Mabel’s Memories, part 7

This is part 7 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Parts 5 and 6. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there over ten years.


Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)

I’ve mentioned these pot-bellied stoves a number of times. I think I’ll tell you an experience Fred had that at least I think was partly, at least, due to the pot-bellied stove. I guess this probably happened after Father died, because I know I had helped Fred milk the cows that morning, and I didn’t learn to milk the cows until after Father’s death when Fred was the only one at home. I had to milk cows that winter in order to help him get his chores done in time to get to school. It was on a Sunday, a fast Sunday, and he had been asked to go up to one of those little communities up that way, I think it was Neola, anyway it was to speak at a funeral. It was rather an upsetting thing for him, because the funeral was for a young man who had committed suicide, and I’m sure it was Fred’s first experience with something of that sort. I didn’t know the young man myself, and I really don’t know how Fred happened to know him, unless it was through his stake MIA [Mutual Improvement Association] work. I would imagine that he had gotten acquainted with him in some way through that. Anyway, he had been asked to speak at the funeral.

We had done the chores and gone to Sunday School and come home, and it being fast day, Mother had urged Fred to eat something, but he wouldn’t. She had quietly suggested to me that I might suggest to Fred that I would like to go with him. I did, and he consented, and so I went along. I’m sure he didn’t know that Mother had made such a suggestion. Mother and I got into cahoots on a lot of things that the boys didn’t know about. We left, and my impression is that we went in the buggy with old Buttermilk, but I can’t imagine why we would have done that, because I know we had my father’s famous car by that time, unless it was out of order. Anyway, it was an extremely cold day and we were just simply frozen before we got there. There was a bad wind blowing, and if you’ve ever been out on North Myton Bench in the middle of the winter in a wind storm, you know how very cold it can be. When we got there we were both just frozen.

We got there just about time for the funeral to begin. I was real happy that they had put Fred rather close to the pot-bellied stove, because we were both just frozen stiff, and I thought at least he would be a little bit thawed out before it was time for him to speak. I was at the back of the hall, and I couldn’t feel any heat at all and was still chilled through. When it came time for Fred to get up and speak, I guess he had gotten too warm beside this pot-bellied stove, or at least he had gotten warm too fast, and with a stomach which was too empty to churn, he was quite upset. He seemed very calm as he started to speak, but I noticed that he began to get whiter and whiter, and his voice began to get slower and slower, and I could tell that he was having trouble keeping his thoughts in order, and I realized that he was going to faint. No one seemed to be very concerned; the people behind him of course couldn’t see. As I saw him start to sway, I started running down the aisle, and just then someone back of him caught him before he fell. They asked for some water, and of course there wasn’t any there, and they sent someone after some to the closest neighbor, and he finally got back with some about thirty minutes after Fred had fainted. Fred was unconscious for quite awhile, and I was terrified.

After he came to, we were taken to the bishop’s home, and he rested there awhile, and I’m quite sure we were given something to eat there. They did finish the funeral, and we did go to the cemetery, and with it all, we were very late getting back. Mother was beside herself with worry by the time we arrived home, and Fred had me sworn to silence by that time that I was not to tell her what had happened and worry her further. I’ve always thought that it was that pot-bellied stove and getting so close to it after being so cold, and getting the heat from it so quickly that caused him to have that experience.

I’ve had one other experience with a person who committed suicide. In those days it was not customary to have the funeral for a person who had committed suicide held in a chapel, and on this occasion it was held in the family home. This man had been ill a long time and had become very despondent, and while his wife was away at work he had shot himself. As I’ve told you before, I usually played the piano for all of our church activities, and this was no exception. There was a piano in the home, and Father of course was conducting the funeral, and I went along to play the hymns. Most of the people from our branch were there in attendance. I have always thought my father was very wise that day in the choice of music. Apparently the wife had been so very disturbed that she had not been any help in making any of the arrangements, and Father had made the arrangements. The song that we sang was “Nay, Speak No Ill,” and we never sing that hymn in church but I don’t think of that particular incident. I remember how right I thought that song was for that occasion.

I hate to leave this on a dreary note, so maybe I can tell you about the time Harold Eldredge rode down the middle of Myton Main Street in the hearse. They had a little hearse at the hardware store. He got somebody to drive it and he stretched out in it, and they drove down Main Street. Just when they got in front of the saloon, Harold sat up. You should have seen those drunks scatter.

