Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)
I want to tell you a little bit about Fred’s goings and comings in his school. You who have long rides in your nice warm cars to your work and sometimes think it’s quite a distance, I’d like to tell you that Fred used to go six miles to his school each morning, but he went horseback. He seldom could go more than at a walk, because the roads would be so slick and dangerous that he didn’t dare make his horse go faster. Usually before he left to go, he had already milked six or eight cows and sometimes had delivered the milk around the town and then come home and had a hasty breakfast and left riding his horse to school. If you ever knew where it was cold, it was in the Uintah Basin. The wind always blew, and on those cold winter mornings, that wind was really something. During the real winter months when the river was frozen over and Fred could ride across the river on the ice, it only was four miles to his school. Those were terrible days for my mother, the days that he rode cross the ice, because she was always sure that the horse was going to go through and that Fred and the horse would both end up in the river. But this never happened.
There might be time on this roll to tell you about the winter Roy and I were both in Vernal at school. We lived with a family named Richardson. They were friends of my father’s, and he always stayed there when he was in Vernal on a case. They had other boarders, and we didn’t pay as much as the others. We paid $30 a month each, and I think the others probably paid $40 or $50. They had their breakfast before we did, and then we had breakfast with the family. We always had hot mush for breakfast, but we could see evidence of bacon and eggs and hot biscuits and other things that the regular boarders had had. We were a little bit resentful of this. Roy slept on the porch, a closed-in porch, which Mrs. Richardson used as her utility room. Her washer and ironing board and so on were out there. I slept with her daughter, who was probably about 11 or 12 years old and was their only child—they had been married quite late in life. On Saturdays I was expected to help some with the housework and I was usually expected to help with the dishes at night. We all ate dinner together, but even then, the better-paying boarders usually had cake or something of that sort, and we and the family had, perhaps, rice pudding.
It was awhile before Roy discovered it, but when he did finally discover that she kept the fruit cake and other goodies in the washer on the porch where he slept, we really didn’t have any pangs of conscience for nibbling at it a bit, but we soon had to stop because the daughter got the blame, and of course we couldn’t allow that to happen.
Roy and I both debated, we were on the debating team, and we had quite a lot of success. We only had one other school to debate with, and that was the Roosevelt High School, but we could always beat them. The two teams debated each other a great deal. The debating teacher and English teacher was a Mr. Lambert and I liked him very, very much—he really was a fine person. I remember how proud I was when he told my father that I reminded him of the Apostle Paul who spoke as one having authority.
I was not able to go back any more to school because of Mother’s failing health. In fact, that year I had to come home a little bit early. Father came over about a week or two before school let out and took me home because Mother had had an attack. She had, for a few years before her surgery, attacks of gall bladder and they were very severe, and she suffered terribly with them. I did get all of my credits that year, but I was disappointed that I hadn’t been able to stay for the closing festivities, the graduation, and all of the things that everybody had looked forward to. At the time, I thought I would be going back the following year, but I was not able to. Mother’s health was never such that I could go again after that.
I would guess that by this time Father had been elected to the office of District Attorney of that district, which comprised Uintah, Duchesne, Wasatch, and I think Utah counties, so he was away from home a good deal. He would have to attend court in Heber, and in Provo, and in Vernal, and in Duchesne. It made it so that Fred and Mother and I were alone a good deal of the time. Of course Fred was teaching, and Mother would be alone during the day. Mother was always very nervous about being alone, and so that perhaps is another reason why it was necessary for me to be at home.
I did get some ninth grade credit the next year. I don’t know how the arrangement was made, but a Mr. Hendricks (or Henderson, or Hendrickson—I don’t know why I can’t remember his name—I had a crush on him, or maybe it was on his motorcycle that I had the crush)—anyway, he arranged with the superintendent and I went two nights a week after school and took a class with him in biology.
Each year we tried to do something with the land that we had bought north of Myton, but it proved to be pretty utterly worthless. Most of it had a few inches of soil on top and then it was a hard shale underneath. One corner of it that they were able to do something with, soon after water was put on it at times became alkaline. My father held onto this land for quite a while because he thought he could sell it for city lots when all of those people came to Myton when the railroads came, but he later gave that up.[1] What he did was to rent or what was then called “lease” Indian land, which was very available, and then of course the profits would be shared with the owners. They did this for several seasons with more or less success.
My mother was never intended to be a farmer’s wife—she worried incessantly. She would watch the clouds during the day as they came up, and if they got black and dark, and she would be sure that it was going to hail and ruin crops. And it usually did. If there was no cloud in the sky and the sun beat down hard and hot, she was sure that the crops would dry up and wither and die. And they usually did.
The year that Keith came home from his mission, he immediately tried to enlist in the United States Army to fight in the First World War. But because of this big scar that he had as a result of his operation while on his mission, he was rejected. Although he was very disgusted about this, he decided that he would lease one of these areas of land and try his luck at farming. He had no sooner settled and started to work the farm, the land, than the United States began drafting and invited him to go to Europe, and on this occasion, he was accepted.
I’m sure that my mother was secretly delighted when he had been rejected, and his leaving after all was very, very hard for her. He had been gone the two years on his mission, and of course she worried terribly as to what the result might be of his going into the service. I remember very well the morning that he left for Salt Lake to report at Fort Douglas. My father was going to go with him as far as Salt Lake, and so goodbyes were said at home to Mother. Mother had herself very well in hand that morning.
