Expansion, Revolution, and War: Phelps-Dodge, the Railroad Industry, and Mexico
The development of mining and railroad interests in Sonora and Chihuahua of copper-mining giant Phelps-Dodge (PD) is well documented. In the late nineteenth century, the booming New York company with mines across Arizona was eager to expand into Mexico’s rich copperlands. Conflict over freight rates, according to the usual story, prompted PD to develop its own railroad, the El Paso & Southwestern, to carry ore from mine to smelter to refinery. Other branches extended south into Mexico. This paper complicates the story in two ways: first, it examines the role of the company railroad in supporting other aspects of the company’s borderlands interest: in the transmission of weapons to sympathetic forces during the Mexico Revolution, and as a (literal) vehicle for removing labor opposition in the 1917 strike by the Industrial Workers of the World that came to be known as the “Bisbee Deportation.” Second, new research in the company and family’s records in New York makes clear that the extended Phelps-Dodge family--especially the Osborns, who were in-laws of PD VP Cleveland H. Dodge, had major interests in the railroad industry elsewhere in North America. Attending to the company’s diversification into the railroad industry expands our knowledge of transportation as labor and investment strategy for a company thought of solely as a mining enterprise; it also ties them to a much larger network of capitalism that crossed nations.
