María de la Concepción Marcela Argüello y Moraga, commonly referred to simply as Concepción Argüello, or "Conchita", 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 Rezanov returned to Russia to ask the Tsar for permission to marry Argüello. During his return trip across Siberia in 1807, he fell from his horseback, became sick and died in Krasnoyarsk, where he is buried. According to a traditional account, Argüello never learned his fate and continued to wait for him nearly till the end of her life, rejecting all other men. Late in her life, she became a Dominican nun at Santa Catalina Monastery and Academy which was founded in Monterey in 1851, where she was given the religious name of Sister Mary Dominica, O.P. She thereby became the first native Californian to enter the Dominican Order. The community she entered, which later became the Dominican Sisters of San Rafael, soon moved to Benicia. She remained a member of the community until her death there in 1857. According to another source, Argüello was waiting for the pope's permission to marry Rezanov, as he was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and not a Roman Catholic. 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, she chose to stay single and later became a nun. Argüello died in 1857 and is now buried in St. Dominic's Cemetery, Benicia, where her remains were moved from the cemetery of St. Catherine Convent in 1894, when it closed. 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.
, a chamber musical based on Concepción Arguello's story and written by , premiered at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco in 2006 -a new adaptation is in the works.
