Clifton News

Whether the Arizona Department of Environmental quality penalizes the Freeport McMoRan Morenci copper mine for an Oct.

Thousands of gallons of a highly toxic solution used at the Freeport McMoRan copper mine in Morenci were blocked from pouring into the San Francisco River in Clifton at mid-afternoon Thursday.

According to the Clifton Police Department, the Freeport McMoran Mine in Clifton opened the wrong valve and as a result sufuric acid is running through the dry creek bed located in the middle of Clifton, AZ.

Tens of thousands of gallons of a corrosive acid solution spilled out of a copper mine near Morenci into a creek, but mine workers were able to stop it from entering the San Francisco River.

There was a major chemical spill in Eastern Arizona on Thursday, October 30. It happened in Clifton, near the Arizona-New Mexico border, where pictures show the glowing green chemicals flowing down the Lower ...

Police in Clifton Arizona, near the Arizona/New Mexico border, are working on containing a sulfuric acid spill.

There is an unspoken camaraderie on the highway. It exists among people who are in the habit of exceeding the speed limit.

There is great ignorance among many movers and shakers in Arizona. They are ignorant of what rural really means.

William Bernard Klein was born in Cinncinati, Ohio in 1874. His parents were from Hanover, Germany.

We're 300 and Holding barbershop quartet Bill Sabina Don Tautkus Tom Doeller John McDougald was taken this past Valentine's Day.

The famous copper-clad trailer doubles as a recording studio for Miners Story Project director Shipherd Reed.

By Brian Wright Sports Editor Published on Wednesday, June 11, 2008 8:37 AM MST She just loves people.

Real Estate by Christie Smythe Housing news hasn't gotten any less grim, but some real estate agents are trying to keep the Tucson market from being painted in gloom and doom with a broad statistical brush.

By Diane Saunders Staff Writer Published on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 10:01 AM MST If emergency agencies had responded to Mary Hanlin's frantic calls for help, her family may not be mourning the death of a ...

>>> A Voyage Long and Strange Rediscovering the New World By Tony Horwitz Henry Holt and Co. / 445 pages / $27.50 In Clifton, Ariz., an old mining town, Walter Mares, the editor of The Copper Era, sometimes dons a conquistador's helmet and talks to school kids about Francisco Coronado. 'Who are you supposed to be - Columbus?' they ask. 'They have no idea about their own history,' Mares concluded. Descended from Spanish colonists who followed Coronado, he dismisses the Pilgrims as 'boat people, Johnny-come-latelies.' On Thanksgiving, Americans 'should be eating chili, not turkey.' Despite an expensive education at an elite university - as a history major - Tony Horwitz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of Confederates in the Attic, discovered on a chance visit to Plymouth, Mass., that he, too, 'had a third-grader's grasp of early America.' He decided to do something about it. Horwitz gave himself a crash course in North American history and archaeology. Since, like John Smith, the savior of the Jamestown Colony, he preferred to 'beleeve my own eies, before any mans imagination,' he took a 'pre-Pilgrimage,' making landfall wherever the European explorers had, to 'meet the Natives, mine the past and map its memory in the present.' Instead of beginning his journey at Plymouth Rock, he ended it there. By turns history and travelogue, A Voyage Long and Strange is instructive and charming. Horwitz sure can spin a yarn. He re-creates the wonder - and the horror - of the explorers' encounters with exotic creatures. And his thumbnail sketches of the first-comers are tight and bright. Christopher Columbus, he reveals, was not 'a farsighted modern, battling medieval darkness.' By 1492, even the Roman Catholic Church acknowledged that the earth was round. But cosmographers did not agree about its size. Columbus was 'the most wrong-headed of them all.' Buttressing his argument by citing the scriptural passage indicating that six-sevenths of the world is land, Columbus convinced Ferdinand and Isabella that he could reach India 'in a few days with a fair wind.' An incompetent administrator, Columbus died in 1506, 'alone, desolate, infirm.' In the ultimate irony, Horwitz writes, two continents were named for his fellow Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, a self-promoter whose claim to have reached South America in 1497, a year before Columbus arrived there, was almost certainly spurious. Horwitz's account of the legacy left by the Spanish adventurers - Coronado, de Soto and de Leon - is more likely to 'affright than delight.' After all, they cut a devastating swath through the ancient civilizations of the 'New World.' At Mavila, an Indian village along the Alabama River, on Oct. 18, 1540, de Soto's men killed about 2,500 natives and torched their houses. The long-forgotten massacre, Horwitz observes, rivals the battle of Antietam as the deadliest day of combat ever recorded on 'American' soil. Mesmerized by the 'gilded hopes' of gold and an Orient express, Horwitz implies, the conquistadores never learned that 'America's true promise' lay in timber, game, fish and fertile land. The settlements the Spaniards established in North America, from Ponce de Leon's 'discovery' of Florida in 1513 until the English arrived at Jamestown in 1607, were precarious outposts, 'beset by mutinies, pirate raids, plague, fires, Indian hostility, and other woes.' They remain dreary destinations. Following the Mississippi flood of 1927, Arkansas City, which may have been the place where de Soto died, is barely a city at all, with no commercial establishments except a liquor store, laundromat and grocery. 'History's all we got left,' an old man tells Horwitz as he sits by the levee. And not much history at that. No coffin with de Soto's remains has ever been found. 'Young man, I do believe you've been led on,' declares 95 year-old Dorothy Moore. 'Just like those Spanish, always chasing their gold.' Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin professor of American studies at Cornell University. via Baltimore Sun

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In addition to my weekday afternoon, "Red, White and Blue Minute," at 5:30, we will be posting a lot of information, including audio and video on this page. via KOOL-FM Phoenix