Sarah Turner (1786-) was an American settler from Kansas who owned the Crooked River Ranch in Texas during the 1860s.
Biography[]
Sarah Turner was born in 1786, and she and her husband Samuel later settled in Kansas, where they started a family. She had two sons, Tom and Enoch; Tom had a daughter, Laura Lee, who remained with Sarah and Samuel when her father went to Texas to found a ranch. Her son Tom later returned to Kansas and fought with the Jayhawkers in Bleeding Kansas, during which he was killed by Border Ruffians from Missouri; Sarah Turner was left with a hatred for anyone and anything from Missouri (as well as harboring a strange dislike for "Hoosiers" from Indiana), and she identified as a proud Jayhawker. After the American Civil War's end, Sarah, Samuel, Laura, and Enoch headed to Texas to move to Tom's ranch, but they were ambushed by Comancheros along the way; the Comancheros killed Samuel and Enoch and planned to sell Sarah and Laura into sexual slavery. They were rescued by the fugitive former bushwhacker Josey Wales, who killed all of the Comamcheros, but Sarah continued to dislike Wales, seeing him as a murderer and an evil man. She later acquired a positive opinion of him after he helped her move to her son's ranch, praying to God and thanking him for changing Wales into "a better man" in time to "deliver (them) from the Philistines". She later helped to defend the ranch from Captain Bill Terrill's Redlegs, calling the "freebooters" a "slander to Kansas" for attacking innocent women. After Wales killed Terrill and all of his men, he and his friends were welcomed as permanent residents of the ranch by Turner, and Wales and Laura Lee pursued a relationship.