She had a pretty good rule that she did not allow herself to break down and cry in front of her menfolk, because she didn’t want to embarrass them. It was pretty rough on her that day, and as she often did after they were gone, well really, there was no place in our little old house big enough for her to cry, so after an emotional crisis was over, you would see Mother going down the path between the raspberry patch and the garden to our outdoor plumbing and there she would have her cry. When she got back she would have herself pretty well in hand. That was what she did that morning when Keith left.
After Keith had gone, Fred and Roy took over the land that Keith had leased and went on farming it. Here again, Mother had a rough time. I remember that she used to worry a great deal all day when they would be gone that something would happen to them. They were so far away, and there was no doctor in Myton. As the evening came on she would be watching the road for their return while she was getting their dinner ready, but occasionally they would have started something that they would want to finish before they came home, and it would be after dark before they came. On an occasion like this, Mother would set the dinner on the back of the stove, and then she and I would start out to walk to meet them. The nights were so still and the roads were so little traveled, and they were rough and muddy from previous rains, so you could hear a wagon for a long distance as it came rumbling along and creaking over the ruts. When we would hear that noise and know that the wagon was coming, Mother and I would turn around and hurry back to the house, and by the time the boys would get there, she would be calmly warming up their dinner on the front of the stove and I would be sworn to secrecy that we had ever been worried.
The same thing would happen when Father and Fred would go to Roosevelt to a stake meeting. Father was president of the branch and Fred for a time was president of the Mutual and was later on the Mutual stake board. Roosevelt was the stake center and that’s where they went for their leadership meetings (Union meetings, they used to call those). When they would be unusually late, Mother and I would start down the road to Old Town, on our way toward the bridge across the river. It would be at least a good mile, I’m sure, to the dugway that came down from North Myton Bench, which they had to come down on their way home to North Myton Bench. When she would hear the wagon creaking or the buggy creaking down that narrow dugway, again we would turn and hurry home, and if it was real late, we’d slip quietly into bed or become very immersed in a book so that when they came, it would look as if we had not been at all worried.
I don’t know that Mother fooled anybody, but I’m sure the boys and Father loved her for trying. I imagine that’s probably why Father never told her exactly when he would be home. I’m sure he thought that if he did, Mother and I might arrive by foot in Provo before he ever left some time.
It was probably a good thing he hadn’t told her when to expect him when we got our first car. Father had handled horses all of his life, and I’m sure he didn’t think a car would be any harder to drive than that. It was an inanimate machine and not near as apt to get scared at something at the side of the road or give him any trouble as a team of horses would. He bought the car, and he had the man that sold it to him drive him out to the edge of the pavement, gave him his car fare back, and Father started out. I don’t exactly know why he came by way of Price, because it was summertime and that road was usually only used in winter because it was kept open better than the road up Daniels Canyon, but he did come that way. He sheepishly told us later that he picked up a hitchhiker who had ridden with him for a few miles and then meekly asked if he could get out. That morning Father came walking in about 5 o’clock in the morning (it was just getting light) and admitted that he had run out of gas on the South Myton Bench.
After breakfast he and Fred went out with the horses to bring the car in. When they got there, they discovered that he had not only run out of gas, he had run out of water. When they got it to the garage, they found out that he had driven it so long after he had run out of water that he had cracked the radiator. He’d also ruined the emergency brake using it coming down the hill like he used the brake on a wagon. The car was patched up, but the radiator always did leak, so after that whenever we were going to be where there would not be water quickly available, we always had to carry a can of water with us. We also always carried a couple of good sized rocks so that if it conked out on us on a hill and we couldn’t make it all the way up, somebody could get out and quickly put the rocks behind the wheels before we started going back down.
Father never did learn to drive that car as a car should be driven; he always drove it like he would a team of horses. If he came to a great big mud puddle, or to a small creek, instead of easing into it gradually, he gunned it just like you would a team of horses, and the mud and the water went splashing all over the car and the windshield. You were lucky if you could see where you were when you got out.
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| Ute Indians in Myton, Utah (adapted from www.mytoncity.com) |
When any Indian became seriously ill, they would be brought to the medicine man, McKuen. Then began days and nights of chanting and singing over this sick person. At first, that was quite hair-raising to my mother when all night long they would chant and sing. They often would build a bonfire and you could see them dancing or moving about the fire. We wanted very much, we kids, to go over close enough so that we could see better, but my father insisted that we did not do this, that they were entitled to their privacy, quite as much as we were to ours. They certainly did respect our privacy.
In all of the years that we lived there, my brothers I’m sure were very careless about their saddles and bridles and pitchforks and gloves and what-have-you, but never once were we ever aware of losing anything. People have given the Indians a reputation for being very dishonest, but as Mr. Waugh, the owner of the little store I’m going to tell you about later, used to say, the Indians were honest until the white man taught them not to be.
There was one way that we could always tell when spring had come. There was a stream that ran through their place, and it ran down along the side of the road past us. It was quite a good-sized ditch, particularly in the spring, and it was from it that we got the water for our gardens. Early in the spring on the first nice, warm, sunny day, you would hear a great laughing and chattering and talking and visiting, with splashing, out by the McKuens’ house, and you would know that it was spring because the family were having their spring bath. They would all be out there: men, women, and children, in the nude, taking their bath together. It was a real happy time for them.
After they would get settled down and get back into their clothes (this time only one layer of clothes) they would take off in their wagons and buggies and head for the hills. They did this a great deal during the summer—they were away. They weren’t bothered with farming their land; it lay idle. They would go out fishing and hunting and enjoying the summertime. I’m certain that they would have agreed with the scripture that “Man is that he might have joy” because they did enjoy their life and they were a happy people. They always had a smile.
