Mary Bernard Aguirre

Evergreen Cemetery, Tucson Arizona

Mary (Mamie) Bernard Aguirre
1844-1906


Mary (Mamie) Bernard Aguirre was born on June 23, 1844, in St. Louis, Missouri. The family later relocated to Baltimore and after 12 years moved to Westport Missouri where her father owned a large store.

She was sixteen years old when the Civil War brought an end to the family's affluent lifestyle. With youthful idealism she helped make the first Confederate flag to fly over Missouri and proudly waved it from an upstairs window of a tobacco shop. This stirred Southern patriotism to riotous proportions; Union troops were sent in to quell the riots; friends were shot; family assets were confiscated and Mamie and her family feared for their lives.

Sometime during the next terror filled months a handsome Mexican freighter came to her rescue. Epifanio Aguirre, a wealthy Mexican trader, whose family owned a large amount of land near Chihuahua, Mexico, quickly made a name for himself in the business world. By 1864, he owned the bulk of the government contracts for freighting along the Santa Fe Trail between the Colorado and Missouri rivers. The hundreds of mules and oxen he owned carried supplies to Army posts throughout the Southwest, and he is said to have employed more than 300 men as teamsters and roustabouts. Don Epifanio Aguirre spoke no English and Mamie spoke no Spanish, but when he proposed marriage in 1863, Mamie accepted.

They had a son, Pedro, in June of that year, but, as she would later write, she could hear the sounds of guns and rifles just as she was giving birth to Pedro. The Aguirres had two more sons, Epifanio Jr. and Stephen.

Mamie was only nineteen (and a young mother) when her husband loaded her in a carriage behind his mule train and she made the first of her five long journeys over the Santa Fe Trail. For the next six years the Aguirres made their home in New Mexico, but in the fall of 1869, after losing their freighting business to fire and Indian raids, the young couple made their way to Arizona. No longer rich, Mamie rode part way to Tucson in a grain wagon, atop a load of wheat-through hostile Apache territory. "My husband's hand never left his pistol," Mamie recounted.

There was nothing to be seen but grass for miles -- one long unending road with not even a shrub and rarely a tree except for an occasional small one near a water hole. "We made thirty miles a day when we drove a good day's driving. The tall grass was turning gray with the cold that came upon us very gradually. The very monotony of it became pleasant at last. There seemed nothing more to expect, nothing to look forward to and nothing to do."

In August of 1869, the Aguirres arrived in Tucson. A short time later, her husband was driving a stagecoach en route to Tucson, when he was ambushed and killed by Indians. This left Mamie a widow with three small sons to raise. In economic trouble, Mamie saw herself forced to return home to Missouri and live with her parents.

In 1875 she decided to come back to Arizona to take a teaching job in a small town called Tres Alamos.

Mamie had to stay in a place that was owned by Thomas Dumbar. Her room was small and the house was made with adobe. Mamie's room lacked wood, making it an uncomfortable place for the teacher to live at.

It has been argued for decades that Apache Indians used to send people over to spy possible targets before attacks. One morning, before class had begun, a boy spotted an Apache walking towards the school. Ordered by Mamie Bernard to let the Indian in, a boy opened the school's door and the Indian sat on a chair, seemingly interested in learning how to read.

About a week later, three members of a family near Benson (which, in turn, was very close to the school where Mamie worked at) were killed by Apaches, and Mamie was told that the Indian who entered her classroom was a spy for the Apaches who wanted to figure out how well prepared for an attack were the new settlers of the area. Before daylight, Bernard Aguirre and a friend at the Dumbar home were warned by a stage coach driver that the Apaches might try to attack that location too. The two women panicked, afraid that they would be attacked too.

Someone else asked where did they think that the Apaches would attack next. When that question was answered, the other lady staying at the Dumbar home screamed out loud. The reaction caused the lady to fall off and land next to the door, where the coach driver was. Her fall, in turn, caused the spooked driver to scream "Good Lord! what's that??!!"

Mamie remembered this episode as a quite humorous one, writing in her diary " I'm quite sorry to remember that I put my head on my pillow and laughed most shamefully when I heard that man jump off the door sill (sic)".

Later that night, she received a letter from her brother, who advised her not to return to her school, that it had been burned by the Indians. She moved back to Tucson, where in May of the same year she was named head of the public school for girls.

"There were about 20 girls in the school when I took charge," she recalled later. "With a few exceptions, they were the most unruly set the Lord ever let live. They had an idea that they conferred a favor upon the school and teacher by even attending… The recess bell was a signal for those girls to climb out the windows into the street, to whoop and scream like mad, and to generally misbehave. I let the first recess pass, but when the afternoon recess came, I would not allow a girl to leave her seat. Of course, there was rebellion and muttering dire, but I told them that the first one who left her seat should go home and stay there. So order was restored and no one left the room."

Mamie Aguirre continued her disciplinary measures, sending home students who misbehaved. At the end of a week, her class of 20 students had dwindled down to five. However, Mrs. Aguirre's determination paid off. The next week the girls returned and by the end of the month she had 40 students. In 1879 when she resigned, the school's enrollment stood at 85.

Mamie Aguirre's achievements in the field of education continued, and in 1895 she became head of the Spanish language and English history departments of the University of Arizona .

She died on May 24, 1906, in San Jose, California, of injuries suffered in a Southern Pacific train wreck on May 9, 1906.