In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, industry was booming in big cities back East. With the rapid expansion of jobs came a population explosion. In New York City, so many children were being born that families couldn’t keep up, and an epidemic of abandoned babies swept through the city.
Meanwhile, out here in what wasn’t yet Arizona, mining towns were cropping up in remote parts of the country, and the communities lacked the resources to keep babies alive. Census records from the early 1900s contain tragic accounts of households reporting multiple births, but very few surviving children.
In the midst of all this, a Catholic charity in New York called th Foundling began running what came to be known as “orphan trains.” The nuns at the foundling, known as the Sisters of Charity, worked with these distant mining towns to find families who wanted to adopt abandoned kids from the city and sent those kids out West, on trains, to start new lives.
The program saved many lives — but it also created crises, including a situation in 1904 that’s come to be known as he "Arizona Incident.”
Lori Halfhide, a researcher with a historical preservation organization called the National Orphan Train Complex, has done extensive work to uncover exactly what happened in Arizona.
Halfhide joined The Show to discuss how the whole thing started in a pair of small towns called Clifton and Morenci.
Full conversation
LORI HALFHIDE: Clifton and Morenci were both mining communities. Each one had about 5,000 people, and of the nearly 10,000 combined residents, two-thirds of those people were Mexican Americans.
The Mexican Americans were Catholic. The white mine owners and business owners were Protestant. So there was a big rift there. There was also the fact that the year before, the Mexican Americans had staged a walkout and a strike at the copper mines, and there were still very hard feelings between the mine owners and the Mexican population.
And then they got a new priest who came in from France — barely spoke the language. He had no idea what had happened the previous year. And when the Foundling contacted him and wanted to see if he had people that wanted kids, everybody there wanted kids.
SAM DINGMAN: So this new priest, what did he tell the Foundling when they reached out?
HALFHIDE: He took applications from his parishioners, who were all Mexican Americans, and he contacted the Foundling and told them that he had some Hispanic people who wanted to take in children.
Well, the sisters immediately thought, “Oh, these people are from Spain.” So they sent lighter-complected children because the people from Spain, you know, they tended to be lighter-complected. And when they got to Arizona, they made the horrifying discovery that all of these little blond-haired, red-haired, pale children were being put in Mexican homes. And they could not argue with the priest because number one, it was 1904 and women couldn't back talk anybody. And number two, they were sisters, and they could not say anything that would demean the priest in front of his parishioners.
DINGMAN: Wow. So there's a number of dynamics operating in that scene you've just described it sounds like.
HALFHIDE: Yeah.
DINGMAN: First there's the gender dynamics that you were just alluding to, the religious dynamics in terms of the dynamic between the nuns and the priest. But also, if I'm hearing you right, Lori, there was a fundamental assumption made by the sisters in New York that they would be sending light-skinned children to live with light-skinned families. And the prospect that that wasn't going to happen was, in the context of the time, a huge scandal.
HALFHIDE: Yes. The Protestant women of the community showed up at the train station when they found out that these children were going to be coming into town. They figured they could get some, too. They didn't know that they had already been pre-assigned homes. … So when they got there, they told the nuns they wanted children and they said, well, I'm sorry, we can't give them to you because they're already preassigned. … And one of the women just wouldn't take no for an answer. And she's the one who basically started all of the bad stuff that was going to happen.
DINGMAN: So, let's talk about that bad stuff. Presumably the majority of the children who arrived that day did end up going to the Mexican American families, right?
HALFHIDE: Yes. They had 20 children they were going to leave in Clifton. Twenty children were going to be going to Morenci. They made the placements in Clifton. And Sister Anna Michaella, who was in charge, watched the placement go on. She knew that this was not a good situation. She knew that there was going to be trouble, but she couldn't say anything. So, the children went home with these families. They went back to the train car where they had the other 20 children.
First thing in the morning they loaded up into a wagon, and they went up to Morenci with the other 20 kids. When they got up there, they started placing them out in Morenci, And they placed 14 out. And Sister Anna Michaella refused several of them, because she said that there was just too much of a difference between the child and the family. So, she was starting to get her courage up and speak up.
DINGMAN: But presumably that difference that she was referring to was —
HALFHIDE: Skin color.
DINGMAN: Was skin-color based. Yeah.
HALFHIDE: Yeah.
DINGMAN: So, then, there's more trouble.
HALFHIDE: Oh, there's lots more trouble. They wound up with a mob in Clifton, and they went around and they picked up all of the kids who had been placed out in Clifton. Well, the sisters picked up the ones in Morenci. They had decided that this was a bad situation. They were going to pick up the kids, and they were going to leave town. Well, they got the kids from Morenci, but they didn't make it back to Clifton in time to get them. The community had already done it.
DINGMAN: Do we know how old these children were at the time of these incidents?
HALFHIDE: Yes, they were all from 2 to 6 years old. … Six was the oldest. Most of them averaged right around 3 to 4.
DINGMAN: So these are kids who are already old enough to be forming memories and, you know, really experiencing the trauma of this. They've already become orphans in one way or another back in New York. They've now taken this cross-country train trip and been placed with new families and are now being ripped out of the homes of those families by third families.
HALFHIDE: Yes, they took the kids to the hotel, which was owned by one of the people who was key in starting this whole mob thing. And then in the morning, they held their own placing out. And the owner of the hotel, his wife, gave the kids to all of her friends.
DINGMAN: I see. I feel like I read somewhere that part of what led to this mob of white families doing this was that these salacious stories had started appearing in the newspaper about what was happening to the kids. Right?
HALFHIDE: Yes. Word spread quickly in a little tiny town like that. And when the posse had gone around and picked up these children, they went back and they told all of their friends that these kids, when they picked up these babies, they had beer on their breath, and they were in the red-light district, and they had been found in the homes of prostitutes. And their little tummies didn't handle the Mexican food, and they were all sick. And it was just completely bogus, made up. Just anything that they could do to make the situation look like what they did was the right thing.
DINGMAN: Yeah. So what happened after the kids were rehomed for the second time?
HALFHIDE: It eventually wound up in the Arizona Supreme Court. And then it went on — the sisters appealed — and it went on to the national Supreme Court.
DINGMAN: So what did the Supreme Court end up deciding?
HALFHIDE: That the Foundling had no claim to the children, and that the families that they were living with could keep them.
DINGMAN: So the Mexican American families who had originally offered their homes to these kids got —
HALFHIDE: Nothing. Yeah.
DINGMAN: So why do you think it's important for this incident — which, as I understand it — is not very widely known to be talked about?
HALFHIDE: I think it's important to remember all of the Orphan Train news, and the things that happened with these children because basically this was the beginning of the foster care system, and it needs to be remembered. We need to remember our past so that we can fix it. And, you know, hopefully do better in the future.
DINGMAN: Well, Lori Halfhide is head researcher at the National Orphan Train Complex. Lori, thank you so much for telling us the story.
HALFHIDE: You're welcome. Thank you.
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