It got to the point where, when Mother and I were alone, we were always quite happy to see them coming back. I can remember each spring as they would leave, with the dogs barking behind them and them talking and laughing, calling to each other from the different wagons, heading out to enjoy their summer. Here again, we used to want to get closer when we heard them having their spring festival and their bath, but again Father would tell us, “No, let them have their privacy.”
I said that they got into one set of clothes; I’m telling you this because this is another thing that I might mention later. When a dress wore out, it wasn’t taken off, but they just got a new dress and it was put over the top. That went on all summer and all winter, until by spring they might have six or eight dresses, the women, one on top of the other, and all of them different lengths hanging down below their shawls. I’m sure that there was never another bath, at least until the next springtime rolled around.
The Indians had their holidays just as we had. Two that I was a little bit familiar with were their sun dance and bear dance. I never saw a sun dance. They held it up at White Rocks. I understand that only the Indian men dance in this dance. But I did attend a number of the bear dances, and after I started working at Waugh’s Store and was somewhat an accepted member of the tribe, I danced a number of times in the bear dance.
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| Ute Bear Dance |
The dance went on day and night, and we used to go over at night after I started working. At the end of the three days there would be a feast. I never did eat any of the feast. They used to go around to the stores and get things given to them, and I know that we used to give them in our store tomatoes and peaches and all sorts of canned goods. These were all dumped together in a container or tub or something of that sort, all mixed together: tomatoes, peaches, whatever they were given. They made their unleavened scones (or bread) over an open fire. Each person took his cup and dipped it into the tub and got some of this liquid, whatever was in there, and took a scone and sat down and ate their feast. This happened at the end of the three days.
It was a very happy occasion and they would all be in their very best—and oh! such beautiful bright costumes!—and the bucks in their gay vests with all of the beaded trimming, and the women with their jewelry, as much as they had, one layer on top of another, of bracelets and necklaces. It was a very pretty sight to see.
At night, I suppose, when everyone got tired—the old people got tired; the young people danced all night—they stretched out on their blankets and went to sleep. There would be bonfires throughout the enclosure. It was never entirely quiet at any time throughout the three days of the celebration.
While we are talking about Indians, I’d like to say something about one of my very favorite people when I was a teen-aged girl. She was a little Episcopalian missionary to the Indians. She was a white woman. When I knew her, she was probably in her sixties. All of one summer I trudged around with her from one camp to the other, visiting the various Indian families in and around Myton. She didn’t teach much religion, but she did try very hard to teach them cleanliness and better living conditions in every way. The Indians really seemed to like her and accepted her very well.
In the course of the summer, as we were trudging from one place to another, she told me some of her life story. It seemed that when she was a young woman, she had been very ill, so she had promised the Lord that if He would heal her, that she would become a missionary to the Indians. She said that when she made this promise, she was thinking of being a missionary to the Indians in India, but, lo and behold, when she was well, she was called by her church to become a missionary to the Indians out in western America. She had come long before the white people settled in 1904. She had been out there as a missionary when there were practically no white people there, except in Fort Duchesne there was a regiment of soldiers for many years, presumably to keep peace among the Indians. At one time, this regiment was made up of Negroes, at the time that it was finally dispersed. When the reservation was opened to white people in 1904, the soldiers at Fort Duchesne were released or were sent elsewhere. I remember hearing about when they marched down through Daniels Canyon and down through Heber on their way back to the fort in Salt Lake. Anyway, she was probably, with the exception of the soldiers, one of the few white people out there when she first came as a young woman.
One of the stories that she told: she had a young boy living with her. He was my age; we were in the same grade at school and he was a very fine-looking young fellow. She had raised him and he had played with us and was one of us until it came dating time. And then things changed, and I’ll tell you about that after I tell you her story about him. It seems that at the time that she came out, that when an Indian woman had twins, usually there would be one twin that would be a little weaker than the other, and during the very first night that the twins were born, the father would take the weaker twin out and he would be killed, and only the one would be allowed to live. One morning, or one night, this missionary woman had an Indian mother come to her with twins, and she left the one twin with the missionary in hopes that it would not be killed. She kept it secret for quite a long time, and I don’t know that the child’s father ever did know that his wife had delivered twins. She raised this baby along with all of the other things that she was doing.
As I was going to say, when this boy got to dating age, she was very wise about it, because she recognized that a white girl from a better family would perhaps not want to marry him, and he was much too nice a boy to be married to what she considered white trash. So at that time, she gave up her work out there and went to Redwood City in California to the Indian school there and took him with her to go to school, so that he might find an Indian girl who would be educated and would be in her mind good enough to marry this young man whom she considered as her son. I’ve never heard what happened to her after that. I’ve often wished that I had kept in touch with her, or she with me, and that I could have known how she got along, and what became of this young man.
During the time we would be walking around, she told me so many of the Indian customs. One of the things that seemed to concern her the very most was that so many of the customs that the Indians had were exactly those of the Jewish people in the Old Testament. This was something that she just could not understand. I was too dumb then to know why, and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t ask my father about these things. In talking with her, perhaps we might have taught her the gospel, but I just listened to her story and marveled with her how these Indians way out here in Utah could be like the old Jewish people of the Old Testament.
