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COPYRIGHT 2005 South Florida Sun-Sentinal
Byline: Thomas Swick
BISBEE, Ariz. _ Who lives here?
Cities never raise the question. (Well, you name `em.) Even most small towns have their bespoken lines of established families. It's only those isolated, improbable, checkered places that thrived and died and suddenly appear in the fold of a mountain, looking more prosperous than they have any right to, that make you wonder about the inhabitants of the houses climbing the hills of scrub oak.
Places like Bisbee, Arizona.
In its heyday, around the First World War, Bisbee produced nearly 25 percent of the world's copper. Miners arrived not just from Pennsylvania and West Virginia but Ireland, England (especially Cornwall), Sweden, Finland, Serbia, Croatia, and Mexico (seven miles to the south). The town boasted a stock exchange, Arizona's first golf course, one of the early JC Penney's, 52 mom and pop grocery stores, and over 50 bars and saloons, many of them open 24 hours to serve the miners no matter their shift. Almost all of them were on a street dubbed "Brewery Gulch," sometimes called "the wildest place in the West." You can still see, standing like forgotten halves of victory stands, the stone steps that once led to brothel doors.
On July 12, 1917, 2,000 miners _ almost half the population _ were rounded up, on suspicion of sympathies with the International Workers of the World, and marched out of town to the Warren baseball field. (It still stands today, said to be the oldest ballfield in continuous use in the country.) There, about 800 of the men recanted, and were allowed to go back...
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