There was one time when the branch people didn’t go along with my father. I guess medicine or superstition or something has come a long way since that time. It was learned that there was an old man living out by himself who was very ill, and when my father went down to see him, it was discovered that he had syphilis. He was wearing LDS garments and he maintained to the end of his life, which was really only a few days after Father found him, that he was innocent.[1] When it came time to get him to prepare him for burial, no one would come near because of the danger of syphilis. It fell to my father to prepare him for burial. As I’ve told you before, we had no undertaker, and when someone passed away, it would usually fall to friends and neighbors and branch members to prepare the bodies for burial. When Father had dressed him, he put his garments on, because the man had been wearing them all of these years, and some people were very upset. Father said that was between the man and the Lord. If he had felt innocent enough to wear them all of those years, as far as he was concerned, the Lord could make the final judgment. But the people in the branch did refuse to have the service in our chapel. I remember it was on a Thanksgiving morning that Fred and Father hitched up the wagon and went and got the man’s body. They had a grave dug and they took it to the cemetery and buried the body and dedicated the grave. Since the men who had dug the grave weren’t sticking around for fear of what might happen to them, Father and Fred filled in the grave and then came home. Mother had a good supply of hot water for them to use and they washed and cleaned up and changed their clothing before our Thanksgiving dinner. I know that we today can’t realize the things that people believed and the lack of knowledge that people had at that time.

Charles John Wahlquist

It was in April 1923 that my father died. I was nineteen at the time. He died on a Sunday afternoon from a massive coronary thrombosis type of ailment.

He had been in Vernal for a few days on a case, and we learned later from Mrs. Richardson, where he always stayed, that he had not felt well on Saturday. He hadn’t finished up at court early enough on Saturday to drive home, and she said he had been ill again in the night, Saturday night. On Sunday morning she had tried to persuade him to stay over and not attempt the drive home, but he had smiled and said no, that if he was going to be sick, he wanted to get home so Mama could take care of him. He had had rather a bad trip home—it had taken him about five hours to make the trip. It had been raining, or snowing, sort of a slushy April storm, and the roads were quite slick. Some people who had passed him reported that he smiled and waved to them. One person said that when he passed him, he was stopped with his engine stalled and was trying to crank his car. Of course, stalling his engine was not an unusual thing for my father. We don’t know how ill he was or how much pain he may have suffered.

As I said, it was on Sunday, and when it came time for Sacrament meeting, Mother said for Fred and me to go to Sacrament meeting, and she would stay home to be there when he got home and get him something to eat. We could tell of course that she was getting worried about him by this time, and of course we were too.

I suppose in the years that Mother was sick so many, many times, so seriously ill, we had given some thought to her death and to what our reactions might be and what we would do. In fact, I know my father worried a great deal about her when he had to be away, because whenever he was leaving, when he was giving me my goodbye hug, his last words to me were always, “Take good care of Mama.” I don’t think any of us had ever thought in terms of Father’s death. He was only 57 and he was an unusually healthy person. I don’t ever remember him being sick enough to stay in bed all day. He could out-work almost anybody and was always very cheerful and very happy and very eager in everything that he did-he had a real zest for living. And I don’t think that the thought of his not being with us had ever occurred to any of us.

Fred and I had gone to church, and after the meeting we had a committee meeting to plan some program for Mutual that we were working on. We had looked out the back door of the chapel and could see our father’s car in front of the house, so we knew that he was at home. We hadn’t worried and had stayed as long as we needed to. But when we were coming home, we just came up over the brow of the bench from Old Town where our chapel was and saw Mother standing on the porch calling to us and waving her apron, and of course we knew that something was wrong, and we started to run.

Fred beat me home and we hurried into the house. Father was on the bed in the room right next to the kitchen, which I have described before, just lying on top of the bed. Mother told us afterwards that when he got home, she had told him she would fix him something to eat, and he had told her he felt rather tired and he thought he would lie down for a few minutes, and so he had gone in there. She had stepped out into the kitchen and was doing something when she heard a little sound and hurried back into the room, and he was unconscious. She couldn’t revive him, and she had run out onto the porch hoping she could see someone to help her and had seen us coming.

When we went into the room, his face was a deep purple, and I don’t know what anyone else did; I went directly through the door from that room into my parents’ bedroom and knelt down and started to pray. The only words that I seemed to be able to say were, “Please let my father live!” I said this over and over again, sometimes I guess pleading and sometimes I’m afraid almost demanding. I didn’t seem to be able to close my prayer—I wanted to and to get back into the room where he was—then suddenly it occurred to me that I must pray as my father had taught us to, and say, “Thy will be done.” With this realization I also realized that if I said those words my father would die, and so I was determined that I would not say that. I don’t know how long I was there—it could have been seconds or minutes—it seemed quite awhile to me. Finally I was able to say the words, “Thy will be done,” and I knew when I got up and went back into the other room that he would be gone. As I stepped into the door into the other room, Mother put her arm around me and said, “He’s going.” The purple had cleared out of his face and he looked very peaceful and natural.

