With Their Own Blood: A Saga of Southwestern Pioneers

6. Lonely Graves

SIX: LONELY GRAVES The wild frontier had only begun to try Larcena's fortitude. The worst of times were just ahead for the embryonic Arizona territory, with death and destruction everywhere . Later generations of Americans can hardly imagine what dreadful experiences its pioneer settlers endured and how dearly they paid for their foothold in the Gadsden Purchase. Will Oury on April 6, 1885, reminded a sympathetic audience of pioneers assembled in Tucson that in the 1860s the Indians "had held a carnival of murder and plunder in all our settlements while our people were appalled and almost paralyzed."l Ten days later another speaker assured the pioneers that "There is no one among you who has not seen a friend or a relative fall beneath the murderous attack ofthe Apache. On every hill are to be seen the graves of those who have died in defense of these, our homes.,,2 "The abduction of the woman and child," Thompson Turner wrote to the St. Louis Missouri Republican on March 30, 1860, "was a fearful warning to those living in exposed situations, and it is well for them that they profit by it.,,3 Some isolated settlers, thoroughly shaken by the incident, fled from the perilous frontier; others moved their families into the relative safety of Tubac or Calabasas. The Penningrons, for the time being, stayed at their stone house farm on the border. The beginning ofsummer gave few dues to the disasters that were ro come, except for Indian thefts ofsettlers' animals, which 8I With Their Own Blood resumed after a brief lull following the prisoner exchange that ransomed Mercedes. Tonto attacks north along the Gila River in late April caused employees to desert two Overland Mail stations there. Apaches stole the entire horse herd from the Santa Rita Mine on May 28, made off with stock from a ranch near Fort Buchanan on May 29, and did the same at Sylvester Mowry's Patagonia Mine, southeast of the fort, on June 7.4 Spurred by the unchecked lawlessness and violence of the previous year, settlers moved purposefully toward civil order. They held county elections and convened the first session of county court in May, 1860. They scheduled the first legislature of the Provisional Government to assemble the following spring. They prayed fervently that Congress would soon grant them separate territorial status, but some knowledgeable citizens feared that that would be delayed by the determination ofCongressional Republicans and their presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to exclude slavery from new territories.5 This pessimism proved well-founded. Larcena was well enough by summer to move into the cabin John Page built near the mouth of Madera Canyon. Her wounds healed, leaving scars on her body, and the mental trauma of her ordeal slowly faded. She became something of a celebrity; her contemporaries marveled at her courage. A dozen or more pioneers , in the memoirs they later wrote, described her incredible feat of survival.6 Larcena's home was ten or twelve miles from Canoa ranch, within visiting distance ofit. She acquired a new English-speaking neighbor close to her own age when Bill Kirkland married and brought his bride to Canoa a few weeks after Mercedes was ransomed . Missouri Ann Kirkland was a petite young woman with luxuriant long hair, a daughter of William Bacon, a Presbyterian preacher from Missouri. The Bacons, a large family, had stopped in Tucson the preceding year and operated a restaurant there before completing their journey to California. The daughters had waited on customers, ofwhich Kirkland, on his occasional trips to town, was one.7 Living almost entirely among men in a largely 82 Lonely Graves Hispanic region, Larcena and Missouri Ann must each have welcomed the proximity of another female who could share her thoughts and feelings. Deceptive indications ofpeace and prosperity encouraged the Pages, Kirklands, and Penningtons for a little while. There were between eight hundred and a thousand inhabitants in Tucson, twice as many as four years earlier, Tubac was flourishing, and about thirty separate small conununities now dotted the Gadsden Purchase.8 Communication and transportation to and within the territory were improving. The Tucson to Fort Buchanan Stage Lines made scheduled stops at Canoa ranch and, in spite of recent troubles with Apaches, the Butterfield Overland Mail Company was heavily patronized. Stages coming from the west coast were packed, and east-bound Arizonans could hardly find an empty seat.9 In...