Mary Penn: kidnapped in Arizona...

This is a unique family story. And it requires some background about the roll of churches and our US government during the 1700s through the early 1900s as it pertains to Native Americans. First the family story...

In the late 1800s, I think it was about 1896, my paternal g-m Ida Frances Penn Bowman was living in south-central Arizona. The Penn family was living in or near Silver King which is in Pinal County about 70 miles due east of Phoenix and about 3 miles north of Superior, Arizona. From 1870 until about 1900 Silver King was an active silver mine and my Penn relatives lived there (or perhaps close by; photos at the time show small buildings which may not be houses). Stacey Penn worked for the mine as a teamster moving silver ore via horse drawn wagon. As I understand it he owned his own horses and wagon(s), so possibly he was an independent contractor to the Silver King Mine.

Ore wagons hauling silver ore to the Silver King Mine stamping mill. Maybe Stacey Penn's wagon & team are pictured... ??
 

Silver King Mine about 70 mi east of Phoenix & about 3 mi north of Superior.

At the time, this part of the Penn family included Stacey Edward Penn, his wife Anna Workman Penn plus their children Della, Ida Mae, Walter and Ivan plus a very young child whose name may have been Mary. So there were 5 kids at that time; Edith arrived later in 1898.

 

One day (dunno the date nor even the season) the family was in one of their wagons (probably not an ore wagon) headed to town for whatever reason- I can only guess it was Superior, Arizona. Their most recent child was on board. Somewhere outside Silver King they were stopped by an armed Native American on horseback- probably Apache as land for the Silver King Mine had been taken from tribal reservation land and reverted to public domain. He demanded they hand over the youngest child. He then took the child and rode off. End of story as told to me by my paternal g-m Ida Penn Bowman. She was there in the wagon when it happened.

 

Ida Penn Bowman was emphatically factual in her story telling- she did not ad lib inserts to liven a story when she was telling the tale. By her telling, the family never heard another thing about the child- she was lost from the Penn family history. I was not yet 10 when she told me that summer. There may be some issues about my recall, but I remember the telling vividly so I'm pretty sure I got it right. I didn't know what to do with the story nor how I was supposed to react. In hindsight I suspect my g-m told me in order to share the burden of the loss.

Decades passed and I eventually found myself living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe is filled with historic structures and museums with sign-boards telling you about the history in the area including the Santa Fe Indian School, and no end of locals anxious to share oral history. If you pay attention to what you see and hear in Santa Fe you finally 'get it'- the back story of the Santa Fe Indian School on Cerrillos Rd plus all the other similar institutions spread across the United States. It is a dark period in our history as a nation. 

Briefly, that story is that Native American children were taken from their families (by force when necessary) to be 'educated' in various Indian schools run by not only US government agencies but also religious organizations most notably the Catholic church. This story was repeated all over the US including the East coast starting as early as the 17th century and continued through the early part of the 20th century.

What I learned in Santa Fe decades after hearing my family story from my g-m about the abduction was that the stolen children were often used as cheap labor by those schools- 'cheap' in that they had to provide food, uniforms and housing but they paid nothing for the labor... akin to a continuation of our slavery history? If there was any teaching at the schools it was to train the child as a domestic or as a laborer. I can't atest to resulting reading/writing skills. There were exceptions, but most often those children never reunited with their family leaving a gaping hole in that Native American family's history.

With this history as background I will speculate that the Native American who kidnapped the Penn's youngest child was replacing his own lost child, stolen by those who ran a nearby Indian school. And that the abductions of Native American children were facilitated or at least condoned by our US government to populate the school. That doesn't justify the kidnapping, but then the prior kidnapp8ng 9f his child was not j7stifiable either.

My g-m Ida Penn Bowman never gave me a name for the child and certainly that name, had the Native American family known it, would not have been used by the family that received the child. So there's no way to do a genealogical search for a name of someone that probably died before 1980.

I came across a Penn family tree on Ancestry a few years back which includes my own ancestors but adds a child named Mary. I'd never come across that name before. I had suspected someone was searching for a different Penn line and spottedd mine, copied it and insert their own family member just to have some "history". So as I wrote this today I went back and re-read that family tree and there it was- staring me in the face:

Mary Penn
Birth: 1896
Death Bef. 1988 • Kidnapped outside Silver King

Well I'll be damned! Someone else related to my Penn family has the same story. And now I have a name. That's not going to do much good for searching on Ancestry,com as the kidnappers didn't know the child was named Mary. And I feel confident they would never have used it even if they had known the name. Still- it's a start. 

So here's the Penn family sometime in the late 1890s (I think!)-

The Penn children: Della & Ida in back, the two boys Walter (l) and
Ivan (r) either side of (I think!) Mary Penn.

Next up is a little research into the treatment of Indian families during this time... next post.