On this day, July 12, in 1917, in Arizona, vigilantes deported nearly 1,300 striking miners and others. The mining company, Phelps Dodge, owned the booming mining town of Bisbee. When workers began complaining of conditions, Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler met with company officials, and secretly organized a round-up.

A posse of 2,000 deputized men picked up striking copper miners and sympathizers and loaded them into cattle cars and transported them 200 miles away to New Mexico.