s to which torn skin clung in tatters.
At the pinery, the woodcutters’ main camp, lived a black cook from Texas named Hampton Brown who, with his white common-law wife, had found work in this most isolated and distant of frontiers where their dangerous union might be tolerated. Kirkland referred to them as a “notorious Texas Negro known as Nigger Brown and his white woman known as Virgin Mary.”
Brown thought Larcena to be a ghost. He had been walking down the trail when he saw the white-clothed figure, bloody hair hanging down in front, crawling toward him. He ran back to camp and got his gun, and with several others, returned to investigate this ghostly apparition.
The figure gasped out that she was Larcena Page.
Brown put aside his gun and picked up the frail, emaciated woman in his strong arms. He carried her to camp, where the Virgin Mary tenderly washed Larcena, removed the stones from the soles of her feet and the thorns from her flesh, cleaned out her festering wounds and fed her. She then carefully dressed Larcena in clean clothes.
Larcena asked for some tobacco and then went to sleep. Fifteen days had passed since the Apaches took her.
Tom Childs, one of the woodcutters, galloped to Canoa with the news. Kirkland was there, preparing to help escort the last group of Pinal prisoners to Ewell at Aravaipa Canyon. He gave Childs a fresh horse and sent him on to Tucson to find Larcena’s distraught husband.
Although the Apaches had said his wife was dead, Page had not lost hope. Now the revived man was galloping south to Canoa with Childs, Tucson Dr. C.B. Hughes and Ed Radcliff of Tubac. They rode all night, reaching the ranch just as Kirkland was leaving. They pushed on the final dozen miles to the lumber camp and were stunned by what they found.
“What a sight,” Radcliff declared, “emaciated beyond description, her hands and knees and legs and arms a mass of raw flesh almost exposing the bones, caused by crawling over the cruel rocks, up hill and down hill.”
Doctor Hughes told Page he had no hope of saving Larcena.
Page would hear none of that. He commandeered a wagon and tenderly placed his wife into it. He and the doctor drove the team as carefully as possible along the rough mountain trail down Madera Canyon and then north on the rutted road to Tucson. Page wanted Larcena to be under the constant care of the doctor.
She clung precariously to life for several weeks, and then began a seemingly miraculous recovery. When Radcliff saw her again that summer, he recalled being amazed at the “blooming woman before me.”
The many scars slowly healed, at least those of the flesh. That summer, Page took his bride to the cabin he had built for her near the mouth of Madera Canyon, 10 miles from Kirkland’s Canoa ranch. There, they could begin life anew.
They did not know peace for long.
Terror and Tragedy
On January 27, 1861, Aravaipa raiders struck Johnny Ward’s ranch in the Sonoita Valley and kidnapped his 11-year-old stepson Felix.
Captain Ewell had departed for the East, and an inexperienced young lieutenant was sent in pursuit of the Apaches. He traveled to Apache Pass, where he confronted Chiricahua Chief Cochise about the lost boy.
When Cochise denied involvement, the soldiers seized several of his people as hostages. The chief escaped, and when the hostages were hanged, he began a bloody war of retribution.
Within 60 days of the incident at Apache Pass, the Apaches seemed to strike everywhere. Cochise’s warriors hit five stage stations, repeatedly attacked the mail coaches and swept through the Santa Cruz Valley, killing 150 of the hated White Eyes, including Poston’s brother. One of the first victims of the war was Larcena’s husband.
Wadsworth had hired Page and two other sawmill men, Alf Scott and Jim Cotton, to escort a supply wagon he needed delivered to Fort Breckenridge. A heavy snowfall that January disrupted work at the pinery, so Page saw the job as a nice opportunity to pick up extra cash. He needed the money, for Larcena was pregnant with their first child. Page bade a melancholy farewell and left her in their 