Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton
I think my father had a real pioneer spirit. I think he rather looked forward to going out to the Uintah Basin to live to help to build it up. I think he could envision droves of people coming, and the railroad coming, and it becoming a very thriving part of Utah. I’m sure it was not that way with my mother. I think the move to her was like going to the end of the earth. Thoughts of leaving Heber, where she had lived all of her life except those two years in Provo, which was not so far away, the thoughts of leaving her sisters and her brother Jim and Aunt Maron and all of her friends and her lovely home and the security of that lovely, beautiful, little Heber Valley, I think was just a dreadful thought of loss to her. To go out into that wilderness country, and she hadn’t even seen it yet, so I think it probably looked worse when she did see it than she even imagined it, to go back to coal oil lamps and to all of the things that she had, really, started out with so many years before seemed just almost more than she could do.
But if she felt that way, she didn’t ever express it, at least not that I know of. To the children I think she put on the best front that she could, and she realized that it was the thing that my father felt was best to do, and she certainly had the “whither thou goest, I shall go” attitude. So far as I know at least, the move was with her full consent.
Quite a few things had happened in Heber in those last years. A few people had cars now, and of course we had even had a motorcycle or two. I remember the first one that came through. Jack ran after it with his hat in his hand as long as he could follow it and came home covered with dust and dirt and worn completely out. Jack was always excited by anything new, and I don’t think he’s ever gotten over it.
If you want to see everything on a trip, you want to go with Jack, or with Joe, because they read every sign and every word on every sign. They look at every picture, they stop to examine every rock, and by the time you get back from a trip with them, you really know that you have seen things. Jack always had that adventuresome spirit, even to the point when he’d climbed over the picket fence and fell on the picket, which stuck in his side, and the doctor had to come and take a few stitches, and many other adventures he had, some of which I’ve neglected to tell you and had meant to.
I had meant to tell you about his experience in prison, or in jail I should say, in Provo when he and his friend shot a beebee gun through a lady’s skirt. My father was out of town, and they called my mother when they found out who he was, and she said, “Well, do whatever you would do to any other boy.” I think they were just trying to frighten Jack good, so they put the two boys in a jail cell and left them there until it got dark and gave them bread and water for their supper. They really thought they were there to stay. But when it came dark, or almost dark, they sent them home. When my father got home he secretly laughed about it, but to the boys he put on a very serious face and it was a long time before we dared call Jack a jailbird.
Jack didn’t make the trip to Myton, or the move to Myton, with us. If I have my facts straight, he completed his junior year of high school that year with enough extra credit that by going to summer school he could enter the BYU that fall. So with a small loan from Charlie Erickson I think, he went off to Provo to school at that time. He always came out, until he was married, and spent part of the summer, and I know that his first teaching job was down at Randlett. I remember going down there one time with my father and staying overnight with the people where Jack boarded. I think their name was Taylor. This was the first time that I had ever gone farther than Roosevelt, and so it was the first time I saw Fort Duchesne, or the Chinaman’s Store on the strip, and some of the other things that I may tell you about later.
Fred had finished his last year of high school the spring of the year that we left for Myton, and Roy had completed his first year. I had finished the sixth grade. One thing I remember feeling bad about was that the following year they were to begin the junior high school, and I would have gone over to the high school building the next year.
It was a very busy summer for us, for Mother at least, I suppose. I don’t know what time of year we did leave, but it must have been toward the end of the summer, because I’m sure she had gathered much of the garden and had canned and dried fruit and vegetables and made preparation to take as much food with us as she could. We had arranged to rent the house again rather than sell it—I suppose in case we decided to return. One vegetable I remember that we took, I don’t know the name of it, it was some kind of bean—it was the biggest thing I ever saw—or maybe it would be classed as a pea, I don’t know. Anyway it was a huge thing and we must have raised a lot of them because we just about lived on them that next winter. Mother had bottled chicken and I’m sure that we had gotten all of the things that we could out of the garden: the carrots and squash and all of the many things that we hoped to have for food that winter.
I also don’t remember how much of a convoy it took to move our things. Mother and I had stayed behind while Father and Fred and Roy went ahead about four days before we did with our furniture in the wagons. Besides our furniture, we had many other things to take: all of the food that we had collected, and our furniture had increased somewhat, at least it had increased to the amount of my piano. There had to be some place for the chickens, I’m sure that they had made some pens that the chickens were taken in. We had to take our cows. They were, of course, driven ahead. I wondered if the boys walked to herd them along ahead, or if they rode our lovely little bay pacer named Topsy. The details of their trip, I’m sure, one would have to get from them, because I don’t know a great deal about that. I’ve wondered too, as I’ve sat here or lain here with my foot in the air [she had phlebitis as she was taping this], just what happened about the pigs. I know they had to go some way. Whether they went as meat or whether they went as pigs I’m not sure, but at that time of year with no refrigeration, I would guess they went as pigs, so there would have to be crates for them.
