hich consisted of seven ranches along the dozen miles of the valley floor. The census of 1860 listed 51 citizens in the valley, identified as farmers, teamsters, laborers, a cook, a clerk, a shoemaker, a lawyer, a printer and one simply as an “idiot.” Fort Buchanan provided nominal protection, for the soldiers could barely guard their own horse herd, and Apaches once made off with several of the officer’s tents. Not far from the fort stood the local general store of White and Grainger. Four miles south of the fort was James “Paddy” Graydon’s United States Boundary Hotel, a rollicking establishment that everyone called Casa Blanca. Just below Graydon’s saloon was the ranch of Felix Grundy Ake, who had settled there with his tempestuous brood in 1855. Johnny Ward’s ranch, at the western bend of Sonoita Creek, was next in line, followed by the farms of William Wadsworth, B.C. Marshall and old Elias Green Pennington, and finally a gristmill operated by William Finley and Nathanial Sharp. The Sonoita Valley, proclaimed Tubac’s The Weekly Arizonian, was a “treasure beyond price to the farmers in the neighborhood.”
In time, a few American women also came into the valley. The most noted were the daughters of the eccentric Elias Pennington. He was known to all in the “Purchase” as Old Man Pennington and was a true pioneer as well as a wild, roving spirit. He had moved his growing family from Tennessee to Texas in 1839, but after the death of his wife, he pushed on west. He ran out of steam, but not determination, in June 1857 at Fort Buchanan while en route to California. His daughter Larcena had come down with a fever. While she recuperated near the fort, the Apaches ran off several of Elias’s oxen. Making the best of a bad situation, Elias moved his brood of 12 children—four boys and eight girls—down to the east bank of the Santa Cruz River, close to the Mexican line, where the family dug irrigation ditches and planted crops. The family sold their crops to the soldiers at the fort and to the miners at Tubac. The Apaches did not molest them.
Belles of Santa Cruz Valley
In the eyes of his neighbors and, most especially, the soldiers at the fort, Elias knew his success as a farmer was overshadowed by the lovely crop of daughters he raised on the farm. “I had the pleasure of an introduction to the eccentric old Pennington,” J. Ross Browne noted. “Large and tall, with a fine face and athletic frame, he presents as good a specimen of the American frontiersman as I have ever seen. The history of his residence in the midst of the Apaches, with his family of buxom daughters, would fill a volume.”
Dr. John Hall, a remarkable British soldier of fortune who had spent a considerable time in Sonora, arrived in the Santa Cruz Valley in the summer of 1857. He attended a Christmas gathering at a ranch near the fort at which the Pennington girls created quite a sensation. “But few ladies, American, graced the party, but those present were the ‘belles’ of the valley, good looking and true specimens of frontier coquettes,” he recalled. “Womankind (white) are scarce in Arizona, so all the young squatters present were deeply smitten.”
Captain Ewell, who Hall called an “inveterate old bachelor,” enjoyed the scenery immensely. Hall was perplexed by the small stick the American girls had in their mouths. Ewell explained to the well-travelled Englishman that this tobacco-laden stick and this practice of “mopping” were common on the frontier. The little stick was the mop.
Hall was mortified. “It is abominable, even worse than crinoline,” the Englishman huffed. “A Mexican woman may be excused her cigarette, a Hindoo her hookah and an Irishwoman her short ‘dundeen,’ but a pretty American girl a ‘mopstick!’” Dr. Hall was learning just how quickly the social conventions broke down on the frontier.
Of all the Pennington girls, 22-year-old Larcena was by far the loveliest, breaking the forlorn hearts of many a lonely soldier and miner. She finally married handsome John Page on Christmas Eve 1859 in Tucson. Page was one of the wildest spirits in the valley. He 