Mining has never been for the fainthearted, but these days, it’s safer than it was in the early 1900s, when errant blasts and cave-ins ended many workers’ lives. Bravery was a job requirement, and so was care for one’s fellow man. Robert Warner checked both boxes.
On the afternoon of October 16, 1903, Warner was at the top of the 300-foot-deep Portage Lake Mine, southeast of Bisbee’s Warren district, waiting to hoist miners O.M. King and Bob Bowdish to the surface. But when he heard an explosive charge go off prematurely, he knew something was wrong — and sprang into action.
“I slid down the cable to the pump station, about 150 feet from the top, and yelled to King and Bob but could get no response,” Warner told the Bisbee Daily Review. “I then slid down the rest of the way and found King and Bowdish both conscious.”
But a boulder was resting on King, who’d also taken a blow to the head; Bowdish, meanwhile, had a compound arm fracture and was up to his chin in the water that was flowing into the shaft.
Warner moved the boulder and pulled both men clear of the water, but because the hoist bucket had been “blown to pieces,” he fastened himself to the cable and was pulled to the surface. He briefly fainted, possibly as a result of the fumes in the mine, before he and other miners attached a new bucket and went back to rescue King, then Bowdish. During the latter’s ascent, three more charges detonated below; those would have killed both men, along with Warner, had the rescue occurred minutes later.
Instead, both men survived after being hospitalized. In a later editorial, the Daily Review praised Warner for being “absolutely oblivious of his own danger and fearlessly facing death while trying to save others.” The newspaper even took up a collection to award him a medal, but according to some reports, he asked that the funds instead be given to King, who had lost an eye as a result of his injuries.
Warner married Leah Leonard a few months after the daring rescue, and in 1915, the couple purchased the Glover House, on Subway Street, and renamed it the Warner Hotel. That hotel later sat vacant for nearly a half-century before reopening in 2024; today, its name memorializes one of Bisbee’s bravest.
“All honor to Bert Warner,” the Daily Review wrote in 1903. “All honor to a manly man. All honor to a hero.”