On October 1, 1904, a train arrived in Clifton, Arizona carrying 40 Irish Catholic orphans from New York, all between the ages of one and six. The children had been sent west by the New York Foundling Hospital, where arrangements had been made for Catholic families in the mining towns of Clifton and Morenci to adopt them. Most of those families were Mexican. That immediately became a problem for some Anglo residents. After seeing white children being placed in Mexican homes, local women organized. Over the next three days, armed men went house to house, removed the children from their new families and redistributed them to Anglo households. The confrontation became so intense that the nuns and priest accompanying the children were reportedly threatened. The New York Foundling Hospital went to court trying to get the children back. But Arizona’s territorial courts allowed the Anglo families to keep them, with the court record containing explicitly racial reasoning about the Mexican ...