Bisbee: The Alchemical City of the Borderlands by Virgil Hancock III (review)

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• Bisbee: The Alchemical City of the Borderlands by Virgil Hancock III
• David Yetman (bio)

Bisbee: The Alchemical City of the Borderlands By Virgil Hancock III 2023 200 pages Maps, photographs, notes, bibliographic essay ISBN 979-8-218-07863-8

A few decades ago, the late Richard Shelton published a poetic memoir entitled Going Back to Bisbee. For readers familiar with Arizona history and landscapes, this was not a strange title at all, since Bisbee then, as now, exuded a curiously alluring presence in the state. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Virgil Hancock III's newest book, Bisbee: The Alchemical City of the Borderlands. In this most welcome publication, Hancock has turned his photographer's eye once again to a human landscape. The volume continues a series of photographic publications Hancock began several decades ago, most notably his volumes on Las Vegas and on Chihuahua, Mexico, but in this case the photos are supplemented by his own scholarly written essay on Bisbee and its history.

The latest book is a timely and compelling addition to the literature on Arizona's mining heritage and an incomparable portfolio of photographs. The book combines extensive written essays with a rich collection of Hancock's visualization of Bisbee supplemented by reprints of images from the early days of the town and its mines. His approach differs from that of most historians: he offers a series of written essays enlivened by a powerful photographic ensemble of images of Bisbee, historic and contemporary—several of them modern photos taken at the same location as those of the 19th century. The result is a visual recapitulation of the mining history of the town now better known for its artists and counterculture. This compelling collection of photographs and background descriptions forms a setting for his account of the great mining strike of 1917 and its aftermath. [End Page 397]

In his written essays, Hancock traces the lengthy history of Bisbee, a town founded on copper extraction. It combined the excesses of a mining boomtown with the social fracturing expected when the cheap labor of a heavily non-white and immigrant workforce maintains the machinery of corporate profits. Many images of the sharply delimited class structure of the western United States emerge from his photographs and corresponding historical narrative he employs, most effectively, I must add. Hancock skillfully juxtaposes the images of early Bisbee society and mining infrastructure (and the violence to the natural landscape it entailed) with the contemporary artistic culture and counterculture of the city. He also reminds us that Bisbee is practically a border town, a geographical oddity often overlooked. As such it has deep historical ties to the nearby Mexican copper mines at Cananea and Nacozari, themselves the scene of major and ongoing conflicts between labor and management.

The peculiar geography of the ore bodies in the area required the location of homes and businesses of Bisbee on the sides of the Mule Mountains and along arroyos that grace the town's flanks. Virgil especially enjoys walking the steep streets of the city, absorbing the strange and effective combination of the past and the present. As he puts it, "Walking through Bisbee is not just a historical journey, it is a sensual and spiritual journey as well." This sums up the theme of his book.

Bisbee society of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was dominated by fraternal organizations. The most notable were those quasi-secretive "brotherhoods," which included (but were not limited to) the scions of the business and financial sectors of the community. The most prominent organizations were limited to white men only, though some included auxiliary and affiliated organizations for women, whose role was to support the work of the fraternal organizations. Other, less powerful segments of Bisbee society also had "fraternal" organizations, but their influence paled in comparison to the white and business-dominated brotherhoods. Hancock has amassed a remarkable portfolio of portraits of the assembled white gentlemen, often decorated in their finest fraternal garb, which now seems strangely patrician. He performs an admirable service by connecting these socially pervasive and powerful groups to the development of the city and to the economic politics of the Bisbee...