Orphans In A Storm

The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. By Linda Gordon. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1999. 416 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

DESPITE SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S INSISTENCE THAT LITERATURE WAS SUPERIOR BOTH TO history and philosophy because it drew from both, the contemporary historian has to deal with problems that novelists and critics do not . The first can invent without having, at least overtly, to explain or interpret; the second can explain or interpret without having to invent--at least too obviously. But the really good historian has to discover what happened, present a more or less coherent account of who did what and when, and provide an interpretation not just of how and why but also of the subject's connection to broader movements and patterns in society.

These tasks are all the more urgent when the historian chooses a seemingly minor event--as Linda Gordon has done with the abduction by citizens of a mining camp in Arizona Territory of a group of orphans from New York City who had been placed with Mexican families. The events covered four days, the aftermath several subsequent months. Few people, even in Arizona, know about them, and very little--two brief books and a few articles--has been written about them.

Linda Gordon, best known for her work on women's history, turned to the story not merely because it is dramatic but because she saw it as a "strategic research site," a phrase coined by Robert Merton to describe a situation which "exhibits the phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage in such accessible form that it enables the fruitful investigation of previously stubborn problems for further inquiry" (402, n. 1). In literary terms, this is something like Tennyson's "flower in the crannied wall" approach, wherein everything is connected to everything else in a vast design. Gordon assumes, and makes the assumption convincing, that the full implications of the seemingly minor episode can be understood only by a presentation of the widest possible context. Some of these connections, really interconnections, involve the private welfare organizations of the period, the Arizona copper industry, Mexican immigration patterns, the labor movement, varying definitions of race, the organization of the Catholic church in the Southwest, the vigilante tradition, and the quite different commercial, social, and demographic patterns of Clifton and Morenci, the sites of the conflict.

However, telling the story and presenting the context are quite different tasks, and Gordon moves back and forth between short dramatic scenes describing the conflict and more general and analytic chapters. In both areas, she succeeds admirably. Her account of the events of the first four days of October, 1904, is far fuller than that of Blake Brophy in Foundlings on the Frontier: Racial and Religious Conflict in Arizona Territory, 1904-1905 (Tucson, Ariz.: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1972), which gives names, dates, and some details. Gordon has discovered far more about the people and their backgrounds, and she sets the physical and social scene as no previous historian has attempted. And it is a good story.

On 1 October 1904, in the copper mining town of Clifton, Arizona Territory, a young French priest whose only previous experience of the West had come from a wild west novel, Bandits of Arizona, waited at the copper company's railroad station for the arrival of forty toddlers from the New York Foundling Hospital on one of the "orphan trains" common in the period. The children had already been assigned to families in the parish he had served for eight months in two of the toughest towns in the Territory. New to America's cultural and racial mores and even to the Spanish and English spoken in Clifton and its sister town Morenci, both predominantly Mexican, Fr. Constant Mandin was probably pleased at assisting in a work of charity and apparently foresaw no problems. He was the only adult in Clifton and Morenci who didn't.

The children, most of whom would have...