They really must have felt like pioneers as they made their way to the top of Daniels Summit and down through Strawberry Valley, down Red Creek and Deep Creek, and along through Starvation and Duchesne and on down into Myton. The only difference, I imagine, between them and pioneers was that they were going east and the pioneers were coming west.
As I said, my mother and I stayed behind because we were to go in style on the stage. I don’t remember where we stayed after our furniture left. My guess would be that we stayed down at Uncle Jim Campbell’s. I do remember the morning that we got on that big, old stage to start our journey, because it was the second ride I had ever had in an automobile. I had had one short ride before that in Uncle Jim Clyde’s new automobile. The stage, aside from the fact that it was driven by an engine instead of a six-horse team, could have come right straight out of a John Wayne movie. It was a great, big, lumbering thing. You could almost imagine Indians coming from all directions on the side, and I’m sure my mother expected them to.
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| The Myton stage car about the time the Wahlquists used it |
Mother didn’t relish the idea of going out into an Indian Reservation, having grown up on stories of the Black Hawk Indian Wars and their experiences with Indians in southern Utah. My grandmother had filled her with many of these stories and she was frightened to death of an Indian. I can remember when they used to even come down into Heber during the summer as they sometimes did, and she would see them coming and she would rush me into the house back into that dark closet to sit on the sacks of rags, just like we did during electrical storms. It must have taken a great deal of courage for poor Mother to get on that stage and head for the Indian Reservation.
It was rather a long day. We left quite early in the morning and it was late afternoon when we passed my father and the boys along by a little community called Starvation. That’s exactly what it looked like. It was the most desolate place I think I have ever seen in my life. I think the stage stopped, so my mother and dad could talk to each other for a few minutes there. Now, we must have stayed at Duchesne that night. I really can’t remember. Maybe the things that happened in Myton made that leave my mind completely, but we couldn’t have possibly gone on to Myton that night, because I know that Father and the boys got into Myton the same night that we arrived, or several hours later. It would have taken them much longer than that to do the 20 miles from Duchesne to Myton, so I think we stayed in Duchesne that first night, and then took the stage on to Myton the next day.
We got into Myton fairly early in the afternoon. My father had been out ahead of us, and made a trip out to look the situation over before we moved. When he came back, he had assured Mother that he had rented about the nicest house in Myton. It turned out to be one of the nicer houses in Myton, but I remember when the stage drove up and Mother and I got out in front of this two-story, weather-beaten, unpainted, lumber building. My father had told Mother, and it was true, that it had been the hotel, but they had fairly recently built a new hotel up on the main road, and so this was for rent. There wasn’t a blade of grass in sight, nor a tree of any description.
Well, we went in, and as we went in, we came first to a large room about the size of our big room at home, which I suppose had been the lobby of the hotel, which later became our living room and a corner of it was Father’s office that first winter. From there into another room which could have been the bar, or a bedroom. There was a bed left in it, I know. Then out into the worst-looking kitchen I think one could imagine. It wasn’t painted at all, it was just bare lumber. There were quite a few cupboards in it, but they were just raw, bare lumber. The room that had been the lobby was papered, but there was a big place in the ceiling that you could tell had been patched, and I’ll tell you why just a little bit later.
We were very tired, and of course it really was not the most inviting sight to see as our new home. It looked much better than that, of course, when we got our things moved into it, and Mother got nice, bright rag rugs on the floor. But that day it looked really bad. The people from the hotel had apparently taken all of the window shades with them, and of course there were no drapes up, so the windows were bare and there was no way of closing anything out.
We’d only been there a few minutes, when who should we see coming down the street but a big Indian buck with a couple of squaws and a bunch of little Indian kids. We didn’t know then that they were almost our nearest neighbors and in time we would learn to love them almost as if they were part of the family. That day when Mother saw them coming, that was just about the end. She grabbed me and we got onto this bed that had been left and got clear over into the corner of it as far as we could. There was nothing on the windows, and Mother thought maybe they would just go on by. But that wasn’t what they had come for. They had seen us arrive, and they were very curious. They came and pressed their faces up to the window and looked us over and chatted and talked to each other about us. I guess that they could see that we were afraid, because they laughed and they giggled and they really had a right good time for perhaps about half an hour. They didn’t try to come in, they were much too polite for that, but they did think it was perfectly all right to look us over. When they had done that, they went off down the street towards town.