I keep talking to you about Myton, but it occurs to me that you really can’t understand Myton unless I describe it just a little bit to you the way it looked at the time that we first went there. At that time, Main Street in Myton consisted of about one block and then there were one or two buildings on the ends, each, of the block. There were no paved streets. There were no paved sidewalks. There were hitching posts along in front of the buildings, and people came to town in their wagons or buggies to do their shopping and they walked in five or six inches of either dust or mud, according to what the weather might be. There were no cars, except an occasional stagecoach that might go through, or a traveling salesman who might have a car. The most important street, or block, had about ten small shack buildings on it. On the south side of the street, the first building would be Waugh’s Store, and then there was a tiny post office and a tiny confectionery-and-drugstore combined, then another little general merchandise store. Then there was a vacant spot, and at the end of the block was a hardware store, and the man who owned the hardware store also had a white hearse that was used for the occasional death in the community. That ended Main Street as such on that side. There were a few houses on down the street.
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| Myton, Main Street when Mabel lived there |
Further down was a block that had the school buildings on it. On the street north of Main Street there was the opera house. It was the biggest building in town from the standpoint of area (footage), and there they had a weekly movie, providing that is, if the film got there on time. Occasionally there was a dance there. It was a very poor floor, you can imagine, because on movie nights they moved the wooden chairs in there, scraping across the floor, and it wasn’t a very good floor. I remember a couple of Chautauqua programs coming through. I don’t ever remember any operas, but it was called the opera house, and as I say, it was the biggest building. At one time at least I know that it was filled was my father’s funeral, which was held in the opera house.
On one side of the opera house was the telephone office, which housed the only telephone in Myton. If anyone got a telephone call, if it was a death in the family, they would make some effort to reach you, but if it was anything else, they just took the message and when you came to town, it would be given to you. I can even recall hearing the woman come out of the door and shouting to someone in a wagon coming by, “I have a death message for you!” The person would jump out of their wagon and run in to see what might have happened to someone in his family.
On the other side of the opera house was another small building, which housed the Myton Free Press. There were the editor and his one helper, the typesetter and news gatherer and so on. I guess the editor, who was Mr. Cook, had some national news sources which he used, so that he did put out a weekly newspaper. Across from this office was a little building which looked very much like an extra-large sized outhouse. It was made on pretty much that architecture. There were shelves around it, and it contained a lot of old books that had been donated by various people in the community, and that was the Public Library.
Also over there by the opera house was the new hotel that had been built before we moved into the old one. It was not a large building; I don’t suppose there would be more than six or eight bedrooms in it. They really didn’t have very many people who stopped there, just an occasional government man or an occasional salesman. No one else traveling would be likely to stay at a hotel. So far as I can remember, well, this was Myton.
There was what they called the Old Town, which was apparently where they had settled at the very beginning. There was what had been the opera house down there. It was a much, much smaller building, and it was the building we used for our LDS meetings. There were two or three houses down in there. This was right down near the river, and the river had a habit of flooding up that way sometimes, and that was the reason for moving up onto sort of a little bench area where Myton was. Along down the river right by the bridge, there was another little general merchandise store, a very small one, and a blacksmith’s shop.
Now that represented the city part of Myton. On the south street from Myton (there were three streets) was the government Indian Agent’s office, and further down the street, his home. There were one or two other houses along there. There was also a little community church there, a little white building, where everybody who went to church who wasn’t LDS attended. I don’t recall them ever having a regular minister there, but there were a lot of traveling ministers at that time who went through and sometimes they would preach there. Sometimes they would preach in our church. I used to play the piano for them quite often when they did.
I thought a great deal of Mr. Cook too, perhaps because he invited me to be the librarian on the Wednesday afternoon each week that it was open. For many years I went and opened it and spent a few hours there, largely by myself, unless Mr. Cook came over to visit with me. Occasionally someone would come in and take a book. That was where I learned to love to read. I read everything. I think I read practically everything that was in it, good, bad, and indifferent so far as literature was concerned. Mr. Cook, I must give him credit for teaching me to know good literature. I guess my mother would also give him credit for teaching me some that wasn’t so good, a few that had to go under the mattress if I took them home. I read The Sheik while I was there, which was highly controversial at that time and which now would seem very, very dull, I’m sure. I also read many of the classics while I was there, including Vanity Fair, and oh, all of Dickens’ books, and many, many other things that I probably would never have read otherwise, not going to school, not attending high school or college. I did enjoy Mr. Cook very, very much. He used to talk to me about these books and discuss them with me, and I really liked him very much.
I recall when he came trudging down to our home, which was the only time I think he ever came to our home, because I think my father and he did their visiting either at the Free Press office, or at my father’s office. The day that my father, one of the days that he lay in the front room before his funeral, Mr. Cook came down and came in and stood and looked at him for a long, long time. I was the only one in the room with him at the time, I know. I guess he wondered many things as he stood there. I would suppose he might wonder where Father had gone; perhaps he didn’t, because he insisted that he was a confirmed atheist and he may have thought that was certainly the end. I remember the last thing that he did say as he looked at my father so long was, “There, there was a man.”
My father may have known much more about Mr. Cook than I did. He possibly knew some of his personal life, which he didn’t tell. My father was about the best secret keeper there ever was, sometimes much to my mother’s disgust. She used to go to Relief Society and when she would come home, she would wait until my father got home and she’d say, “Now why didn’t you tell me this or that, that the women were talking about at Relief Society?” My father was the branch president at the time, but he would say, “Well, you weren’t supposed to know it, and neither were they supposed to know it.” She would say, “Well, maybe they weren’t supposed to, but they did.” He would reply, “Well, that’s no reason why you needed to.” So it could be that in their private conversations, Mr. Cook had told him many things the others of us didn’t know.
