Mark Coleman 'Bill' Turney


Mark's caption: "taken election day 1944 as we started out
to vote for FDR for the 4th time!"

b. February 25, 1884 Glen Cove, Coleman County, Texas
d. September 9, 1951 Pima County, Arizona

 Mark was born in Coleman County, Texas on February 25, 1884. As a young man he moved to Arizona and was an employee of the Chino Land and Cattle Company in the Ashfork and Prescott area. He returned to Texas and in Odessa in 1912 he met Ida Speed, a young woman from Kentucky who had moved to Odessa with her parents Ernest & Minnie Morton Speed. In Mena, Arkansas, on August 25, 1913, they were married at her parent's home. (The wedding announcement in the Mena Weekly Star is titled "Miss Ida Speed, A Popular Young Woman, Won by Westerner.") Very shortly after, he and Ida and her parents 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 and he was taken to hospital. 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.

 Betty Barr, in an article in 2001 about Black Oak Cemetery for The Nogales International wrote that Jane Woods, whose father Stone Collie knew Mark, said that Mark could hop hard on his left leg and grab the saddle horn to swing his stump over the saddle. Mark had a particularly harrowing encounter one day with a bull, and Jane said that after that her dad made Mark a black willow crutch that he hooked over his left arm, leaving his right hand free for roping.

 Mark was active in civic affairs and worked for many years as a volunteer official for local and regional elections. In 1919, he ran for a position as a judge in Pima County. He protested Pima County''s proposed elimination in 1936 of his local voting precinct, the smallest in the state, as cost reduction measure (there were six voters in the precinct: Gene Hummel, Mark and Ida Turney, Earl and Minnie Dalton, and Ernest Speed). He wrote letters to the editors of newspapers correcting and challenging and advocating, and at one point declaring his support for Isabella Greenway as the first woman to represent Arizona in Congress because he felt she'd support FDR's programs. In October 1935 he wrote a letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Star in which he chastised the editor for the positions he was taking about the New Deal programs. He proudly captioned a 1941 photo of himself as "taken election day 1944 as we started out to vote for FDR for the 4th time!"

 Mark actively ranched until his death in 1951 of chronic hypertension and arteriosclerosis. His wife Ida continued to operate the ranch until she sold it in 1958. 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.

Written and edited by Corbin Smith from Ida Speed Turney obituary in Arizona Daily Star, Tuesday, December 4, 1962; and from Ancestry.com and Newspapers.com.

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