Eternal Cliffs Form the Safe Walls That
Confine Convicts at Clifton, County
Seat of Graham County, Arizona.
Troglodytes of history have lived in their caves from choice. At Clifton,
Graham County, Arizona, are a number of unwilling troglodytes who are kept
within their rocky home by officers of the law. Clifton is one of the
centers of copper mining in Arizona. In one sense it may be inferred that
the queer jail has its advantages, for the temperature of that part of
Arizona frequently rises in summer as high as one hundred and twenty
degrees in the shade.
It comprises four large apartments, hewn in the side of a
hill of solid quartz rock. The entrance to the jail is
through a box-like vestibule, built of heavy masonry, and
having three sets of gates of steel bars.
Here and there, in the rocky walls, holes have been blasted
for windows, and in these apertures a series of massive bars
of steel have been fitted firmly in the rock.
The floor of the rock-bound jail is of cement, and the
prisoners are confined wholly in the larger apartments. In
some places the wall of quartz about the jail is fifteen
feet thick.
Some of the most desperate criminals on the southwest border
have been confined in the Clifton jail, and so solid and
heavy are the barriers to escape that no one there has ever
attempted a break of freedom. The notorious "Black Jack" was
there for months.