They held a movie there once a week at the opera house. They were silent movies and were usually western-type movies, and they had a player piano that had a lot of wild, fast music that went well with westerns. We sometimes went to the movies, and Mother always took her knitting. She made hundreds of pairs of socks for the soldiers during World War I. She used four steel knitting needles in making the socks, and they clicked together, and the faster the Indians and the cowboys flashed across the screen, and the louder the music played, the faster Mother’s needles went in their clicking. She could do almost the leg of the sock during one of those movies. I don’t know if she ever learned how to turn a heel or finish out the toe in the dark or not, but it wouldn’t surprise me if she did.
I didn’t do a great deal of knitting; however, I did knit a few sweaters. I remember I knit one for Keith. It was a gray yarn, a pullover-type sweater. When he came home from the service, he had this gray sweater I had knit him, which came nearly down to his knees, and a brown one that hit him about two inches above his belt. He always said if he could have gotten the lady who knit that one and me together, perhaps he could have two sweaters that fit.
Perhaps while we are talking about the War, it would be a good time for me to tell you about how Keith fought the First World War. As I’ve told you, he was inducted at Fort Douglas and he remained there to do his basic training. A few days before he was to leave there for another posting, he came down with influenza. That was the year when influenza swept the country, that winter of 1918 and 1919. He had an extremely bad case of influenza which moved rapidly into pneumonia and from there into spinal meningitis. I remember the day when the telegram came that he was dying, and that if the folks wanted to see him, that they should come at once.
My father and mother left the next morning on the stage. When they arrived there, they were put into white surgical gowns and masks on their faces and gloves on their hands and allowed to see him but told that they must not touch him. They hadn’t counted on my father. He had hid a bottle of consecrated oil in his pocket, and as soon as he got into the room, he took his gloves off, and in spite of the protests of the nurse, proceeded to administer to Keith. She told him that she would have to report it, and he said to her that that would be all right.
Mother said that it was a terrible sight to see. She said that Keith was so twisted with this spinal meningitis, his back was so drawn up, that she said you could have put two or three books between the small of his back and the bed. His knees were drawn up so his legs were almost double; his head was drawn back so that just the crown of it rested on the bed. His eyes were rolled back so that only the whites showed. He was delirious and had a very high temperature. When the doctors came in, Father asked if he might stay with Keith that night, and they said that well, he would probably be gone before morning anyway, so they guessed that it wouldn’t matter. So he stayed all night with Keith, mainly kneeling beside him and praying, and he administered to him a time or two during the night. The next morning the doctors didn’t come in at all until a nurse sent for them. They came in and in amazement said that it was a miracle. I’m sure that they were not at all conscious of what they meant when they said miracle, but my father was. He had been told in a patriarchal blessing that he would have the power of healing in the scourges that would pass over the land, and he surely felt that this was a scourge, because it was taking the lives of thousands of people every day during that time.
Father and Mother stayed in Salt Lake for a week or so. They stayed out at Uncle Bill’s, my mother’s brother, and arranged to have Keith stay there as soon as he was well enough to leave the hospital. They had stayed until he was on the road to improvement, and they had been able to visit with him, and he had become rational, and they knew that he was going to be well. When they arrived home, it was to find Fred and Jack both with influenza. They were sleeping in the front bedroom, Mother and Father’s bedroom. I suppose the reason they were in there was because it was beginning to get chilly, and we had a heater in the front room, and by leaving the door open, we would get some heat into that bedroom. I can’t remember anything about that period at all, except kneeling beside their bed at night as we said our prayers together, praying for us and for Keith and for the folks. I guess Roy had gone to Vernal to school by then, and I really don’t understand why Jack was at home, unless because BYU started later, or maybe had not opened because of the flu, or what, but he was there and they both had the flu. They were together in the bed.
Mother always said that Jack got well quickly because of the apples. She said jokingly, that she thought it was because just before she left for Salt Lake they had bought some apples, and not having a better place to stash them, she had put them under that bed. When she went to move the bed, she found that half the bushel of apples was gone. All of the cores were left under the bed as evidence of the fact that he had eaten them. It either says very little for my cooking, or else very little for our neatness, and possible an awfully lot for apples as a cure for influenza.
After Jack was better, Fred continued to be very ill, and as the weather got colder, his bed was moved into the front room where he would be closer to the fire. The front room was where I slept, too. We had a cot there that served as a daybed during the day and as my bed at night. By this time, I had gotten the flu. I thought I was awfully sick, but I guess I didn’t have a very bad case, because I was well long before Fred was out of bed.
During this time we were doing our milk route. Jack had gone back to school, and with Fred in bed, this left no one but Father to take care of the cows, and he and Mother to bottle the milk. He got it delivered and Mother got the bottles ready for the next day, and it must have been a great trial for both of them. I do know that for many days, my father only went to his office long enough to get his mail. He would get up in the morning and milk the cows, and the milk would be bottled, and he would start out. Everybody in town who was ill, whether they were supposed to get milk or not, got milk. Everybody was afraid to go into the homes because of the flu, and so my father would chop wood and at each home where he went, would carry it in, and make sure that they had the food that they needed to eat and administered to anyone who wanted to be administered to, of the people who were members of the Church. Then he would go up to his office and get his mail and come home and start all over again. This went on for several days.
I’ve heard Mother say that one night he had a raging fever, and she was just sure that he would not be able to go the next morning. But by morning his fever had gone down and he got up and took his usual route through town, taking care of the sick and seeing that everyone was provided for, and that the chores were taken care of, and all of the work was done.
