Bisbee '17 Book

A thoughtful, character-driven historical novel that puts you in the middle of one of the most infamous labor disputes in American history: the forced deportation of nearly 1,200 striking miners in Bisbee, Arizona, in July 1917. This story is told in a series of vignettes focusing on several main characters ' some real, like the I.W.W.-affiliated labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler, and some imagined, like the homegrown strike leader, Bo Whitley, who fights for better working conditions and also for Flynn's heart. The novel is at its best in re-creating life in a copper mining boom town during World War I, and the irreconcilable tensions between the striking workers and the nationalistic business and community leaders in Bisbee. Some of the plot devices are a bit contrived, such as a quickly-abandoned "love triangle" between Whitley, Flynn, and her real-life lover Carlo Tresca. But we are treated to a deep psychoanalysis of Sheriff Wheeler's possible thought process in the build-up to the Bisbee Deportation and a suspenseful description of the early-morning operation in the novel's final pages. Well worth reading for anyone interested in the early American labor movement or life in the Southwest when copper was king.