When Fred Watson woke up on July 12, 1917, the first thing he saw was the business end of a double-barrel shotgun.
That never portends a good day. Sure enough, it got worse.
Hours later, Watson stood with dozens of other men in a dung-filled boxcar with no food or water as it lurched through the desert from Bisbee to Columbus, N.M.
When the men arrived - all told, the train carried 1,186 of them - the good people of Columbus turned them away. So the engineer doubled back to Hermanas, N.M., where he decoupled the locomotive and rode off, leaving the men high and very, very dry.
It was called the Bisbee Deportation. In addition to being a startling story in its own right, the event speaks to any number of recurring American themes - wartime paranoia, fear and demonization of outsiders, the power of corporations - that still dominate headlines nearly a century later.
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