Bisbee's Ghosts

On June 26, 1917, copper miners in the border town of Bisbee, Arizona, went on strike. The companies they worked for had refused demands put forth by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) for higher pay, safer working conditions, and an end to wage discrimination against Mexican miners and union members. Rather than negotiate, the companies worked with the local sheriff to deputize a "posse" of 2,000 men to deport the strikers. Early in the morning on July 12, the vigilantes roused the miners from their beds at gunpoint, loaded them onto cattle cars, and sent them on a sixteen-hour, 200-mile trip across state lines to Columbus, New Mexico. They were told never to return, on threat of death. One hundred years later the town of Bisbee staged a reenactment of the deportation in collaboration with filmmaker Robert Greene, whose Bisbee '17 was released in theaters last September.