Clifton and Morenci

Exerpted from: Foundlings on the Frontier, by A. Blake Brophy, University of Arizona Press, 1972

It was the first day of October, and the weather should have been crisply clear. But in 1904 the air was heavy with moisture. The sky was a deepening gray over the Gila Mountains as the regular train from Lordsburg, New Mexico, snaked along the Gila River toward its junction with the San Francisco, which fell southward out of the high country. The train would arrive at about 6:30 at Clifton, but already the light was so obscured that the smoke from the smelter stack was barely visible.

The train arrived every evening about this time, but this Saturday there was a large crowd to greet it. The crowd was mainly Mexican-American, but then so was the town, an Arizona copper camp. And the train was the same as always, except for one car, a tourist sleeping car. The sleeping car had been scheduled to arrive the day before, but a washout had forced the train on the main line to be late at Lordsburg, and the car had to wait a day to get a haul on the Arizona & New Mexico to Clifton.

Midst the crowd, as prominent as a lone cloud, was a small huddle of fair-skinned women. It was not only the whiteness of their skin that made them stand out, but their clothing was finer and more stylish than that of the Mexican-American men and women. The Mexican referred to them as Anglos, and the women took pride in the name, even if few of them could trace their ancestry to England. In one aspect only were they similar to the rest of the crowd. They watched with heightened anticipation as the sleeping car squeaked to a stop.

Earlier that afternoon, the Anglo women had heard that the train would be bringing a car of young foundling children from the East to be distributed among the Mexican families of their town and its sister community, Morenci, nine winding miles up Coronado Mountain. Possibly, it was the wife of a leading saloon owner who had heard first, as most news of the town found its way to that establishment. Or it may have been the wife of the hotel owner, or the wife of the engineer of the Arizona and New Mexico railway. The butcher’s wife probably had heard from customers in the store. And more than likely so had the wife of the deputy sheriff whose husband that day was out of town on Graham County business.

From the platform, even from their favored position up front, the Anglo women could see only the black habited Sisters of Charity from New York scurrying about inside the car, closing windows and locking doors to insure order and to block out the noise of the crowd. But when the train was fully stopped, they forced their way up onto the vestibule of the car and were able to look through the glass of the door. Mrs. Abraham saw the nurses and the sisters busily arranging the children, some only two years old and the eldest five. She observed how neatly and cleanly attired the children were and that the girls’ hair was curled. And Mrs. Wright noted that the boys were in sailor suits and the girls in French dresses. It was a pleasant scene, forty beautiful and beautifully attired children. But then the Anglo women felt an unpleasant surprise, or, more accurately, the shocking awareness that these lovely children could pass for their own. They were not Mexican. They were not even dark-skinned.