All of this time there was a great worry about Keith, too, how he was getting along. Mother said that Father was not able to be quiet for a moment, but even when he was not doing his chores, he would be puttering outside, doing something to keep himself occupied so he wouldn’t have time to think. I remember very well the day that Keith came home from Uncle Bill Campbell’s where he had been staying. My father had gone out to get him, and they arrived on the day that a very dear friend of ours, Harold Eldredge, buried his mother, who had died of flu. Mother and Fred had gone to the funeral (Fred had recovered by this time), and I stayed at home so that there would be someone in the house in case they did arrive, because we really hadn’t known just when they would get there. They came before Mother and Fred got back.
Keith was really a sight when he came home. He was unable to sit—he could stand up or he could lie down—but he couldn’t sit for hardly long enough to eat a meal without being in terrific pain. I’ve often wondered how he stood the long trip home from Salt Lake. His eyes were still not focusing, and he saw double. He didn’t see it in the usual way of side-by-side, but he saw one figure above the other, and he was unable to read. For quite a long time, we read to him for his entertainment.
Harold had always been at our place a great deal and had always been very close to us. After his mother died, he spent a great deal of time there, and he and Keith were very close friends though he was several years older than Keith, three or four years at least. His home was down in Old Town, just across from the church. I’m sure that he would have moved in and lived with us if it had not been that his elderly father was still alive. His father was a funny old gentleman, I guess a very fine old gentleman, but to me as a girl, he seemed like a real grouchy old guy. He wouldn’t come to church and was in very poor health. Someone had to be with him, so Harold’s oldest sister’s oldest daughter, Eva Maxwell, came down from Altonah to take care of the house and take care of Harold and his father.
It was just a nice walk from our place down to Harold’s, and Keith got in the habit of taking that walk quite frequently. During that winter, he and Eva fell in love. They probably would have been married that spring—Harold was very much in favor of the marriage—but my folks rather worried about it because they didn’t feel that Keith was well enough yet to undertake married life. They liked Eva; they had no reason for not wanting him to marry her. Anyway, that summer Keith went out to Provo and lived with Jack and went to the BYU for summer school. That fall he passed his Teacher’s Examination and got a job at Emery, quite near Price, and he and Eva were married in the Salt Lake Temple and went down there to live.[2]
He wasn’t through with spinal meningitis and never was. It left him with a tendency toward infection, and whenever he would have a bump or bruise or anything of that sort, it would very often become infected. He had a lot of boils and pimples and things of that sort. As you all know, his death began as a result of a pimple on his upper lip, which he cut when he was shaving in the morning, and by that evening he was in the hospital with infection. There was sulfa, but there was nothing else to fight infection at that time. They did give him sulfa, but that affected his kidneys. He was not able to tolerate it, and so he was among the first people who took sal theazol. It was shipped each day from Chicago by air, and then each day a report had to be given back to them as to how it was affecting him. If he could have had it right at the beginning, it might have helped, but it was too late by the time he had gotten it. After a month’s illness there, he died. His death certificate said it was a heart attack, but of course it was brought on by the long strain on his heart from this infection. He had been very, very ill all of this time, but I’ll tell you more about it later as it is a whole other story.
I’m sure the war didn’t register with us, or at least not with me, as it did to many people who lived in heavily populated areas. I only knew four or five people who served in the war: Keith and one or two others from our small town. We didn’t hear a great deal about the war. Our little weekly paper always had the latest of what they knew of the things that were happening. I’m sure that to my father and to other adult people it had a lot more significance than it did to me. We heard about the airplanes and the bombs and such things.
I thought maybe it might be interesting to you for me to tell you about my first experience of seeing an aeroplane. We received word, it was in the paper, that an aeroplane was going to land on South Myton Bench on a certain day. I don’t recall what the occasion was, I guess it was just going to stop there. It was probably some young pilots who had gotten hold of an aeroplane and were making some money out of it by making stops in various areas. You’ve seen pictures, I’m sure, of the type of aeroplane it was—just the two little wings, the kind that Lindbergh flew. I remember all the excitement. For days there were men out scraping and working and preparing a level spot out on South Myton Bench for it to land. When it was time for it to land, we all waited with great expectancy, and all of a sudden, all of the bells in town began to ring, the one in the little congregational church, and the school bell, and the fire siren, and well, every noise that could be made in town was made. The aeroplane was coming.
Oh, that was really a sight, to see it come out of the sky like a bird and land on the ground, and these two fellows got out. A lot of people got in to have their pictures taken. I didn’t, I guess just people who had a camera did that, and I don’t recall that we had one then. Old McKuen, the medicine man that I’ve told you about so many times, and his family gathered around it. It was seeing two civilizations to see these Indians around this very modern plane, something that was so new. Finally, these fellows coaxed McKuen to get into the plane, and his picture was taken, and he was so pleased, he was smiling. Suddenly one of the pilots got in and started the engine, and that did it for McKuen. He began to scream and to yell, and all of the squaws and everybody started to scream to get him out of there before the plane took off. They had no intention of taking off; they had just done it for a joke. McKuen climbed out and after that no Indian would get in; they would look and they would laugh and they would talk and giggle, but there weren’t any more Indians who got in that day. That was my first sight of an aeroplane.
There might be room left on this cassette to tell you about Mother’s gall bladder surgery. You remember I told you that I had to come home from school early the year that I went to Vernal because Mother had had an attack. These attacks continued and became more severe all the time and it was finally decided that she would have to have surgery. She didn’t want to go out to Salt Lake, and since there was rather a good doctor in Roosevelt and a small hospital over there, she decided that she would have it done over there.