About this time we found out why the bed had been left behind and not taken to the hotel when they had moved out: it was alive with bed bugs. By this time they were all over us, and Mother’s fear of Indians and everything else had left her, and she jumped up and we got the mattress out and the bed thrown out in the back yard as fast as she could do it. The back yard didn’t look any better than the front yard. There was no grass out there. There were some kind of shabby old sheds out in the back where our cows and pigs and chickens were later to live.
By this time I was so thirsty I didn’t know what to do, and I had been crying for quite a while to have a drink of water, but Mother wasn’t about to get off that bed while the Indians were looking, not until she found out about the bed bugs. I think even the Indians wouldn’t have frightened her enough to stay on the bed after she discovered the bed bugs. Anyway, Father had told her that there was a cistern there. I don’t know if all of you know what a cistern is, but it’s a big hole dug down in the ground and cemented all around and then filled up with water. She decided that she would get me a drink out of the cistern. We went over and took the top off the cistern—she had a bucket, and she was going to get me a drink of water—and the first thing we saw was a frog, a big, fat frog, that had fallen in the cistern and drowned, and he was floating around on top. Well, that took care of our drink of water. I was crying, and I really think Mother probably would have sat down and cried at that moment, except here came a lady from a house on the other side of us, a little house that we hadn’t even noticed because it faced the other street. She had a pitcher of ice water or lemonade, and it was very, very good.
She explained to us that it was late in the summer and we should not drink the water out of the cistern, but there was a hydrant almost a block away from where we were that belonged to the city, and she pointed out to us where it was, and we should get our drinking water from there. The only time in the summer that we should use the cistern for drinking water would be if something went wrong with the water system, and then we should boil the water. In the winter when the city water froze up, which it always did, we either had to get ice from the river to melt, or we had to depend on the cistern water.
We had our drink of water and went back to the house and decided to investigate the upstairs. When we got upstairs, we discovered why the patch on the ceiling downstairs. There was just the one layer of boards: the ceiling downstairs was the floor upstairs. There were just bare floors on the upstairs. We learned afterwards that a very heavy man—there were about three bedrooms up there—we learned later that this heavyset man had gotten up in the morning and had put his foot through the floor and caused this big hole in the ceiling which would have to be mended, and which hadn’t been very well mended.
I guess it was nearly dark, or it could even have been dark, when Father and Fred and Roy finally came with all of the cows and the chickens and whatnot, and our first day in Myton was almost to an end. We got enough stuff into the house so that we could get to bed that night and get to sleep. Mother, after she had investigated the upstairs, had gotten busy and heated some of the water. She had built a fire in the stove from wood that she found outside and heated some of the water, and she had been scrubbing and cleaning and had gotten it at least so she would allow food to be set out. I don’t know just what we did about beds that night, whether we slept on the floor or what; I imagine that by that time I was sound asleep.
You may think that I worried too much about how we got our chickens and cows and pigs out to Myton with us, but you must remember that they represented a big part of our living. I’ve already told you about Mother’s butter and egg money, and how it bought practically everything, or much of what we had that didn’t grow in our garden. Our pigs represented at least ninety percent of the meat that we ate. Occasionally Mother would kill a chicken. I shouldn’t say Mother killed a chicken—Mother never killed a chicken. Occasionally Mother would have one of the men in the house kill a chicken. On a very rare occasion, I’ve known my father to bring home mutton chops. That’s the only kind of meat I ever remember us buying at the butcher shop. We ate a lot of cheese, and once in awhile we would have a can of salmon. That was a real treat. We sometimes had sardines instead of meat. So our pigs were really important to us. My father was an excellent butcher. He could cut up an animal beautifully, and he always insisted that my mother use everything but the squeal. She made head cheese and sausages, and we had salt pork and bacon and roasts, and every bit of the pig was used. As I say, it represented the biggest part of our meat. We ate a lot of these funny beans that I told you about—they were very high in protein—that winter. That winter was not our very best winter. You’ll have to remember that my father was new in the community, and he had very little practice that year.