I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about those next few days. I do know that Harold came; I don’t know who told him, perhaps somebody passing by the house; we didn’t have a telephone and neither did he, but I know Harold was there, and other members of the branch were there. They washed my father and prepared him for burial, and a casket was brought and he was placed in the front room. In those days the body was not taken to the mortuary as it is now, it was just prepared by family and friends, and the body remained in the home until time for the service. I know that people came; I couldn’t tell you who, except the story that I have already told you about Mr. Cook.

I don’t remember going to the funeral. I know that it was held in the opera house and that it was full. I don’t remember any flowers, but I know the articles telling about the funeral say that there were many beautiful floral offerings. I’ve saved all of the clippings about the funeral and I will attach them to this when it’s transcribed so that you may know what happened. I know that Congressman Don B. Colton, who was a close friend of my father’s, spoke, though I don’t remember him speaking. I don’t remember going to the cemetery, or leaving the cemetery, but I know that I did.

I don’t remember when Jack and Keith came, but I know that they did. I don’t remember when they left, but I know they and my brother Fred cleared out my father’s office. I suppose among them they determined that Roy was to remain on his mission—he had been gone just eight months when my father died—but they probably arranged among them how they would support him. I just don’t remember anything about any of it, except worrying about my mother for fear she would not be able to bear up under it. But she did, surprisingly well. I know that the boys came out by way of Price, because Daniels Canyon was closed with snow that late in April, and that was the reason that my father wasn’t brought to Heber for burial and was buried in Myton. It was about 15 years later, after my mother’s death, that the four boys went out together and brought his body back and buried it beside my mother.[2] As I say, I’ll have to let you depend on the newspaper articles for the details of my father’s funeral.

Because of the snow in Daniels Canyon and through Strawberry Valley, none of my mother’s family were able to come to Father’s funeral, which would have been a real comfort to her, I’m sure. The following summer the two sisters, Aunt Mary and Aunt Agnes, and her brother Jim, who were the only three living then, did each come and spend a few days with her. I’m sure she derived a great deal of comfort and pleasure in visiting with them.

The period after his death I suppose we got back to normal living, as people do at such times. I know that the following Sunday we were all in our places at church, me playing the piano and Fred up in front directing the Sunday School. I suppose we went ahead with our life pretty much as before, though it hardly seemed possible that such a thing could happen, that life could go on without my father there to direct us. Mother continued in her work as president of the Relief Society and Fred and I were extremely busy in our church work. I was president of the Mutual at that time and I think Fred was still president of the Young Men’s.

Roy was still on his mission, and Keith and Jack were both married and living on the outside.[3] They were both teaching school at that time. There were just Mother and Fred and I at home. Fred was to teach school in Myton that year. I think that was the first year that he taught in Myton, before that he had made these long horseback rides, as I’ve told you about before. I sort of wished that I could teach school, but there wasn’t any way that I could go away to school, because Mother was not well enough, though she was well enough so that I could leave her during the daytime. The School Board offered to let Fred and I teach together in a little school called Antelope, between Myton and Duchesne. It would be about ten miles from Myton and we would have had to ride that distance morning and night all through the winter, or else stay up there. We knew we couldn’t stay up there because we had to come home and milk cows and it would have been impossible to have left Mother home alone at nights, and we knew the worry that it would be to her to know that we were making that long trek morning and night, which under the conditions at that time would really have been quite a trip.

We were debating about this, but we decided I would have to stay home. The winter after Father died Mother’s health was not too good, and the decision was made that I would stay at home. That’s the year I learned how to milk cows. Up until that time, with four men, four boys in the family, Mother had never thought that I should learn to milk the cows. As I told you, I herded the cows, and I went and got them at night and brought them home, ready so they would be there to milk when the boys came home, but I had never milked them. My only experience of being around the cows when they were milked was as a little girl standing with my tin cup while Father squirted warm milk from the cow into my cup for me to drink.

I do remember one frantic experience when my mother, who didn’t know any more about the cows than I did at that time, had to stick a cow. I’m sure you don’t know, all of you, what I mean by that, but when the cows in the springtime would eat certain grass or alfalfa, they would bloat. There is a spot in a cow where if you insert a knife, the air and gas and whatnot from what the cow has eaten will come out. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for Father or the boys to have to stick a cow, but Mother had never done this. One afternoon we found that one of the cows was down and was bloated badly and would die if it were not helped. Mother very fearfully went out with the butcher knife and inserted it where she had been told it was supposed to be done, and I went along with her for moral support. Somehow or other we must have done it all right, because the cow got well.

