It appears I have hit a dead end for now with both John Thomas, Nelson’s brother whom he followed to Arizona and with Margaret, Jean’s sister whom I thought I had identified in pictures.
I did, however, turn up a lot of information about Bisbee in 1913-1921. The document of Jean’s arrival in New York in 1914 says that she is joining her husband, Nelson, whose residence is in Laundry Hill, Bisbee, Arizona. Other than the picture of Nelson holding up Ivy, this is the only other picture I have from Grandma’s album of my great-grandparents in Bisbee.
Jean is smiling impishly at the camera and Nelson is holding a baby. There’s a woman who is not smiling and looks like she might be maybe Asian. I am not even going to take a guess as to her place there. But those are some big plants! Quite a garden.
I googled “Bisbee Arizona mining 1913” and got a lot of results. So, I have been reading, trying to assemble a better picture of what life was like when this picture was taken. Though I won’t do it justice, I am sure, I will lay out what I know.
I think there’s a good chance that the picture above is taken in front of their company-supplied house on Laundry Hill. I read that the miners and their families lived in different areas around the mine, grouped according to their country or region of origin. For example, Eastern Europeans lived in one area – apparently lots of Croatians and Slovaks came to Bisbee – and Welsh, Cornish, and Manx presumably, though they were not listed, lived in Laundry Hill.
Bisbee was a prosperous town at the turn of the century. The men who founded the town went looking for gold and other minerals and discovered copper, instead. (I have not found anything yet about the Native people they no doubt pushed off and out.) The mining industry grew steadily, until Bisbee was a good size town – larger than Houston early on – and dominated by the mining company, Phelps-Dodge Copper Company, whose leaders took a paternalistic, sort of benevolent despot approach to running the company. There were lots of jobs, housing was provided, pay was generous by the standards of the day, the workday was 8-9 hours, and people from all different backgrounds were hired.
Chinese laborers could get jobs in the mine, too, though they could not live in any of the housing that the mining company built for everyone else. Openly discriminating against them was acceptable, especially since the first Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by Congress in 1882. (It was renewed every ten years until it was repealed in 1942.) Of course, the law was passed because so many Chinese people were already here, having immigrated with the encouragement of the American government to come build our railroads, in the late 1860s and 1870s. Among the many sad, infuriating things about this time in history, one really sad part to me is that so many young Chinese men came to work, to make their fortune like anyone else, but their wives or potential wives, or families, could not come to the US to join them. They couldn’t marry someone white, either, so many of them stayed, lived out their lives alone, and continued to send money back to China to help their families, whom they never saw again.
All of that may seem like a didactic digression. I think it is relevant to Nelson and Jean, though. The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first legislation to exclude people from an entire country, after they had already started to make their homes here, people who sounded different and looked different, and were easy to target for discrimination. Jean and Nelson were not like the Chinese, it seems obvious to say. They were white and they spoke English but, if you’ve ever heard someone speak with a thick Scottish accent, they can be as hard to understand as someone from China speaking English. They had their own customs and history, too.
More than that, though, I try to imagine the sense of uncertainty, and a desire to fit in, even blend in, given the consequences for people who could not blend in, even if they tried. I try to imagine pulling up roots from the only home I have known, giving up a lot to move to a new country, only to find that there’s a lot of uncertainty here, too, depending on who you are and where you come from. I don’t know. Maybe I am overstating it. I wonder if Nelson and Jean had met someone from China before coming to the US … or Croatia, or Slovakia, or any of the other countries, for that matter. Was the idea that everyone had to live in their separate enclaves a strange thing to them? Did it seem okay?
It sounds like Bisbee was the sort of American success story which high school history books love: easy to describe and oversimplify, for the purposes of making a point. An article I found described mining life under the leadership of Dr. James Douglas who wanted to foster both a moral environment as well as a financially profitable one:
“The company also paid its workers’ good wages. A library was established, schools were improved, a first-rate hospital was built for the workers, and church activities were supported. To provide for social activities, elaborate YMCA and YWCA facilities were built.” (McBride, 1999)
Gosh, it sounds great, doesn’t it?
Then World War I started. Copper was in high demand and Bisbee became a boom town. Right about this time, Nelson and Jean arrived. I wonder if it was everything they hoped for. I mean, do you have high hopes when you take that big a leap into the unknown? Was this growing metropolis of 25,000 people with a library, a hospital and a YMCA exciting to them? Based on what I read, Nelson’s work in the mine would have been dangerous and back-breaking. And I imagine Jean was preoccupied too, taking care of a house, two little kids, and doing things like growing their own food. Are you too exhausted to be excited and hopeful? Or is the excitement and hope what make the exhaustion bearable? I don’t know. I keep looking at the picture, thinking the answer will be revealed to me.
I am going to write more details about the mine and an attempted strike tomorrow, because I think it is important to filling out the picture of what Nelson and Jean experienced. I haven’t figured out when or why they moved to Santa Monica, California, but it seems like a significant choice to leave mining and Arizona behind.