I love cemeteries.
The older the better. They are
filled with ghosts of the past.
Evergreen Cemetery in Tucson holds the remains of thousands
of gutsy men and women willing to brave the unknown in Territorial Arizona. A few years back, while wandering through the
worn graves I noticed a small, unassuming marker. I don’t know why it caught my eye, or why I
wrote down the name carved into the stone.
Once home, I did some research. No one personified the perils awaiting those
who ventured into the southwest desert better than the occupant of that
plot.
Larcena Ann Pennington was born in Tennessee and came to Tucson
when she was twenty years old. Two years
later, she married John H. Page. A year
after that, she was kidnapped by Apaches while her husband was away doing
whatever it was frontiersmen did in 1860. The day-long march over rough terrain was
difficult for Larcena, and frustrated with her inability to keep pace, her
captors stripped her to her petticoat, beat, speared, and finally threw her over
a ledge. Some accounts say they also
shot her a couple of times for good measure before they left her for dead in a
snowbank twenty feet down.
Confident all the stabbing,
punching and plummeting had killed their prisoner, the Apaches distributed Larcena’s
clothing and shoes between them, and continued on their way.
Later that day, John returned to discover his wife and many
of their provisions missing. I picture
him trying to decide if their homestead had been raided or if Larcena had just
gotten fed up with living in the middle of nowhere and took off. Either way, being a man with mad pioneer
skills, he tracked her boot prints to the spot where she had been, just days
before, unceremoniously shoved to her death.
However, the plucky Mrs. Page was not so easily
dispatched. Despite her injuries, she was merely knocked
out. When she finally came to, she heard
John calling her name. Three things
worked against Larcena: She was too weak
to respond, her husband didn’t peer down into the gully where she laid, and,
most importantly, one of the Apaches now wore the boots. John continued on, following the prints he
believed were made by his wife.
Undaunted by her bad luck and despite the injuries, Larcena eventually
managed to get herself moving. After ten
days, subsisting on only native plants and melted snow, she heard the sound of
wagon wheel s and climbed to the top of a ridge to get a better look. Using her petticoat attached to a stick, she
tried to signal the people below. Much
to her chagrin, no one noticed and by the time she made it down, everyone was
gone.
Did Larcena lose hope?
Of course not! She was one kick-ass woman; no kidnapping/murder attempt/feeling like crap was going to stop her. A few days later,
starving and decidedly under dressed, she crawled into a lumber camp. At first, the men thought she was a wayward
squaw and almost shot her before one of them realized who she was. Good thing.
How ironic if she’d survived the wounds, the fall, and the wilderness
for two weeks only to be cut down because of mistaken identity.
Larcena recovered from the ordeal, but did not escape
further tragedy. When she was three
months pregnant with her first child, John Page was killed by Apaches, a fate also
suffered by her father and two brothers.
One sister succumbed to malaria, another to pneumonia. Larcena contracted smallpox but that didn’t
kill her either. In fact, she lived
until she was seventy-six, a tremendous accomplishment given the era and her
history.
I believe Larcena called out to me that day, knowing I would
appreciate her tenacity and indomitable spirit.
Have you ever experienced a message from beyond the grave? One commenter will win digital copies of the
first three books in my Coursodon Dimension series.
