Clifton: Copper Town in the Cliffs

Clifton, the seat of Greenlee County, is one of Arizona's most dramatically sited towns, wedged into a narrow canyon where the San Francisco River cuts through red-rock cliffs. Copper was discovered here in the nineteenth century, and the Arizona Copper Company, later absorbed into Phelps Dodge, built a smelter that transformed Clifton and the adjacent company town of Morenci into the beating heart of Arizona's copper industry. At its peak in the early twentieth century the Clifton-Morenci district was among the largest copper producers in the United States.

The workforce was largely Mexican and Mexican American, and the district was the scene of major labor battles in the early twentieth century and again in nineteen eighty-three, when a bitter strike against Phelps Dodge became a landmark confrontation between a major corporation and organized labor. Clifton today is a small, resilient community still in the shadow of one of the world's largest open-pit copper mines.