The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

Historian and professor Laura Gordon’s The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (1999) is a historical account of the fate of a few dozen orphans in the U.S. It centers around a 1904 Supreme Court decision on the welfare of these orphans, as well as a vivid four-day event in Arizona where white women coordinated the abduction of forty orphans so that they wouldn’t be placed with Mexican-American families.

Its themes include the amorphous meaning of family, shifting class and race relations, and notions of law in the American West. The work is not told chronologically; the events are arranged to increase the reader’s suspense. Gordon reprints news articles from 1904, as well as court documents, to relay class and racial attitudes in the American West.

In the mid-1860s, several organizations proposed that all urban orphans should be adopted by rural families or shipped to some location in the sparsely populated American West. This latter plan was adopted, and many children were forced to migrate from the East to the West. Once they reached the end of the railway, however, there rarely were families waiting to adopt them. Instead, all sorts of scammers now had the opportunity for free child labor. Most estimates place the number of children who embarked on this railroad to be more than 100,000.



The “Orphan railroad” ceased around the turn of the century, due in large part to Catholic organizations protesting, such as the New York Foundling Hospital, run by the Sisters of Charity. The hospital arranged for forty dozen children to be adopted by Catholic, Mexican-American families in a mining town in Arizona: Morenci. When the locals heard about this interracial adoption, the general reaction was outrage. Particularly among white women, the town decided it would be better to kidnap the forty children than have them be placed in Mexican-American households.

Several of the women told their husbands to travel to Morenci and tell the sheriff to arrest the priest for allowing brown people to adopt white children. While they were doing that, a mob formed in front of the hotel housing all the children from the Foundling Hospital. Carrying guns and whips, they demanded that the children be removed from the brown families. The nuns and priest refused until they were threatened at gunpoint. The church representatives arranged for the children to return to New York, but more than a dozen white children had already been placed with Mexican-American families in the area. The mob didn’t think this was good enough and was going to lynch the priest until the sheriff told them no. According to news reports, several members of the mob called the nuns “slave dealers and child sellers.”

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction begins on October 2, 1904. At 11 p.m., a group of white people is going from house to house to collect the remaining orphans, usually Irish immigrants from two to six, from various Mexican-American households. The author notes that none of the men knew the nation-wide repercussions their actions would have: eventually, the case would be on the front of every newspaper. In future court hearings, the men claimed that they had faced little resistance. But the author notes that the kidnappers who could speak Spanish were limited in their vocabulary, and many of the Mexican-American households weren’t proficient in English. Gordon suggests that what looked like acceptance on the part of the Mexican-American families was more likely an inability to resist; the men, after all, were armed.



The women and men claimed the children at gunpoint. They forced them to go into their own homes and leave the Catholic Orphanage. The Catholic Church was outraged and launched a legal campaign to reclaim the children. Three months after the abduction, the Foundling Hospital filed a legal suit in a Phoenix court.

For the next year, the case proceeded all the way up to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that placing white children with Mexican-American families was a form of child abuse. The court sided with lower courts that said Mexican-American parents could never offer the same education or culture as a white family; placing white children with a brown family then was a guaranteed way to prevent their success as adults.

Gordon looks at the various feminisms that operated during this period. The Mexican-American mothers took in the orphans as a way to signal to their church and community that they were morally responsible women. The Anglo-American women, on account of their skin and its status, felt the need to trump the brown mothers and “save” the children.



Gordon concludes her book by pondering what this historical incident has to say about the racial, worker, class, familial systems we have inherited. She does not delve into an account of what happened to each of the orphans, noting that history has a happy or sad ending depending on where you stop the story.