Concepción
Argüello
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
María Concepción Argüello (February 19, 1791 – December 23, 1857) was an Alta Californian noted for her romance with Nikolai Rezanov,
a Russian promoter of the colonization of Alaska and California.
Biography
She was the daughter
of José Darío Argüello, the Spanish governor of Alta California
and Presidio Commandante. She was born at the Presidio
of San Francisco and at 15 she fell in love with Nikolai Rezanov,
the visiting head of a Russian expedition to Alaska. His expedition had hard times in California
and his involvement with Argüello was at first motivated by practical
considerations, since the Spanish Crown did not permit giving aid to Russians. But the pair
fell in love, and Nikolai returned to Russia to ask the tsar for permission to
marry Concepción. During his trip across Siberia in 1807 he fell from
horseback, became sick and died in Krasnoyarsk,
where he is buried .[citation needed]
According to a traditional account,
Argüello never learned his fate and continued to wait for him till the end of
her life, rejecting all other men. Later she became a nun in Monterey, California and remained in the sisterhood until her death.
According to another source,
Argüello was waiting for the pope's permission to get married. She learned of
Rezanov's death a year later in 1808, when the head of the Russian American
Company, Alexander Baranov, wrote to her brother. Although freed from her
engagement,[1]
she chose to stay celibate and became a nun.[2]
Argüello died in 1857 and is now
buried in Saint Dominic's Cemetery, Benicia, where her remains were moved from St. Catherine Convent's
cemetery in 1894. A monument marks her grave.
In
culture
- Francis Bret Harte wrote a ballad describing her fate, in which Rezanov
is referred to as Count von Resanoff, the Russian, envoy of the mighty
Czar.
- Novel Concha: My Dancing Saint by Rebecca Lawrence Lee
- Soviet rock opera
Juno and Avos
describes Concepción Argüello's love story.
The entire wiki link can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concepci%C3%B3n_Arg%C3%BCello
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