Stories and Lifestyle: Romantic Old West atmosphere in the South of Arizona

The old Copper-Queen-Mine in the mountain village of Bisbee in the South of Arizona, where gold, silver, copper and zinc have been mined from 1881 to 1975, is one of the many tourist attractions in the desert of southern Arizona.

The Copper Queen Mine’s tunnel does not lead downwards, but was dug straight back into the hillside. This mine alone has more than 200 km (125 miles) worth of tunnel, most of them laboriously dug and blasted by hand. For the workers, this was an arduous and dangerous work. However, there were many people who wanted one of these jobs, since it was a good source of livelihood.

The Copper Queen Mine is only one of the 34 mines that offered good jobs to young men during Bisbee’s good times. Back then, the small town grew to a population of 25,000, and around 1900 it was said to be the biggest town between St. Louis and San Francisco, in the vast lands between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

Today, the town of Bisbee, which is about ten kilometers (6 miles) from the Mexican border, is only a shadow of what it used to be – but still a nice shadow at that. The center of the small town surrounded by red hills is the “Copper Queen Hotel.” It is one of the houses that had to be built when the population started to grow and important visitors came into town on a regular basis. The Phelps Dodge Mining Company invested a lot in the building of this particular facility. In order to find a level piece of land to built the hotel on, a large portion of the mountainside had to be blasted away.

What was once luxurious, today gives way to a more romantic Old West atmosphere. And there are inexplicable phenomena in the old building: “The hotel has three resident ghosts, one for every taste,” the hotel’s manager Adam Lamb says. The first, he explains, is an older gentleman, tall, long-haired and bearded. He’s usually wearing a black cape and a hat. “Some claim they smell the smoke of a good cigar even before they see him coming.”

Even better known than the old gentleman, who usually appears in the Teddy Roosevelt room, is a younger woman in her early thirties. Her name was Julia Lowell and she was a lady of the evening, who used to meet her clients at the hotel. She fell in love with one of them, but when he didn’t return her feelings she took her own life at the hotel. Her presence can still be felt on the second and third floor of the main house. The most mischievous of the three ghosts is haunting the same place: guests are still hearing the step and the giggling of a small boy who drowned in the San Pedro River.

But not only Bisbee is a haunted place. Also in the neighbouring town of Tombstone thrilling stories are told about people who have disappeared in the desert or succumbed to the climate. So that town, where all the buildings still have their old facades, isn’t called Tombstone for no reason. And people still like to dress up in costumes of the Old West and shoot guns (with blanks in them). The town was inhabited by loose women and tough guys – men looking for silver and finding it. Those guys, who set off into the barren, hot desert in the summer, knew no fear. Even the Apache couldn’t frighten them. Back then the Natives often waylaid the silver seekers and, not infrequently, put an end to their lives – even before the first claim was staked.

Consequently, Tombstone’s most interesting tourist attraction is the graveyard – situated in the wasteland next to the colourful wooden houses. Piles of stones can be seen amid cacti and thorny shrubs. Simple wooden crosses with scrawled inscriptions tell about who is buried there and what kind of horrible death he died.

When the white settlers tried to drive the Natives off their ancestral lands, they fiercely defended their territory. Treaties were signed and broken, and finally the Natives lived in exile in the far away states of Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma – or in the mountains of the present day Chiricahua National Monument.