The surgery was successful (so far as I knew), and she was getting better, but one night they brought a young woman into her room whom they were going to operate on for appendicitis the following morning. By the time morning came, the woman had broken out with smallpox. Mother was quarantined in the room with her, and in due time Mother came down with smallpox. She had a very severe case. It seemed that smallpox came more in the wound which had not yet healed and destroyed the tissue in the incision, especially around where the draining tube was still in her side. She was extremely ill and my father was very worried about her for several days. We were not at all sure that she was going to live.
Fred and I went over to see her as she was beginning to recover. We went over in our buggy with our old faithful horse, Buttermilk—which if I haven’t already told you about, I’m sure I will—driving. It was a rather long journey over to Roosevelt at that time, nearly two hours. We had to go up the long, narrow dugway up onto North Myton Bench. It was a very narrow, rough road and only room for one vehicle. If you saw something coming down from the other side, you of course moved out as far as you could to the outside on one of the wider spots (there were three or four wide spots on the road). There you waited for the other team or buggy to pass you and hoped that they wouldn’t slide into you and knock you off the hill, especially if it happened to be muddy or slippery weather.
When you got up on the bench, it was about three or four miles across it, level land. This was good farm land, and this was where most of the farmers had settled. The only problem with it was that there had not been enough canals built as yet, and they hadn’t much water, so each little farm was like a little oasis of green in a dry desert. As I’ve already mentioned, people carried much of their water by hand to water their fruit trees and their gardens and what little they had there. Their main crop was alfalfa seed, which didn’t require a lot of water. It was planted in the spring before the rains came, and it was just allowed to grow what it could, and it dried out during the summer. They gathered the seed in the fall, and that was their major crop.
When we got across North Myton Bench, we went down again into the valley to Roosevelt. When we came to the hospital, we were not allowed to go in and see Mother, so we looked at her through the window. We weren’t even allowed to open the window so that we could talk to her, but we could smile as wide as we could at her through the window and look as pleased and as happy as we could, and try to mouth a few words to her. She smiled back at us and I thought how dreary it had been for my father the nights that he had waited outside of that window.
Mother did recover and was able to come home. When she came home, the wound in her side, especially where the tube had been, had not yet healed, and it really never did heal. The smallpox had eaten away all of the tissue and destroyed much of the tissue in her side. She was left with a very bad hernia, which never was completely healed. Though she did have some surgery later, they were unable to repair it because they said there was just no tissue there to work with. For the rest of her life she wore, well, they tried several different trusses and things that might help to make her more comfortable, but the thing that we finally just settled on was putting about three wide strips of sticky plaster across her side as tightly as we could to hold the incision together, and then a wrapper, a cloth wrapper, over that. This of course was uncomfortable, particularly in warm weather. When she would perspire, it would get very irritated and sore, and every few days I would have to take these off, and sometimes I was at a loss to know where in the world to put them on again. But they would have to be put on, so we simply bathed the best we could and put talcum on and let it dry a little bit, and then back on went the sticky plaster as we called it. She wore it again until it had to be removed, which we had to do every few days. It interfered a great deal with her ability to do things, and it was one of the reasons she was not able to do a great deal of work. However, she was still the Relief Society president and I’m sure that when she went into other people’s homes that she did whatever was necessary. She still worked around the house and did all that she possibly could of her share of the housework.
The summer after Roy graduated from high school, he was interviewed to go on a mission in the fall. He wasn’t terribly anxious to go on a mission. He thought that he would like to go on to college and finish his education at that time. But he said he would go. At home he always said, “I’ll go anywhere, just so they don’t send me to the southern states.” Mother worried about that all summer, and she said to Father two or three times, “What will we do if he’s called to the southern states?” Father just smiled and said, “Well, we’ll wait and see.”
I’ll never forget the day that Roy’s call came [Autumn 1922]. Father brought the mail home at noon when he came for his lunch, and Mother could hardly stand it all afternoon until Roy and Fred came home from the fields so that he could open the letter and find out where he was to go. It was a cardinal rule in our house that no one ever opened anybody else’s mail. And so even anything as important as a mission call had to wait for the person to whom it was addressed to get home. Well finally, Roy came and opened the letter, and his excitement and all of us standing around with our eyes and mouths wide open, and where should it be but the southern states! Roy didn’t say a word at the time; he went right ahead preparing to go on his mission, and everything worked out all right.
He was already quite an accomplished speaker. He had done a lot of debating all through school, and with his natural wit, he was always able to give a very good talk. In fact, he had gained such a reputation as a wit in our branch there, that when he got up to speak, before he even started to talk, people were smiling, they were so sure that he would have something amusing to tell. He did make an excellent missionary, and I’ll tell you more about his mission and some of the experiences that we had at home during the time that he was away at a later time.
When it came time for Roy to leave, Father went out as far as Salt Lake with him, and Mother, as usual, said her goodbyes at home. As usual, she kept her tears pretty well under control until after they were gone, and then, again as usual, she took her little walk down the path between the raspberries and the garden and had her cry. When she came back, Fred and I, as usual, pretended that we didn’t notice that she had been crying. I suppose, as usual, she thought she had fooled us and we didn’t know.
One of the things that did happen to Roy after he had been out in the mission field several months was rather interesting, to all of us at least at home. Mother awakened one night very suddenly and awakened my father and she said, “We must get out of bed and pray for Roy.” He said, “You must have been having a bad dream.”
She said, “No, I haven’t been having a dream, but I know that Roy’s in trouble and we must pray for him.” Father was not one to question things of this sort, and so he and Mother got out of bed and they did pray for Roy’s safety.