Anyway, back to my milking. I did learn to milk the cows that winter, and I milked six cows in the morning and at night all of that winter, and Fred milked the other six. As I recall, we were milking twelve. I don’t know what we were doing about the milk then; my impression is that we were probably separating the milk and selling the cream, but I’m not sure. Anyway, helping in the house because Mother’s health was failing and she was particularly miserable that winter, and helping Fred with the chores was a good part of my day.

We did have a boarder that winter. That’s the first time we ever did anything like that. A young fellow named Ernest Bramwell, who had come out there to teach school for his first year’s teaching, lived with us. He slept with Fred and was with us the whole winter. He was a very nice young fellow and very pleasant to be around. He was very fond of my mother and she was fond of him, and in fact, we were all fond of him and enjoyed the experience of having him stay with us.

The first job that I had was in Phillips’ Store. It was a very small department store, about three doors down from Waugh’s. I don’t remember just how I got the job, whether I asked for it or whether they asked me. Mr. and Mrs. Phillips ran the store themselves without any help, but for some reason they decided to take in a clerk, so I was hired. I don’t recall just how long I stayed there and I don’t remember anything very exciting about it. They were lovely people and I enjoyed my experience there. After, oh, I think just a few months, I got a chance to go to Waugh’s Store and I decided that I would like to do that. The Phillipses asked me if I knew someone who would like the job, and so I suggested Loreen. She was delighted with the idea of coming; she was going to live at our house. They hired Loreen, and she went to be their clerk when I went to Waugh’s.

We had quite a laugh about this the other night; Fred and Loreen were here visiting and I asked Loreen how I got acquainted with her, because I really don’t know when I met Loreen. She didn’t know either. We decided that it must have been just through the fact that both of us worked in the Mutual. Loreen lived up at Ioka, a little community, well, I don’t know how far from Myton, but it could have been to the end of the world the way traveling conditions were at that time. Anyway, I had grown to like her, and we had become quite well acquainted at Mutual leadership meetings, and when we had taken plays up to Ioka to Mutual, and they had brought programs to our ward, and so on. There wasn’t anyone in our branch who was my age; I didn’t have a girlfriend, and I thought it would be so nice to have Loreen come down and we could be friends.

We laughed the other night; she accused me of playing Cupid, but that really wasn’t in my mind, and I was amused when she said that she had already decided that Fred was the boy that she was going to go after. It was a result of her having seen him play ball at Ioka, and she had been impressed by him. I’m sure she had also met him at leadership meetings in Roosevelt, too. I was sort of surprised when she said that, because I really don’t think I had thought in terms of Fred and Loreen at that time. I was delighted when they did fall in love and get married, but Loreen was such a vivacious, popular, pretty girl—she had her beautiful auburn-red hair and her big sparkly brown eyes, and she was very lively and not shy, but popular and a good dancer, and all the things that I wasn’t. I think it rather surprised me that she would think in terms of quiet Fred, who didn’t dance and who didn’t go to many of the parties or things of that sort and was not very much interested in girls. However, he admitted in this same conversation that he had had his eye on Loreen, having met her over at Roosevelt and having heard her speak, and so he was quite delighted when I had this brilliant idea of having Loreen come down to work at Phillips’. Which all goes to show that the wheels of the gods or whatever-it-is they say, grind slowly and things do work out for people.

When Loreen came to stay with us, she and I of course were very good friends, and it was a very happy time for me. We made dresses together and we could go to church together and do so many things together. I don’t know when she and Fred did their romancing; I wasn’t conscious of it. Maybe Mother was, though if she was, she didn’t tell me, and I’m quite sure she would have done.

I well remember the night that Loreen was going to go home for the weekend and how shocked Mother and I both were when Fred announced he was taking her home. They left, and the next morning about 5 o’clock, when Mother awakened thinking it was time for Fred to be up to milk the cows, she discovered that Fred had not arrived home. The only thing she could think of at all was an accident, and so in our usual manner we were out ready to start hiking for Ioka until we found him, when suddenly we saw him coming up through Old Town in the car, and he arrived home very sheepishly to tell us that he and Loreen were engaged to be married.

Fred and Loreen’s marriage changed our lives a great deal.[4] Fred had some land leased out south of Myton about a mile. lt was where we had kept the cows pastured that summer. There was a house on this land and he and Loreen were to live in it. They went into Salt Lake to be married and then had a honeymoon trip down to the canyons in Southern Utah. I remember my part of it all was to be very careful that no one should know when they returned home, because one thing Fred was not going to have was a shivaree. Perhaps you do or don’t know what a shivaree is, or was. Whenever a couple got married, all of the other young people in town would try to get them when they got home the first night and usually separate the girl and the fellow, sometimes taking the fellow away for the whole night, or the girl, and just generally making things very unpleasant. Fred was going to have none of that, so I kept it a very deep, dark secret when they were to be home. When they did get home, they stayed with us the first night. Anyway, they managed to get themselves settled before people knew that they were at home.

