# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DeF-VRiGho6
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/71448762-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/7bb663b972.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-10-05T00:57:23.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

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 families who had originally received the children.

The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1906 as New York Foundling Hospital v. Gatti. The Supreme Court dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds without deciding the underlying racial dispute.

The Arizona ruling stood. The children never returned to the Mexican families they had originally been placed with.

More than 120 years later, the episode remains one of the lesser-known chapters of Arizona’s territorial history.

Had you ever heard about what happened in Clifton?

#Arizona #ArizonaHistory #Clifton #Morenci #ArizonaNews

## Stats

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## Tags

clifton, morenci, arizonahistory, arizonanews, arizona

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