“I wish I were where ten thousand babies fenced me in on every side,” wrote Newbrough to a friend in 1883, the year before he arrived in New Mexico and established Shalam. In a subsequent letter, he describes the living conditions in orphanages that made his efforts to acquire babies for the colony so urgent:
We lost one little babe, which we brought away from the almshouse—though it was nearly dead when we received it . . . To me it is perfectly appalling how these little things are slaughtered in this city. We hope to save many, and to raise them up in the right way, so as to have a new race by and by.
Surprisingly, Newbrough’s conception of a “new race” was free from the scientific racism then prevalent. At a time when eugenicist notions of racial purity were ascendant in American society, Newbrough took in all the babies he could get ahold of—baby boys and baby girls of any race and class. However, the number of babies he was able to bring to Shalam was not high. Few of the settlers entering the colony already had children, and bureaucratic hurdles made it hard for Newbrough to adopt. In a letter of 1883, Newbrough writes that “there is so much round about red tapism to be gone through in order to get a child out, that it dies by the time the permit is granted.” A Southwestern Farm and Orchard profile of Shalam written ten years after its establishment counts only twelve babies living there, “among them … a negro and at least one mulatto.” Before the colony’s demise, the Faithists also adopted a baby of Chinese descent. The children had one thing in common: all had been orphaned, and most were among the poorest of the poor. Such were the children that John Ballou Newbrough hoped would inherit the earth.