With Their Own Blood: A Saga of Southwestern Pioneers

2. The Penningtons

TWO: THE PENNINGTONS The battered, bleeding woman lying in the mountain snow had married twenty-six-year-old John Hempstead Page on Christmas Eve, 1859. They were a vigorous, confident young couple ready to face frontier hardships together. Chance had led them by widely separated paths, thousands of miles from their native states, to the Gadsden Purchase where they first met.l Larcena was born in Tennessee on June 10, 1837, the third child offrontier farmer Elias Green Pennington and his wife, Julia Ann Hood. From these two stalwart pioneers she inherited strength, a firm religious faith, and a cheerful, optimistic outlook on life. Her parents, both of English descent, originated in the Carolinas.2 About the time of their marriage in 1831, they moved to Tennessee. There, before Julia was twenty-three, she gave birth to their first four children- James, Laura Ellen, Larcena Ann, and Caroline. Elias had some education, but Julia, apparently, could neither read nor write.3 However, her character might be glimpsed in her twelve children, who, with one exception, were mutually loving and loyal, the sons kind and considerate toward their sisters.4 Elias, too, had much to do with that. He was good-humored, quiet, sober and hard-working. He loved his wife and was an affectionate father. Even in later years when people referred to him as "Old Pennington," he was physically impressive-"large, tall, II With Their Own Blood with a fine face and athletic frame."s By then he was clean-shaven, although bearded in earlier years, with fair hair, blue eyes, and an aquiline nose.6 J. Ross Browne, a traveler who met him in Tucson in 1864, described him as eccentric: when other Ariwna settlers had fled the rampaging Apaches, Elias and his family had remained, "seeming rather to enjoy the dangers than otherwise ." Nevertheless, Elias Green Pennington was "apparently a man of excellent sense," according to Browne, who stated that he had never seen a better example of the fearless American frontiersman.7 A Pennington family tradition holds that Elias and his brother John were the sons ofone Elijah Pennington. Elijah, they say, had been a soldier at Valley Forge in the terrible winter of 1777 and had received a large bounty land grant in Virginia as a reward for his Revolutionary War service. There he reared eight boys and eight girls and became wealthy growing fine tobacco. He had a stern belief in self-reliance. When a son became twentyone , Elijah gave him a rifle, a dog, a horse and saddle, and $2100 in silver, then told him to go out and make his own fortune. As each daughter married, he endowed her to an equivalent extent , instructing her that divorce or separation was sacrilegious and that she should not expect to return to his house under such circumstances.8 Elias' children did not hear this legend - true or mythicalfrom him. He made few if any references to his background and seldom if ever heard from relatives. There may have been an estrangement , some emotional distance even greater than the miles that separated them.9 When Tennessee became too populated to suit Elias, and when he heard of vast frontiers opening in the new Republic of Texas, he moved his family there. They reached the region that is now Fannin County, just south of present-day Oklahoma and the Red River, in November, 1839. Elias homesteaded 640 acres on Bullard's Creek, a branch of the Bois d'Arc. 10 It was good, well-watered farmland, with lovely, mature trees-pin oak, Spanish oak, hickory, hackberry, hawthorn, and 12 The Penningtons persimmon- which the surveyor used as markers.I I Elias built his cabin about seven miles west of "the Honey Grove," an area which soon developed into a small town. The first settlers had come to the region only three years earlier, finding friendly Kickapoo Indians and Shawnees to the north and Caddos to the south. But the Cherokees and other bands had been hostile from 1837 through 1839, when they were soundly defeated by the whites. 12 There was peace while Elias and Julia built their home and when their fifth child, John Parker Pennington, was born on December 24, 1840.13 Three-year-old Larcena, holding fast to James, who was seven, could safely romp out to the field which their father cleared, plowed and planted in the spring. That freedom...