They took the cows out there, and this left Mother and I alone, which was a brand-new experience for us and a rather frightening experience for Mother, I’m sure. I know it was a frightening experience to me, because it gave me the full responsibility of Mother. Mother was always very nervous about us being there alone, but our good old dog, Tip, was a good watchdog and took very good care of us. You remember me saying about how much we came to appreciate our neighbor, McKuen, the medicine man. It wasn’t any time after Fred left until McKuen came by one day and said to Mother, “Me watch,” and he always did, bless his old heart. We always knew that in McKuen we had a good friend, and that if anything very seriously went wrong, we could go to him for help and he would be there.

I seem to have done things wrong. Sometimes I think I should never have started this, because whenever one of my brothers is here, they say I’ve got things wrong. Fred insists that Roy was at home when he got married and that Mother and I were not home alone, but the more we talked about it, he couldn’t figure out just how Roy could have been home.[5] Roy had, as I’ve said before, gone on his mission to the southern states, and he was there his full two years and an extra three months. He came home and after he had been home a short time there was a letter came, sent out to all wards and branches in the Church, asking for missionaries, asking each ward to furnish a missionary, preferably one with some experience, to go into the mission field for a special drive that they were doing. These were just to be six-month missions. We really had no one in our ward to send except Roy. He was about the only experienced, well he was the only returned missionary we had in the branch, and so he volunteered to go. The branch theoretically was supposed to support him, but my judgment is that Fred probably provided most of the money. In fact, Fred admitted that when he was here. I think that’s where he was when Fred got married, but Fred thinks he had returned, but we won’t argue about it, and I’m not going to do the record over.

Now, to tell something about Roy and his romances, I don’t know how I got acquainted with Maude either. I assume it was through Loreen.[6] I remember meeting her at Pack’s one time when I went up to visit with them for a few days. That was when I got my hair cut.

Mabel after her hair was bobbed

I think I was the last person in the world to get their hair cut, and I don’t know why, because I never liked my hair long. It was very heavy and it always gave me headaches, and I didn’t do it very attractively. They had already had theirs cut, and they talked me into letting them cut my hair. Very reluctantly, I did. They first cut off the big braid that I had hanging down the back, and then they proceeded to hack off the rest of it. They wouldn’t let me look to see what was going on, and they didn’t let me look into the mirror until after they had it all curled and ready for inspection. I was very pleased with it, and thought it looked very nice. When we went home that night to Myton, there was a dance or ward function of some sort, and I knew Mother would be there. We were so late getting down there that we didn’t have time to go home first, so the first that Mother saw me with my hair cut was on the dance floor, and she was very shocked. However, she liked my hair, and everything turned out very well on that score.

Another time I remember spending with Maude was when I had the first of my many benign tumors removed. I’d had this tumor in my leg for, oh, many years, since I was just a very young girl. We had never thought much about it; my father didn’t worry about it, but it suddenly started growing quite rapidly, and it got so it showed quite badly on my leg beneath my dresses, and also my leg had got so it ached quite badly. I went over to Roosevelt (I don’t know who with at that time), to Dr. Miles, who was a woman doctor, rather a good doctor, and also a surgeon. She said that it should be taken out because it might be attached to the bone in my leg and might cause serious trouble. So Maude invited me to stay with her at her place while I had it out.

I think she and Roy were probably going together by this time (he had returned home). I went and I had the surgery done that day, and that night I went to Maude’s. She was going to be extra nice to me, and they had a very wide windowsill in their living room. Now, I don’t know whether they didn’t have the extra bed—I’m sure they did—but I think she must have thought that would be a pleasant place for me to be, so I could sit up and look out this window. She put a feather tick on the seat of the window—it had no pad on it—and that was where I slept. It was real soft and comfortable and cozy when I first went to bed, but during the night my leg ached quite a bit, and of course the windowsill was a little short for me, being rather tall, and by morning the feathers had all gone to both sides and were all over me in all directions, and I was sleeping on just the fabric of the tick under me on this hard window seat. I didn’t say anything to Maude, because I knew that she was trying to be very kind.

We went to the doctor the next day—I’m sure we must have walked—and of course Dr. Miles’ office was on the second floor of the building, and we climbed the stairs, and with it all I had torn several of the stitches and the wound had begun to hemorrhage. I had quite a little trouble getting it to heal up, and I did stay there in Roosevelt for three or four days before I returned home. It healed fine eventually, and instead of having a lump show underneath my dress, I had a nice long scar for many years.