Almost immediately after we came to Myton he was made president of the little branch there. It was not a ward at that time. As I have told you, I think earlier, he very often turned what could have been law cases into church responsibilities. He had expected a great deal of work, I think, from the Indian land ventures, and he did have, I guess most of the work he did have had to do with water rights with the Indians and things of that sort. But I don’t think that that business came as rapidly as he had expected.
Myton was a non-Mormon town. It was made up of people who were there because of the government, the government Indian Agency was there, and also of a certain amount of land speculators I’m sure. Then there were some very influential and very fine people who were in business there who didn’t really discuss where they’d come from and would a little prefer not to say why they had come where they had come from. Most of the LDS people there lived out of town. They were people who had come to take up land, and they were farmers. So we had only just a very small branch.
There is an interesting little story that I’d like to tell that might prove a point. About the same time that we came to Myton, there was a man, whose name I won’t mention, who was a dentist who came to Myton because there wasn’t a dentist there, and he thought it had an opportunity for him. When the ward teachers went to visit him, he asked them not to come any more. He said that he would go to church later on and would take an active part later on, but while he was building up his practice, he preferred not to be affiliated with the LDS Church because it might harm his opportunity to get business from the non-Mormon element of the town. It is rather ironic that it wasn’t very long after that, a year or so, that this man was leaving town because he could not get a practice and my father had been elected as president of the town council. My father was very well accepted in this town, even though they knew his religious affiliations and he didn’t make any effort to hide them at all. He had some wonderful friends among the non-Mormon people in town. I’d like to tell you some stories about them as we go along.
There was no high school in Myton, so Roy didn’t go to school the first year that we were there. He stayed at home and milked the cows and worked around the place. I’m not sure about Fred, whether he taught school the first year we were there, or not until the second year. I guess I’ll have to call him up and find out and then I’ll let you know. I went to school of course, in the seventh grade. My teacher’s name was Mr. Cope. Isn’t that wonderful? I can remember another teacher’s name. That’s two I know out of all of them. There were two small two-room buildings on the block that comprised our school yard. The one building had the first four grades and the other building, the other four. In our room were the seventh and eighth grades. Mr. Cope was the seventh grade teacher. The next year, when I was in the eighth grade, Mr. Cope had left and my teacher was Mr. Rice. I liked both of these men very much. I enjoyed school, even under those conditions. I think there were only not more than ten or twelve of us in each grade.
I told you I’d call Fred and ask him if he taught school that first year, and I did. He did teach; he taught at Lake Fork. It’s another interesting thing that I really didn’t know—he said that they stopped in Duchesne for him to take the Teacher’s Examination as they were coming through Duchesne with all the cows and chickens and everything on their way to Myton. He stopped and took the Teacher’s Examination and then started teaching at Lake Fork on the first of October that year. So of course that means Roy did have the full responsibility of taking care of the cows and the chores at home.
I’m sure the money Fred made from his teaching, however small it might have been, must have been a great help to us that winter. This won’t be the only time that I’ll tell you about some of the wonderful, unselfish things that Fred did for the family. He didn’t ever go to college and was the only one who didn’t [except Mabel herself], but he was always right there with money and work when it was necessary to help anyone with anything that they might need. He was, and is, the most unselfish person I have ever known.
You might also wonder why I’ve belabored the fact of how long it took us to get to Myton. Joe’s family, at least, will realize that they get in the car here at our place [in Ogden] and go way beyond Myton, way past Vernal, which is about another forty miles, and then on out to Manila, which is possibly another forty miles, and do it all in about, well they never count on about more than three hours, because now of course they have nice, paved highways to drive on, and when Fred and Roy and Father made the trip, it was on old dirt roads, a lot of them along high mountainsides, sometimes slanting until you wondered how they kept from sliding off. Sometimes people did when there was stormy weather, because they didn’t have much in the way of shoulder on the road; the road had just been dug out of the side of the mountains and traveled on.
It wasn’t very long until Mother had her butter and egg business going, with me as the Delivery Department. I’m sure that that, with Fred’s salary, helped a great deal. You have to remember that Keith was still in the mission field, which was a great expense. His operation there had to be paid for, and there were many expenses that my father had that winter. Mother, of course, was just as fussy with her butter as she had been in Heber, and the result was that she sold part of it to the little restaurant, and part to the hotel. If they didn’t need all of it, then the rest went to Waugh’s Store, which I’ll tell you about later on. Waugh’s Store is one of the most fascinating things in my lifetime.
