By Al Bates
(Note: This is an expansion of the original Days Past King S. Woolsey article printed February 4, 2006).
The first part of this article told of the rescue of a young Mexican woman from Apache captors and how she became the wife of King S. Woolsey and the mother of his children and how financial problems forced them to move to a ranch just north of the Gila River.
In 1869 life at the Agua Caliente establishment became complicated. Woolsey, on a visit to Gila Bend, met “Miss” Mary Taylor who was passing through with a California-bound wagon train. A few hours later, she accompanied Woolsey to his Agua Caliente Ranch to become his housekeeper. Mary’s exact marital status at this point is uncertain because she had been traveling with a Mr. Nash as either his fiancée or his wife. In any event, she and Woolsey were birds of a feather: tough, hard working and ambitious.
What the living arrangements at Agua Caliente were cannot be known. However, Mary did spend much of her time across the Gila River from the ranch supervising Woolsey’s Stanwix Station, a wagon train and stage stopping point.
Whatever the arrangement, three events of significance occurred less than two years later: A son was born to Woolsey and Lucía, Woolsey and Mary were married, and Lucía and her three children left for Yuma permanently.
Mary continued to spend much of her time at Stanwix, building a reputation as a hard working, no nonsense business person while Woolsey increasingly turned his attention to opportunities in the growing community of Phoenix and to his political ambitions.
It was during Woolsey’s unsuccessful run for Territorial Representative to Congress in 1878 that word of his abandoned family was published in the Arizona Sentinel of Yuma. That scandal—along with Woolsey’s support for moving the Territorial Capitol to Phoenix—made him run poorly in Yavapai County.
After Woolsey’s sudden death in 1879, a Yuma businessman acting as the children’s guardian petitioned for a share of Woolsey’s estate to go to them. And then things got nasty.
Woolsey’s Stanwix stage and wagon train stopping place south of the Gila River between Yuma and the Pima Villages in 1873. (Courtesy of Sharlot Hall Museum – Call Number: BU-ST-6009p)
Mary Woolsey resisted the petition strongly, but in a legal maneuver allowed her lawyer to admit that Clara and Johanna were Woolsey’s children by an “Indian woman” named Lucy. There was no such admission of parentage regarding the boy who undoubtedly was a very sore point with Mary. What is significant is that “Lucy” is referred to as Indian while previous statements made by Mary had referred to her as Mexican.
Mary’s motives are clear. Because of the existing miscegenation laws, no white person could marry an Indian, thus classifying the children as the result of an “illegal cohabitation” and thereby reducing their claim on Woolsey’s estate. An initial ruling in favor of the girls was reversed on Mary’s appeal. There were rumors that Mary later provided “pittances” for the girls out of her considerable assets.
The 1880 census for Yuma provides almost the last trace of Lucía and her children. Significantly, they all were registered as white as then would be any person considered racially Mexican. Also by then, she had a second son. His father is unknown.
The older daughter, Mrs. Clara Woolsey Marron, died in Phoenix in 1947. Her obituary gave her place of birth as the Agua Fria ranch, and her father as King S. Woolsey. There is no known further record either of her siblings or of their mother, Lucía. However, when King Woolsey’s remains were moved from the old Phoenix cemetery to the “Pioneer’s Cemetery”, the names of three granddaughters, were recorded on the re-burial certificate.
With Woolsey’s estate in hand, Mary Woolsey went on to marry and outlive two additional husbands and accumulate an even more substantial fortune. When she died in 1928, Governor George W. P. Hunt ordered state flags to be flown at half-staff, the first such recognition of a woman in Arizona.
The contrast is striking: Woolsey acknowledged two wives. The first (common law) wife died in obscurity and probably in poverty. The second (and quite possibly bigamous) wife died honored and wealthy. Is there a moral there somewhere? As Lucía might have said, Quien Sabes?
(Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners, International. The public is encouraged to submit articles for Days Past consideration. Please contact Assistant Archivist, Scott Anderson, at SHM Archives 928-445-3122 or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information.)