel you enter is punched into fractured Bucky O'Neill Hill, a limestone knob which dominates the area and under which a number of huge ore deposits were found. You'll be walking only a section of the more than 2000 miles of tunnels under the old town. As you enter the Queen Tunnel the bright yellow beam of your miner's lamp seems swallowed by the black depths. The air temperature in the tunnel is 47 degrees Fahrenheit and moving rather briskly, so you're glad to have on your heavy yellow slicker, which along with your lamp are actual miner's equipment donated by Phelps-Dodge.

For the most part the walls of the tunnel are untimbered. It was originally dug from the inside out to bring ore from the Southwest Shaft, which you'll see later in the tour. Following the single pair of mine tracks, you pass a niche in the rock wall which once housed a burro or mule that worked the underground shaft. The walls of the once pristine rock tunnel are now smoky black as this area was later used for on-the-spot fire training

Of mine crews. But the soot does not mask the limestone flows which show where ground water has followed a fracture and brought layers of once white carbonate minerals to the opening.

The ground waters that deposited these simple flows also carved huge underground openings beneath Bisbee. You'll learn that by actual count there have been over 2000 such natural caverns encountered during mining here, caverns in which some of Bisbee's richest and most colorful ores were found. Not all are as huge as the "Jewel Box," however, which once served as a dance hall for a high school graduation.

Your first evidence of real mining along the tour is an inclined shaft cutting across the tunnel. This shaft started on the surface at the old "glory hole," site of the first mining at Bisbee. The future of Bisbee was still in doubt until this incline was dug and miners encountered a massive, rich ore body measuring about 60 feet thick and over 400 feet long.

Farther along the tunnel you'll be taken into a large open area where ores have been mined out. Miners call it a stope and it is usually dug from beneath. "Stoping up" enabled miners to use gravity to move ores and to also take advantage of the breaking up of falling rock, which saved crushing costs later.

There also are exhibits set up along the tunnels to help you understand blasting and drilling techniques used in the old Queen.

As you penetrate deeper into the shaft you'll find more evidence of actual mining. Ore chutes, funnel-like timbered openings, pierce the walls at a steep angle. These openings are really the bottom end of huge open stopes where men mined out the ore. Resting below them are rugged steel ore cars capable of hauling a ton of crushed rock and ore to the surface. The silent ore cars seem to be waiting for some ghostly miner to "shoot" the walls of the stope just once more, and send a cascade of fractured rock rich in copper tumbling into their yawning tops. The ore cars will wait forever but the huge stopes they emptied are there. It is hoped some of the biggest stopes will become a part of a newly planned adventure tour yet to be opened.The ore car display is right next to the Southwest Shaft from which came the bulk of the ore hauled out of the Queen tunnel. This shaft extends 700 feet vertically, but it never reaches daylight because it was dug completely underground and was used to get from one ore body to another. An elevator and level station also have been reconstructed here, enabling you to visualize more completely the complex operations of mining underground.

The close of the tour offers still another treat, a ride on the narrow knee-hugging mine train to daylight. Though the Queen Tunnel Tour now is open the story of underground Bisbee is just beginning. A recent federal grant of $800,000 is going to be used to extend and complete the Queen Tour and construct yet another underground experience. Bisbee expert Dick Graeme calls it "A real adventure, designed for the active and curious." Plans call for it to travel through several levels of the mines, into huge man-made stopes and large natural caverns, with more extensive views of the miners' life underground. Completion is expected by late 1978.

(Left) Breathtaking Crystal Cave, one of the largest underground natural formations found by Bisbee miners, was filled-in to prevent cave-ins. Plans now call for reopening the cave as part of the new underground tour.

(Below) Visitors to the Queen conclude their tour of the mine with a ride on the narrow knee-hugging mine train to daylight.

If you're stirred by colorful pageants and his-torical events, you'll enjoy a visit to Bisbee August 6th and 7th. That's when the town pre-sents its Centennial Claims Celebration, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first recorded claim in the area. Included in the two-day event will be a reopening of the newly remodeled Mining and Historical Museum on August 6 (10 A.M. to 4 P.M. at No. 5 Queen's Plaza) and the presentation of the 8th Annual Historic Pageant, by the Bisbee Council on the Arts and Humanities. There are two shows planned at the Greenway School Auditorium, the first on August 6 at 7:30 P.M. and then again on August 7th at 2 Ρ.Μ.