With Their Own Blood: A Saga of Southwestern Pioneers

13. “Toward the Western Shore”

THIRTEEN: ((TOWARD THE WESTERN SHORE)) By the year 1902, when John Handy, Jr. came to Tucson to visit Larcena and Fisher, there were not enough ofthe earliest pioneers remaining in Arizona to crowd a small room. And for those old-timers, life, like the setting sun, was "fast dipping toward the western shore," as the Tucson Post phrased it.l Larcena and Fisher were still clear-eyed and vigorous, but they were feeling the approach of their final years. They were aware that they were survivors. So few of their friends and neighbors remembered the perilous times before and during the Civil War. So few could even begin to understand what clinging to existence in that new and dangerous territory had meant. Only those who had lived through it could know. The newcomerseven their own descendants - never would. Here and there an individual appeared who was eager to try. One was Larcena's new son-in-law, Professor Robert H. Forbes of the developing University of Arizona. Wisconsin-born and Harvard -educated, Forbes had come to the University to teach agriculture . A small dynamo ofa man, he attacked his new career with the ferocity of a young lion, and after he met Larcena's goodlooking daughter, Georgie Scott, he became fascinated by the history of the Penningtons.2 Georgie had grown up taIllike her parents. She was a slender girl with "striking grey eyes," light brown hair, and regal dignity. She became a schoolteacher after training at a teacher's college in 205 With Their Own Blood Colorado. On January 15, 1902, she married Robert H. Forbes. According to Tucson folklore, Georgie accepted his proposal on the condition that he climb high, sheer Baboquivari Peak southwest oftown. Five times between 1896 and 1898 he tried to reach the summit. He lighted a bonfire on the mountain the night of July 12, 1898, to signal success at last.3 With similar tenacity, he forged a distinguished record of achievement in Ariwna, Africa, and Jamaica and lived to be a hundred. In his scientific, scholarly fashion, Robert Forbes began taking notes on his conversations with Larcena and Fisher Scott. As Larcena retold the story of her capture by Apaches, Georgie recorded it in her neat schoolteacher's handwriting for her husband. He corresponded with those Ariwna old-timers he could track down and interviewed them-one-armed Silas St. John, who survived the ax murders at Dragoon Springs, Daniel E. Conner, who came with the Walker Party to the Hassayampa and laughed at the Indian arrow dangling from Jack Pennington'S pants leg, Sabino Otero, who was Jim Pennington's friend, and Charles Genung, who pursued a killer to Tubac and found Larcena and her sisters there. Forbes photographed the Pennington's old stone house at the border, their homesites in Tubac and Sopori, and their former haunts in the Sonoita Valley. His diligence eventually resulted in a small booklet about the Penningtons in Ariwna, published six years after Larcena's death.4 Forbes was keenly aware of his mother-in-Iaw's eminence as a pioneer. It would have been hard to find another woman more qualified than Larcena to head a list of Ariwna's early AngloAmerican settlers. She had lived in the Territory longer than any others and had remained through all its worst times, when most fled to safer regions. She had experienced its horrors and survived them; she had known the splendors of its untrammeled wilderness. She had watched Tucson grow from a village of barely four hundred Spanish-speaking residents to a modern melting pot ofover 5600. Where wooden ox-carts from Mexico once creaked slowly past her door, a mule-drawn trolley now ran on steel rails all the way out to a modern university.5 Automobiles sped down Main 206 Georgie Hazel Scott, later Mrs. Robert H. Forbes (Arizona Historical Society).. Below, a triumphant Robert H. Forbes at the top of Baboquivari (Arizona Historical Society). 207 ({Toward the Western Shure» With Their Own Blood Street at the legal limit of seven miles an hour, or even faster. Highways were now free ofhostile Apaches and Mexican bandits, although American train robbers occasionally tested law enforcement officers. Most Ariwna towns and cities had arisen in Larcena 's time. Phoenix, non-existent when her father was killed, was now the territorial capital, with a population almost as large as Tucson's.6 Her life in...