They cut the phone lines first, while the sky is still dark. At dawn, men in white armbands appear at doors, guns and lists in hand. By noon, nearly 1,200 striking copper miners and their supporters are driven into cattle cars rank with dung.

My great-grandfather takes Mule Pass instead, heat in his lungs and 2,000 vigilantes at his back. Dark smudges beneath greasewood are the only shade on Jovan Vaso Kulinovich’s escape from Bisbee, Arizona. His path, which locals call “the Divide,” is a narrow shelf blasted into rock by convicts a few years earlier. Blast marks and drill holes scar the stones. Rattlesnakes hold to the shadows. No shelter for 20 miles. The Mule Mountains in summer swallow mercy.

Still, the way ahead is safer. Behind Jovan, the posse breaks into boardinghouses, yanks a miner from behind a grocery counter, shoots another dead in his home. Their authority is the cloth band torn from flour sacks or pillowcases. Everything else is rage.

It is July 12, 1917. My great-grandfather is 42. Back at home in Dubacher Canyon, his wife Maše, whose name I will later carry like a promise I don’t understand, keeps their four children close—especially the oldest, Maxim, almost 13, who resists confinement and routinely skips school to scramble the steep hills. Women and children have been warned off the streets today. Maše’s English is still broken-backed, insufficient to meet whatever is coming.