Another time I remember being with Maude before she and Roy were married, I went with her over to Fort Duchesne for the U.B.I.C. That’s the Uintah Basin Industrial Convention, which used to be held every year, and I think still is. Fort Duchesne was quite an interesting place. It was built very much on the same pattern as Fort Douglas in Salt Lake, and the officers’ homes were really very nice homes—nice two-story buildings, and they were in rather a sort of a semi-circle. There were the long barracks for the soldiers that stayed, though there were no soldiers there at that time, and some of the officers’ homes were occupied by families there at the fort. There was a store there and a few other government offices, and these government men lived in the homes that had been the officers’ homes. That was my first time, I think, of going to Fort Duchesne to stay.

U.B.I.C. in 1926 when Mabel and Maude attended.

I’d been through there once before, and it was my first experience of going over to what was called “The Strip.” I don’t know exactly how to explain that, but apparently there was a narrow piece of land that did not belong to the fort and did not belong to the Indian reservation and did not belong to Uintah County, so it was not really under any legal jurisdiction. During the time that the fort had been in operation, apparently it had been a very wild spot, with many saloons and gambling places. It had been the place for wild life for the soldiers and many others, but at that time there was very little there except the Chinaman’s Store. The Chinaman had an Indian trading post there and it was quite a large store, I guess about the biggest thing around. He had just everything in the way of clothing and groceries and what-have-you, and did a very lucrative business. He got business from everywhere; everyone went over to the Chinaman’s because he had the reputation that if he couldn’t get you to buy it any other way, he would make you a deal. As I say, that was another experience I had with Maude.

I liked Maude and I was happy when she and Roy were married.[7] At the time Roy and Maude were married, Fred and Roy divided up the cows and the horses and the farm implements and everything they had worked with in common. Roy had leased some land down on the river, just across the river, really. There was a house on the land, an old log house, that they lived in. It wasn’t too far from the grist mill, which was run by a man named Waterson or Waterman, who was their closest neighbor.

Roy and Maude didn’t quite escape the shivaree; they weren’t quite as lucky as Fred and Loreen. It was just a few of us who went out there the evening that they got home, I think the four schoolteachers and myself and few others, I don’t even recall who. They didn’t have anything to give us to eat—they hadn’t gotten groceries much into the house yet—so the fellows disappeared and in a little while they came back with a couple of chickens and a couple of nice, big watermelons. The chickens still had their feathers, but not their heads, so we had to pull the feathers off the chickens and clean them and cook them before we had our midnight supper. I’m sure neither Roy nor Maude was very happy about this, because it was quite obvious to all, though nothing was said, that they had not bought the chickens, nor had they bought the watermelons. I guess Roy thought that it was better than being taken off somewhere to walk home through the night in his bare feet, and Maude thought it was better than being left alone. Nothing was said and we cooked the chickens and we had a nice dinner in lieu of a shivaree.

The next day—I was working at Waugh’s by this time—and the next day, Mr. Waterson came in to the store and he was just as mad as a hatter about young people having gotten into his chickens and stolen two of the chickens and also taken some of his watermelons. I tried very hard to look as innocent as I could; I don’t know how well I succeeded. I finally managed to escape to the basement. I didn’t fool Harold; he immediately caught on and kidded me about it afterwards and kidded Roy about it afterwards. These teachers who had come from outside had had such a hilarious time and it had been such an experience for them that they could not feel sorry about it. We all just sort of said nothing and I’m sure Mr. Waterson knew who got his chickens and his watermelons, but though he said he was going to make a great fuss about it, he didn’t.

I guess I’d better tell you about the “outside” and the “inside.” When you lived in Uintah Basin at that time, if you were living in the Uintah Basin, you were living “inside,” and if you lived outside Uintah Basin, you lived “outside.” I don’t know how that came about, unless it was just that so many people in earlier days maybe didn’t either want to explain or couldn’t explain or didn’t want to say, “I came from New Jersey (or New Mexico, or wherever it might be)”; they just came from the outside. So that was the term that was always used. If you didn’t live in the Basin, you lived on the outside.

When I played this record for Maude the other day, she assured me that Roy had gone to Mr. Waterson and confessed all and had paid for the chickens and the watermelons.


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Notes:

1. For faithful Latter-day Saints, the garment they wear as underwear symbolizes their commitment to covenants with God. Once a church member is authorized to wear the garment, only a complete removal from church membership requires that the garment no longer be worn by that person. Charles Wahlquist was right to leave the choice to the man himself.
2. Mabel’s brothers went to Myton to get their father’s body between 1935 and 1938.
3. Jack had married Grace Dorius that summer, August 30, 1923.
4. Fred married Loreen Pack on August 26, 1925.
5. Roy was gone from October 1922–March 1925 and November 1925–March 1926; so he was home for Fred’s wedding.
6. Maude and Loreen were first cousins.
7. Roy and Maude were married on October 20, 1926.

