The Story of The First Lady Of Concordia Cemetery
· NewsTalk 1290There is a question worth asking before we get into any of this: when is the end of something also the beginning?
El Paso is a city built on layered history, stories stacked on top of stories, names etched into the land long before the railroad ever arrived. And few names are more foundational to what this city became than the one resting at the entrance of Concordia Cemetery: Juana Maria Ascarate Stephenson. The First Lady of Concordia. The woman without whom the story of one of the most legendary cemeteries in the American West never begins.
Who Was Juana Maria Ascarate?
Juana Maria Ascarate was born in 1800 into Spanish aristocracy, and not just any aristocracy. Her family ranked among the most elite in the El Paso del Norte region. The Ascarate name carried serious weight. For their military service to the Spanish Crown, the family had been granted land tracts totaling thousands of acres, and Juana stood to inherit all of it: the land in the Corralitas area, the cattle, the silver mining interests. She was, in every sense of the word, a powerful woman before she ever became anyone's wife.
Someone at the Concordia Heritage Association once put it simply: the numbers on a tombstone matter, but the dash between them matters more. That little dash is a whole life lived. In Juana's case, the numbers and the dash deserve equal attention.
A Love Story With a Little Controversy
Here is where things get interesting. In 1828, Juana Maria Ascarate married Hugh Stephenson, a trapper and trader born in Kentucky who had made his way from Concordia, Missouri down into Chihuahua to work the trade routes. Think of it as the classic story of a princess choosing the regular joe over the prince. In other words, Hugh Stephenson found himself a very wealthy partner.
To be fair to Hugh, the man was resourceful. He opened a mercantile store, expanded into lodging and blacksmith services, and eventually built an entire community around the ranch that bore his Missouri hometown's name. But the land, the cattle, the silver mines? Those came from Juana's side. The 900-acre tract they built Concordia Ranch on was purchased from her father. Hugh brought ambition. Juana brought the empire.
Together, they built what by all accounts looked like a genuinely good life. They had seven children. They opened their home and resources to travelers and the poor alike. They built a chapel, San José de Concordia el Alto, the first church on the east bank of the Rio Grande, right there on their ranch. Hugh even built it specifically for her. By the 1840s, around 195 homes dotted the Concordia region, housing the Mexican workers and families who had built a community around the Stephensons' ranch. What had started as a land grant became a whole world.
The Part That Hurts
Now here is where the story takes a turn into classic, gut-punch Disney territory. Think Bambi. Think Fox and the Hound. Think about a woman who grew up on a cattle ranch, who understood animals her entire life, who one day found a fawn and decided to raise it.
It is a story well passed down through Juana's family. She raised a pet deer from a fawn, nurturing it from its earliest days into adulthood. As the daughter and granddaughter of wealthy ranchers, Juana was no stranger to animal handling. This was not a naive decision made out of ignorance. It was an act of deliberate tenderness from someone who knew exactly what ranch life looked like and chose, in the middle of all of it, to care for something simply because she wanted to.
We do not know exactly how long Juana raised that deer. What we do know is that by 1856, the animal had grown into a full buck with hardened antlers, which in a white-tailed deer happens somewhere around a year and a half to two years of age. The same deer Juana had loved and cared for, the animal she had raised from infancy, turned on her and gored her through the stomach.
In 1856, that kind of wound meant almost certain death. There were no antibiotics. There was no hospital within reach. A deep abdominal puncture from a contaminated antler on a frontier ranch miles from medical care meant a slow, agonizing death from infection. And that is what took Juana Maria Ascarate Stephenson on February 6, 1856, two days before what would have been her 56th birthday.
The Beginning
Hugh buried his wife inside the chapel he had built for her. That burial marked the first body entered into what would eventually become Concordia Cemetery, now the final resting place of more than 60,000 souls including gunfighters, Buffalo Soldiers, Civil War veterans, and a former Mexican president.
In the years that followed, Juana's headstone was stolen. It was later replaced by the Concordia Heritage Association, the nonprofit that has preserved and restored the cemetery since 1990. Today, the stone bearing her name and the inscription "First Lady of Concordia" sits at the Yandell entrance of the cemetery, where visitors can find it and learn what it means.
Without Juana Maria Ascarate Stephenson, there is no Concordia Cemetery. Without that burial on her own land, in the chapel her husband built for her, there is no Boot Hill, no John Wesley Hardin plot, no ghost tours, no Stories from the Stones.
Which brings us back to the question we started with.
When is the end of something also the beginning?
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