ABSTRACT
Copper mining is one of modern man's most aggressive landscape modifying activities. This chapter describes the evolution of one such mining district, Arizona's Warren Mining District, whose landscape is marked with the classic features associated with copper mining in arid and semiarid regions. The city of Bisbee was incorporated by 1905, while the other communities remained unincorporated satellites of the "queen of the copper camps." The ambitious copper-mining technology associated with open-pit operations also produces large amounts of waste material. The concentrating of copper ores at the Black Gap concentrator also produced the district's first tailings pond south of Black Gap on the broad Espinal Plain, which sweeps down into Mexico at the south edge of the Mule Mountains. The "time-exposure" maps make clear that the Warren District is one of the most complex of Arizona's urbanized areas, a mosaic of settlement and mining features that are the result of a century of evolution and development.
