Ida Speed Turney


Ida and Mark, from Ancestry.com

b. July 17, 1879 Madisonville, Hopkins, Kentucky
d. December 3, 1962 Tucson, Arizona

  Ida was born July 17, 1879 in Madisonville, Kentucky. As a young woman, she was prominent in the social life of that city, and received training as a concert pianist. In 1912, she moved with her father and mother, Ernest and Minnie Morton Speed, to Odessa in western Texas where she taught piano and music (including to the boy who later became chairman of Standard Oil.) In Odessa, she met Mark C. Turney, a cowboy from Texas who had been living in Arizona. Later in 1912, she and her parents moved to Mena, Arkansas, and on August 25, 1913, Ida and Mark were married at her parents home in Mena. (The wedding story in the Mena Weekly Star is titled "Miss Ida Speed, A Popular Young Woman, Won by Westerner.") Very shortly after that, she and her parents and Mark moved to Arizona, locating near Elgin, where they bought a small ranch.

  The first years in Arizona were tough. Minnie died in 1914 in an accident involving a cart and runaway horse; Ernest continued to live on the ranch until his death in 1941. Mark was ambushed and shot late in 1916 by neighboring rancher named Buford Ward; according to a newspaper report on the pre-trial hearing, Ward claimed that Mark had been threatening him; Mark countered that he had refused to aid Ward in branding some stray cattle so Ward could claim them as his own. Mark lay wounded for a number of hours before help got to him. Ward's trial didn't begin for more than six months because Mark couldn't leave the hospital; he was finally brought to the courtroom on a stretcher so the trial could take place. After almost a year and half of interventions, doctors finally decided that his right leg had to be amputated at the hip. He took several more years to recover fully, and then returned to ranching.

 Ida engaged in the social and civic life of her new home. She was elected president of the newly formed Black Oak Cemetery Association in 1920. In 1923, she was the director-pianist for a program presented by the Farm Bureau in Elgin, and she was an officer of the Elgin women's book club. In 1936, she wrote a letter to the Arizona Daily Star correcting a misattribution of the writer of a play The Great Divide. Later in her life, in 1958, she donated the native stone and wrought iron entry gate to the Black Oak Cemetery in memory of her parents, Ernest and Minnie Morton Speed, and her husband Mark, all of whom are buried there.

  After Mark died, she continued operation of their ranch until 1958 when she sold it. Their land had grown from the first small 1913 homestead to 1,500 acres of deeded land, and leases to state and forest lands adding up to 10 sections of range on the west slope of the Whetstone Mountains, 12 miles east of Sonoita. Ida moved into Tucson and became an avid traveler, visiting many places in the United States and even taking steamship trip to Hawaii. In 1960 she suffered a stroke which paralyzed her right side but it didn't slow her down, and she used a wheelchair to get around for the next two years until her death at 78 from abdominal cancer in 1962.

Written and edited by Corbin Smith from obituary in Arizona Daily Star, Tuesday, December 4, 1962. and Pima County Coroner's report

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