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Go to Part 8.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 6

This is part 6 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. The stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah begin in Part 4 and continue in Part 5. The family had moved from Heber City to Myton in late 1915 when Mabel was almost twelve and lived there over ten years.


Chapter 3
Growing up in Myton (continued)

I just came in from hanging a batch of clothes in my usual haphazard way, which I tell Elizabeth is a rebellion of the many, many years that I had to do it the “right” way. So maybe I might take the time to tell you about a typical wash day in Myton.

Our old washer had broken down before we left Heber, and so by the time we got out to Myton, we had to do our washing on the board. As I’ve said before, Mother was not in good health. She had sciatic rheumatism, which made it impossible for her to wash on the board, so doing the washing fell mostly on me. It was not the easiest job in the world, with all of the heavy clothes that we had in those days. I don’t mean to imply that Mother didn’t work hard, because she did. The washing on the board just happened to be one of the things she couldn’t do, but she did many other things on wash day. She always sorted all of the clothes and got them ready to wash. You must remember that in those days we didn’t have permanent press and drip-dry and all of the things that we have today.

We had mostly white clothes. Our sheets were all white, no pretty stripes or flowers; our towels were all white, and our underclothing was white. The men’s dress shirts were all white, no pretty colors like we have now. So most of the washing consisted of white things. Then there were the boys’ work shirts and their overalls and their socks, which were black, and of course Mother’s and my stockings were black too, black lisle, and that—and our handkerchiefs of course were white—and that was mostly what our washing consisted of.

Mother always sorted the clothes for me and got them ready to wash. The sheets and the pillow cases all went in a pile, and then the underwear in a pile, and each thing in its own little pile in the order that I was to wash them. I’ve often thought that Noah could have used Mother very nicely when he was putting the animals into the Ark, because she certainly had an orderly mind, and I’m certain that she wouldn’t have gotten any of the animals mixed up. There seemed to be a law in those days exactly how a washing should be arranged. I don’t know whether it was handed down from mother to child or not, but if it were, I’m afraid Mother failed to get it handed down to me. Why it should make such a big difference whether a handkerchief should get mixed up with a shirt is something I’ll never understand, I’m afraid. I’ll have to hand it to Mother, she certainly tried, and even though I don’t do it to this day, I have a real sense of guilt if I don’t get that washing out the way that Mother taught me that it should be done. I’ll have to admit that Mother had a real knack that all things must go like things together, and if a white nightgown happened to get mixed up with the sheets or vice versa, it would have been a most terrible thing to her.

While she was sorting the clothes, I was busy getting the water. First I would have to stoke up the stove. If it were 100º F. in the shade, which it sometimes was in the summertime, the old stove had to be stoked up as hot as we could get it. The only way you could keep all those white things clean was to boil them. We would put the boiler on—I’m sure most of the older ones of you have seen a boiler, the others, I can’t really describe it to you—it was a large tub-like, oblong-shaped thing that covered the two front burners of the stove. We also had a water heater on the side of our stove, and then of course we put on as many pans and buckets and whatnot, on top of the stove as we could, of water. You mustn’t forget that this water I carried from the hydrant that I told you about, which was on the far end of the block where we lived, a bucket in each hand. Many trips were required to get the water to do a week’s wash.

The boiler would be filled with water and when the other water was warm, a tub would be filled with water and I would start to scrub, beginning with the sheets and going in Mother’s proper order down through the various types of clothing. I would scrub them on the board and then they would be wrung out by hand and put into the boiler. We couldn’t put too much in the boiler at a time, because it had to be loose enough in there so that it could be stirred around with a stick and all of it be properly boiled. After it had boiled a few minutes, it would be taken out with the stick into a pan and from there transferred to the tub of water again, and there it would be rinsed thoroughly to get all of the lye soap out of it and to be checked to make sure there weren’t any spots left that had been missed. Then it would be put from that tub into another tub of clear water with some bluing in it. The only bleach that we had at that time was this bluing. When that was done, then it would be ready to hang. It would take several boilers full to get all of the white clothes done. After the white clothes were done, then you started scrubbing the colored clothes on the board. They didn’t go in the boiler; they were simply washed in the hot water with the lye soap and scrubbed on the board. Then they were wrung out by hand and put into the clear bluing water and wrung out by hand again. Then they were ready to go on the line.

