By Teresa H. Alatorre
Guest columnist
The title of the book first alerted me to the delicate characteristic not usually associated with fallacies and stereotypes of the early "western woman"
"The Gentle Tamers-Women of The Old Wild West," by Dee Alexander Brown, has excellent information based on primary sources, which to historians are the most essential elements for any of our documentations and writings. It was with great interest then, as I read his book, that I found one of the "women of the old wild west" to be none other than the controversial lady of the 12 Travelers project in our city, Susan Shelby Magoffin!
Brown affirms, "Susan was the first white woman to travel the Santa Fe Trail. She was the antithesis of the gaunt-faced woman in the sunbonnet."
The picture in the book of Susan Shelby Magoffin, provided by the Missouri Historical Society, depicts a very attractive, well-dressed, proper and affluent young woman. Detailed facts in Brown's book also confirm that she did travel well and comfortably along her journey. These particulars are what, eventually, directed me toward another outlook of a gentler nature and conception of the "western" woman's role in our city's history.
With this renewed inference, and a softer perspective of the "Wild West," I recalled that there were other "great women," in this tender category, and in our more relevant past. Two ladies came to mind immediately.
Both women were resourceful, generous, and highly respected in their communities. Their expertise in business and industrious characters, in their vast holdings of lands and properties, were admittedly appreciated by their husbands. Those spouses went on to become prominent pioneers in our city, and these ladies became some of the great Western women behind the scenes of the early-day events that helped shape and chronicled our town.
The 12 Travellers board should consider them for recognition, long overdue, as El Paso's prominent "women of the old Wild West."
Juana Maria Ascarate, a pioneer family member, was the daughter of Juan and Eugenia Ascarate, of the large Ascarate Land Grant that extended into what is now a portion of the Lower Valley. In August 1828, she married Hugh Stephenson, who was born in Kentucky but raised in Concordia, Mo.
After their marriage, the Ste-phensons established their own prominent homestead on a land grant Stephenson was given. It was named the Concordia Ranch (now Concordia Cemetery). Both continued with many of their ventures and investments in El Paso, the Las Cruces area and in Mexico.
On Feb. 6, 1856, Juana Ascarate de Stephenson tragically passed away. She had been gored by a deer while on a trip to Ruidoso. Her grave is in the French family plot in the northwest corner of Concordia Ce-metery. She had been widely known as the generous and hospitable woman of Concordia, where she had established the first "private" chapel for Catholic worship at the time.
Juana Marquez was a full-blooded Tigua Indian and the young daughter of a Tigua cacique. Her father's tribe (Olguin-Marquez) had resided in Ysleta del Sur since the 1680s. Juana Marquez became "Doña Juana Dowell" at the age of 19 in 1852, when she married Benjamin Shackett Dowell in a ceremony presided over at the Concordia Ranch by Judge Rufus Doane.
Their first residence was on the old Ponce de Leon ranch (the Mills Building, which later be-came the White House department store and more recently the El Paso Electric Co.), where her husband was employed. Later, they moved to a separate ranch adobe structure, now the Camino Real Hotel on El Paso Street. That site became a hub for many of their area businesses. Like Stephenson, Ben Dowell was originally from Kentucky, and had also become very proficient in Spanish. Juana Marquez eventually spoke three languages.
In 1853, Marquez traveled to California on a wagon train to seek a better life. A year later, no longer wanting to put up with the unscrupulous occurrences in the Los Angeles area, they took another wagon train back to El Paso. They brought back with them a daughter, their first child, who had been born in California.
In 1891, 11 years after her husband passed away, Juana also succumbed and was buried at an Ysleta grave site. Both Juana and her husband Benito Dowell, as he was called by many of his friends, were later reburied at Concordia Cemetery, where other family members are now interred. Their own graves, however, are now unmarked!
Teresa H. Alatorre is a sixth-generation El Pasoan who is writing a book on the area's history.
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