The Hopes of Holes

There is something quite visceral in the feeling one gets living in a town that has had its bowels excavated for more than a century. My friends from Butte will understand this declaration since they, too, live with a giant man-made pit that swallowed sections of their city, but here in Bisbee

the evidence of forlorn prospector hopes pockmark the south mountain side of this canyon with dozens of abandoned “glory holes.” We live across the street from the Catholic cathedral, St. Patrick's, which was constructed in 1917 with the helpful donation of mine owner Thomas Higgins. A stipulation of his gift demanded the new church face the Higgins “diggins” which, of course, did not pay out

as well as Thomas might have hoped. His excavated dream joined dozens of others on that mountainside to bear testimony today to the optimism and folly of mining speculation in Bisbee. It is an interesting physical legacy that, while scarring the natural landscape, has become a natural a part of the view as all the brush that has grown up to replace the clear cutting done to provide fuel for nineteenth century smelting operations. Time may not heal all wounds, but it does lend a softening aspect to these mining scars.