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.
FROM THE LIPS OF ANANIAS.
Some Interesting Results Attained by Narrators Who Talked or Wrote While Seated
Between Fancy and Fact and Who Might Have Been More Happy
"Were T'other Dear Charmer Away."