Father checked his time and checked the time it would be down in Georgia, where Roy was at the time. The next day he wrote a letter to Roy and asked him if he could let us know what he had been doing at that particular time. When the letter came back, Roy told us that at that particular time, he was in a little town, he and his companion, and they had stopped at a little hotel for the night, which they rarely did. There were no church members that they knew of in the town, and there was no place else to stay. This little hotel was directly across the street from the old county courthouse and jail. During the night they heard a lot of noise, shouting and talking, and so they got up and looked out of the window. Over on the courthouse grounds there were a lot of people gathered and there was a lot of angry shouting and talking.
Being two curious young fellows, they got dressed and went across the street to see what was going on. When they got over there, they found that a Negro, who had been jailed that day for having raped a girl, was being prepared to be hung or burned at the stake (I don’t remember which it was). They were horrified, and they were there on the fringe of the crowd when someone tapped them on the shoulder and a man said, “Are you Mormon missionaries?” They said yes, they were, and he said, “Well come with me.”
They went with him, and he got them into his buggy, and they started out of town at full speed, as fast as the horses could go. The two missionaries didn’t know where they were going, or where they were being taken, and they were rather frightened. He said, “Now don’t be afraid of me, but I heard talk there in the crowd that there were two Mormon missionaries there and they might just as well take care of them while they were taking care of the nigger. So I thought I’d better get you out of there.” He didn’t explain, ever, who he was or why he wanted to do something good for Mormon missionaries, but whatever his reason was, he took them to the next town where they did have LDS members, and where they were put up safely for the night. In checking the time, this coincided with this feeling that Mother had had in the night that Roy was in trouble. It was always rather a significant thing in our minds.
I’ve been thinking that it’s probably very hard for you to believe that it could take almost two hours to go to Roosevelt as I was describing a few minutes ago, but nowadays you don’t have to go up that old dugway, nor down the one on the other side. Nowadays you travel in your cars along a beautiful paved state highway with a gentle grade that takes you up over the bench and back down without hardly realizing that you have been over it. Probably you’re grumbling all the way because you can only go 55 miles an hour. It’s marvelous what progress does for us. Even after we got our car, we didn’t make the kind of mileage that you people do today. We went speeding along at possibly 20–25 miles an hour and thought we were really doing great. If we had gone very much faster than that over the kinds of roads we had, I’m sure we would have shaken ourselves and the car to pieces in no time.
I can remember when I came out to Heber with my father for Aunt Sophi’s funeral [1921]. That was one of the few times that I came out during the time that we lived at Myton. I know we left early in the morning and it was late afternoon, about sundown, when we arrived at Daniels, where Aunt Sophi lived. We had been traveling along, jogging along, all day in that old car, and Father was very tired. I remember too, I guess he sat up late that night and talked with the family, and remember being so embarrassed the next day at the funeral because I looked at him and he had fallen asleep, or so I thought at the time. He might just have been reminiscing, as I’m discovering as I get older that I do sometimes with my eyes closed. I thought he had gone to sleep, and I thought what a terrible thing that was to do and how awful people would think he was. I remember nudging him a time or two, but he didn’t respond a great deal, so I’m rather inclined to think he was reminiscing.
What a time we had in that funeral procession afterwards, going to the cemetery! There were cars and there were buggies and there was almost every kind of conveyance you can imagine. Father, being the driver that he was, killed his engine about every few feet it seemed like. He would get his motor going and away we’d go, and pretty soon we’d be right on top of the car in front of him, and of course he would have to stop and he would kill the engine. It was rather a hectic time until we got to the cemetery.
The next day though, I remember that we, a day or two afterwards (I don’t remember how long it was) we went on into Salt Lake because he had some business to take care of that he thought he could do while we were out there. And I remember going along State Street and we saw a sign that said—I guess it was minimum, probably—“Mileage 15 miles.” He looked at me and he said, “Sis, do you think we can make it?” So you can tell by that that we weren’t going very fast.
That was quite a day, I remember, in Salt Lake. He had business to take care of, and he took me to the library (which was always a very favorite spot of mine wherever I went) and left me there. I do remember going into the library with him and there was a gentleman seated at a table and he had the saddest face I think that I can ever remember seeing. My father pointed him out to me as Brother Cowley, who had been excommunicated from the Church at an earlier time. Now I should know his first name, and I suppose you do, but I can’t think of it at the moment. But he was sitting there reading.[3]
I spent my whole day—while Father was taking care of his business—there at the library, and I had a marvelous time. They had lots more books than we did in our little library in Myton. Much of my time I think I just spent walking up and down the aisles reading the titles. Then of course when I had seen all of the books and gone on all of the floors and gone up and down all of the aisles, I finally found a book of my choice and sat down to read. But to me that seemed just about the most marvelous place that I had ever been.
But after he [Father] had finished his work, he came and picked me up, and I remember we stayed at Uncle Bill’s that night. One of the things I think I’ve always been impressed by I think I told you earlier—that Mother’s family were not very happy when she married my father, but my father and my mother’s brothers became such very, very fast friends after Mother and Father were married, and Mother’s sisters came to admire my father so much, and as a family I think that they came to feel that, in the long run, she had made a very wise choice in her choice of a husband.
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Notes:
- Despite decades of effort by various groups, the railroad never did come to Myton.
- Keith and Eva were married September 3, 1919.
- Matthias F. Cowley was not excommunicated but was forced to resign his position as an apostle in 1905 for his involvement in post-Manifesto polygamy, and he was further restricted in his membership rights from 1911 to 1936 for the same reason.
Go to Part 6.
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