By Al Bates

Love stories are supposed to be happy endings. This one from Arizona's territorial days did not.

This story begins like a romantic novel of the old West - think of Zane Gray at his most florid. First, Apache traders carry away an innocent Hispanic child. Then, after two years of privation as a captive she runs away to a militia camp and finds a home in a small mining town. Soon after this she becomes the wife of one of the most powerful men of the new territory.

Then the romance turns sour when her husband abandons her for another woman, leaving Lucy to fend for herself and for their three small children.

Lucia Martinez was 12 years old in 1862 and living with an older sister, a schoolteacher, when Apache raiders prowled south across the Gila River in search of loot and captives. When the Apaches returned to their hideaway in the rugged central Arizona mountains, Lucia was one of their captives.

For two years the Apaches kept Lucia under constant guard, mistreated her and - in her opinion - purposely starved her. Escape was out of the question since she was too far away from homne to even consider crossing the desert that surrounded the Apache stronghold.

Happily for Lucia, the situation was changing. The discovery of gold not far from the Tonto Apache strongholds had brought miners from around the world to the newly formed Arizona Territory. An area once known only to roaming Apache and Yavapai tribes was now open to a new dominant civilization. The miners were well armed and quick to retaliate when Indians raided their livestock.

A retaliatory expedition of miners into Apache territory in the summer of 1864 finally provided Lucia with an opportunity to escape. In the confusion during a skirmish between the militia and Apaches she managed to slip away and make her way to the militia camp.

Malnourished, dirty, naked and trembling, the miners treated 14-year-old Lucia kindly and soon rustled up some empty flour sacks, plus a needle and thread, for the shy young girl. Lucia's skill in converting the sacks into a serviceable dress and her willingness to help about their camp impressed them.

In the beginning, communication with the terrified young girl was difficult since she knew no English, and only a few of the militia had any rough use of Spanish. After struggling with her long name in Spanish, one of the miners said "Oh hell, call her Lucy," and Lucy she became.

Lieutenant Colonel King S. Woolsey of the territorial militia, who had been the first Anglo to settle north of the Gila River and who soon would be a force in territorial politics, led Lucy's rescuers. Woolsey was not impressed at first sight of the emaciated young maiden, guessing her to be a "Yaqui squaw about 10 years of age."

The militia party brought Lucy back to Woolsey's impressive stone house at his Agua Fria ranch. Soon afterward, Lucy went to live and work in Prescott as a servent for a recently married couple who were friends of Woolsey.

Members of the resuce party on meeting her later marveled at how quickly she learned English and became a neat and pretty young woman once the effects of her captivity wore off. She was always grateful to her rescuers and was known to nurse them in sickness.

In retrospect it is clear to see that she had particular affection for the rescue party's leader, for less than three years later, in February 1867, King S. Woolsey and Lucy, by now his common-law wife, became the parents of a baby girl they named Clara.

The first cloud on Lucy's horizon came just three months later when financial setbacks caused Woolsey to lose the Agua Fria Ranch to foreclosure, and they had to retreat to Woolsey's Agua Caliente ranch just above the Gila River upstream from Yuma. The next year, 1868, Lucy bore Woolsey a second child, a girl they named Johanna.

In August of 1869 Woolsey returned from a business trip to Yuma bringing with him a Miss Mary Taylor whom he had hired as a housekeeper. Mary soon advanced from housekeeper to manager of Woolsey's Stanwix stage station just across the river and, at least in Mary's mind, immediately replaced Lucy in Woolsey's affections.

Two years laer, Lucy bore Woolsey's third child, a boy they named Robert. This event caused an ultimanum from Mary. Soon after Lucy and the three children were packed off to Yuma - never to return. On May 27, 1871, Woolsey and Mary became the first married couple married in newly formed Maricopa County.

Lucy was gone from the Agua Caliente ranch, but it may that Woolsey had not entirely abandoned her. According to the 1890 census Lucy had a fourth child, a son named Louis born about 1873. It could be that the Colonel was running two establishments for a time.

Woolsey and Mary prospered, and he soon was one of the largest landowners in the desert community of Phoenix. His political career prospered as well, and he served two terms as president of the upper chamber of the Territorial Legislature.

When Woolsey ran for election as Arizona Territory's representative to the United States Congress in 1878 a newspaper "blew the whistle" on his abandoned family in Yuma. Nothing really came of the revelation, but Woolsey did lose the election. He died unexpectedly a few months later, apparently of a stroke or heart attack.

A Yuma businessman began court procedures to gain a portion of Woolsey's estate for the children, but Mary blocked this action with a slick legal maneuver. She acknowledged that the first two children were Woolsey's but then falsely claimed that Lucy was Indian, and therefore, under territorial law the children had no rights of inheritance. The court ruled against the children, and Mary inherited all of Woolsey's estate.

Lucia and her brood were still in Yuma in 1880 according to that year's Census but then nothing for over 65 years. The oldest child, Clara Woolsey Maron, died in Phoenix in 1947, and her obituary mentions her father and her birth at the Agua Fria ranch.

So there you have Lucy's story. In a mere nine years she lived a lifetime that went from a normal frontier childhood, to life as a terrified Apache captive, to consort of a powerful man, to abandoned wife and then to total obscurity.

Mary Woolsey, by contrast, remarried (twice) and over time became one of the wealthiest women in Arizona. When Mary died in 1928, Governor George W.P. Hunt ordered state flags to fly at half-staff in her memory, the first woman ever so honored in Arizona.

Also, just one more thing, according to one contemporaneous account, there appears to have been another Mrs. Woolsey before Lucy and Mary came along, but that's yet another story.

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