The Copper Left, Bisbee Stayed

The canyon at the foot of the Mule Mountains has a main street that twists to follow the wash, and off that street the houses climb whatever they can grip. Some stand on wooden legs. Others are set so deep into the rock that the back wall is the mountain itself. Between them run stairways where a street would not fit — narrow flights of concrete and iron going up past fences, clotheslines, and porches loaded with potted geraniums. In the morning the east-facing steps light up one at a time. By afternoon the whole canyon glows like the inside of an oven.

Bisbee, Arizona, hangs on this slope near the Mexican border, high enough that the summer heat breaks at evening and the winter cold comes down off the hill at dusk. The place was not laid out so much as wedged. Prospectors found copper, then more copper, and then so much copper that a city appeared where nobody had intended one. Saloons, boarding houses, a railroad, all of it crammed into a defile that a less determined town would have left to the rattlesnakes. The houses are painted the colors of the high desert — adobe red, faded turquoise, a yellow that shows against the gray rock like a shout.

The stairways remain, and so do the buildings, and past the last row of houses the ground opens into the hollow that paid for all of it.

Follow the road east and the houses stop and the Lavender Pit begins, a terraced bowl sunk into the hillside on a scale that reads from the rim as man-made. The benches step down one above the next, each rim sharp enough to catch the low sun and throw it back in long copper lines. The pit is the size of the town it built.

Copper Was the Whole Argument

The ore under these mountains is the reason the town exists. Nothing else explains a city built at such an angle — streets that dead-end into steps, houses stacked on the slope like cards in a crooked game. For decades the mines here ranked among the richest copper grounds in the West, and the money ran through everything: the brick banks, the opera house, the freight wagons climbing the switchbacks to the railroad, the faces of the men coming off shift at dark with ore dust ground into their coveralls like glitter.

The work went down as far as men could haul air, and the deeper a man went the more the mountain pressed in on him. Above ground the company ran much of the town — the houses, the store, the hospital, and the payroll that decided elections. Work was dangerous and wages were disputed. In the summer of 1917, during a walkout, the county sheriff swore in a posse of company men, rounded up more than a thousand striking miners, and loaded them onto railroad cars that carried them out of state. A few of them made their way back over the following weeks. The town went on digging. The story is not the first thing written on the gallery walls now, but it is in the ground.

On the north edge of town, the ravine called Brewery Gulch filled with saloons when the drill crews came off shift. In its loud years it was the sort of street a working town keeps at the edge of its own respectability — dance halls, card rooms, bars shoulder to shoulder down the slope. The families in the houses above the gulch learned not to argue with the noise. It was the sound of the economy turning.

The Leaving and the Staying

By the 1970s the ore was thinner and the price of copper had fallen, and the company that had kept the canyon alive made the calculation every mining town dreads. It shut the mines, pulled the equipment, and left. The population fell. Storefronts closed. For-sale signs stayed up so long the sun faded them to blank boards.

The boarding houses went quiet. The bars that had never seen a slow night closed their doors. Mining families left for the cities, for flat ground and work that did not depend on the price of a metal. Those who stayed learned the sound of a town with little to do: the grit of a broom on the sidewalk, the creak of a screen door somewhere up the hill.

For a few years the place had the look of a decision postponed. Main Street kept its buildings but not its energy. The people who stayed found work in the county offices or drove out of the canyon each morning for jobs elsewhere. The ones who left sold houses for whatever the market would bear, which was not much. The stairways that had always been the town's joke — a place so steep it substituted steps for sidewalks — became a practical matter again for anyone carrying a week of groceries.

But the closing was never total. Bisbee kept its place as the seat of Cochise County, and county government does not vanish because a mine does. The courthouse stayed. The hospital stayed. The people who had no reason to leave, and the ones who refused to, filled the empty rooms with the continuations of their own lives. A town does not need a reason to stay the way it needed a reason to be built. It needs a few stubborn people and a patch of ground that can still feel like home after the main source of its wealth is gone.

The Second Life

What came next was a slow drift of people who saw a canyon town with cheap roofs over cracked sidewalks, and who had the particular skill of living on little money while making something from their hands. Painters, potters, writers, mechanics with an eye for the old trucks parked behind the hardware store. They did not come to make a tourist town. They came because the houses were cheap, the bars were dark, and the light was worth standing still for.

The repair happened one building at a time, over years, the way such work happens in a place without much capital. A gallery opened. A bakery opened. A feed store became a bookshop that smelled of paper and dust. The old storefronts that had sold work clothes to miners began selling boots and coffee and secondhand furniture. Visitors came on weekends, then during the week. The town discovered that being interesting is a trade of its own, and it learned the work without giving up the place.

Each autumn the town stages a race up its stairways, and the runners pass through the residential blocks that visitors never enter from a car — under laundry lines, up flights poured in the mining years, past back porches that look out over the canyon. In the summer the streets are full and the town is used to being looked at. But the town is home year-round to retirees, artists who came in the empty years, and county workers keeping the government warm. They know the difference between high season and the slow months, when the stairs are quiet, the shopkeepers have time to sit, and the pit holds whatever rain has found its way down to the bottom.

The copper ran out in the sense that it stopped being worth the digging. What remains is the town, still pinned to its slope, still connected by its stairways, still making its living in the old rooms. On a winter afternoon the sun moves down the steps one at a time. Somebody locks the door of the bookshop and heads up the hill. The canyon goes quiet. It is just the next shift.

Photos: Nicholas Hartmann, Infrogmation (CC BY-SA 4.0)