The restaurant was a very small affair, and at noon I always had to come home—Mother’s butter had to be fresh, you know—so I had to come home from school at noon and get the butter for the restaurant, a couple of pounds or so, and two or three pounds for the hotel, and take them there during the noon hour. Then after school, if there was any other butter left, I took it and eggs up to Waugh’s Store and traded them for whatever else she might need.
I wasn’t fond of the job, I’ll admit. I was getting bigger then, and going to people’s back door with the butter was not the greatest job in the world, but it was certainly a necessary one, and we did that for several years . Well, perhaps not several years, but for some time until we finally got a separator.Before we got the separator, I was not only delivering eggs and butter, I was also delivering milk around the neighborhood and to the hotel. I don’t recall taking milk to the restaurant, but I used to go in the evenings with a bucket of milk in each hand, and when I’d get to the places who were buying the milk, we would measure out however much they were to get, and I would go on to the next place and usually wound up at the hotel with the balance of it.
I don’t know, it seemed to me that I never got started out in the evening with a bucket of milk in both hands but what a mosquito would land square on my nose and I’d have to put the buckets down and bat the mosquitoes, pick them up and go ahead. I know I was doing this up to the time when I became interested in boys, because while there were hardly any boys around, (and the ones who were I was not interested in particularly as boys) but I still was very embarrassed when they would come riding by on their horses and there I would be with my buckets in front of me, batting the mosquitoes off my face.
I’m sure that my mother realized and appreciated my embarrassment and probably put a little pressure on my father, but I don’t think he appreciated it. He had, as you know, grown up in very hard times and had done many very menial things, and I think he sort of thought that it had helped him develop his strong character. Mother, on the other hand, being the youngest of her family, which was quite well-to-do when she grew up, had been brought up somewhat as a lady. While she certainly had had her trials with her blind mother and the care that she took of both her mother and her father, she had never had to do what she considered menial tasks. As I’ve told you, she had never learned to milk a cow or kill a chicken or even to ride a horse. She was brought up more as a lady and she appreciated my embarrassment, I’m sure.
We had moved from the old hotel building; we bought the house on the corner of the same block just east of where we lived. It was a much smaller house; in fact, it was a very small house. I think we only had four rooms and a long porch along the side of it. We finally bought a separator, and so after that the milk was separated, and at least for a while we sold the cream.
It was really funny to watch when we had the separator. My father or Fred would start it up, and here would come the Indians. The Indians that I mentioned before lived now directly across the street from us, right on the edge of town, and the old Indian, the Chief, was the Medicine Man of their tribe. His name was McKuen. He had several sons who also lived there in tents around. They and the wives would hear our separator start, and here they would come in their bright shawls and would stand around watching the separator and giggling and talking to each other. After awhile, my father would say, “Would you like some milk?” Immediately a bucket would come out from under the shawls and he would fill their buckets with separated milk, and off they would go home. They never, ever would ask for the milk unless he said, “Would you like some milk?” You would never know that they even had the bucket there to take it home in.
We did this for awhile and then they got the idea of a milk route. We bottled the milk very carefully and sealed it, and it was taken in the back of the buggy, the back seat taken out and room left for it, and Fred or Roy or sometimes Father delivered milk all over town. Practically everybody who didn’t have their own cow bought milk. This was quite a lucrative business for a number of years, and I think we engaged in it almost as long, well, I suppose as long as we lived in Myton, or at least until Father had died and Fred was married and Roy had gone on his mission, etc.
My chief part in this venture, of course, was washing and scalding all of the milk bottles and the buckets and the strainers and the separator and everything connected with the milk, which had to be kept very clean. This required a lot of time and a lot of effort, especially considering the fact that the water to do all of it had to be carried a block, from this hydrant that I told you about before. In the wintertime, Father and the boys would go down to the river and cut great chunks of ice. We had a shed which we used as an ice house, and the ice would be put in there with sawdust or straw, and it would have to be gotten out and melted and cleaned up to be used for water, because that hydrant that belonged to the city always froze up. In fact, it looked like a great fountain—the water would keep running over and freezing until sometimes it would stand several feet in the air (the ice).
I think Roy had to stay out of school only the first year that we were in Myton, and then he went to Vernal to what was then called Uintah Academy. It was run by the LDS Church. There were several of these academies all over the state, and later they were bought by the state and were run as high schools. I was able to go over there one year, but I want to tell that as a separate story.
I’m getting myself so mixed up with all this stuff chronologically, but as I told you, I’m only trying to relate some of the more interesting things about our growing-up years that you might not otherwise know, and it will make you feel that you know your parents and relatives better.
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Go to Part 5.
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