Hanging the clothes on the line was something that I just simply never did quite learn to accept. I think a woman’s character was judged by how she got her washing on the line. The sheets must hang absolutely evenly, the corners must be pulled straight and square. Everything had to go in its order: the shirts must all be together, all the white shirts together and all of the tails had to hang exactly to the same length, no deviation whatsoever. The towels had to hang exactly the same length; they all had to be together. For a towel to show up between two shirts would have been as bad as an elephant and a cow getting into the Ark together. Even after you got the white clothes all out in their exact order and all hanging evenly at the bottom, then you started on the colored ones the same way. All of the blue shirts must be together, all of the aprons together, not an apron between two house dresses; that would never do. Finally, down to the very end would come the black socks. Every sock must be exactly even at the bottom. When it was all done, it was really a work of art, and it would take me all day, let me tell you that.

When you got through with the washing, you had all the nice, soapy lye suds left, and that made a marvelous opportunity to scrub the kitchen and the room next to the kitchen. That room we used—we had a bed in it, but we also had our dining table in it and we ate in there on Sunday and at times when there were too many of us at home to eat at the kitchen table. Those two floors were bare wood and they had to be scrubbed on your knees with this lye soap. It made the bare wood floors a beautiful, clean white, just as white as your hand. Well no, not as white as your hand, because your hands were red by that time. When you got that done, of course the porch had to be mopped because that was where we did all of our taking care of the milk, and that’s where the separator was, so that had to be scrubbed and kept nice and clean too. This was really quite a day, wash day.

The only other difficulty about wash day was those darned cows. We always took our cows down east of McKuen’s place, about a quarter of a mile, in the summertime, to graze. It was open land down there; there were no farms. Since McKuen didn’t raise any crops on his land, there was no obstruction and we could see from our back door where the cows were. If they would stay where they belonged, why it was fine, but every once in a while they would start to roam in various directions. If they went in one direction, they could get into the cemetery, and if they went in the other direction, north, they could get across the river. If they did that, and I didn’t have a horse at home, I was in trouble. So we’d have to keep watching the cows, and if they started wandering too far in one direction or the other, I would have to take my dog, Tip, and we would run through McKuen’s field, about a quarter of a mile down to round up the cows and get them back together again, and then come the distance back home to continue with our work.

We watched and rounded up cows all summer. I don’t know, it might have been more than a quarter of a mile, it could have been a half a mile. It certainly sometimes seemed ten miles to me. Sometimes on a real hot day, I used to get so tired that I would have to lie down and rest coming back. Later we discovered that by that time I had already gotten my low thyroid, which left me with very little energy.[1]

The day after wash day was always ironing day, and it was almost as interesting as wash day. We didn’t have an electric iron. We did have electricity by that time, but we used the old flatirons that maybe you have seen in museums, or maybe some of you have them for relics. The kind that we had were the old black flatirons, not the kind that had the handle you could take off or on. We set up the ironing board and proceeded the next day to iron all of these things we had washed the day before.

We had no no-iron or permanent press things, as I said before, so everything had to be ironed. I shouldn’t say everything. We didn’t iron our sheets, but of course we had to iron the pillow cases. We had to iron all of these white shirts that my father wore to the office and the white shirts that the boys wore on Sundays, because they were just cotton shirts. The aprons and the house dresses had to be ironed. We had quite a few aprons and quite a few house dresses, because my mother, in all of the years that I can remember, when we got all of our work done for the day, before night came and my father came home from the office and the boys home from their work, my mother always had on a clean apron, and if needed, a clean house dress. When she sat down to do her mending after we finished the ironing, it would be in a clean apron. That usually took a good day, to get our ironing and mending done. This took care of two good days of our week.

One thing I think I’ll always remember about home, though, was our evenings. Sometimes they began a little bit late, because we had the cows to milk and the chores to do and dinner to get over with and the dishes to wash and all of that sort of thing, but we always managed somehow to have some evening. There was never any work done in the evening. I’ve noticed—and I’m sure it’s because so many women work nowadays—that the evening is spent in doing the things that we would get done in the daytime. All of the housework that we were going to do, all of the fruit we were going to put up, anything that we were going to do was done during the day. When evening came, we sat down as a family and enjoyed our evening in reading, or visiting, or playing Flinch or Rook together, or just plain talking, or singing around the piano while I played the piano. We always spent our evening as a family. I think it will be always one of my very best memories of my growing up years.

Talking about scrubbing those floors till they became white with the lye soap reminded me of the summer that Max was born.[2] Keith and Eva were going to come out and stay with us that summer as soon as school let out, and Mrs. Maxwell was going to come down and be with Eva when the baby was born. He was to be the very first grandchild on both sides of the family, so it was quite an event. Mrs. Maxwell would have to bring her baby with her; she had a baby girl and a little boy named Carl, a little over two years old.[3]

We had a bit of a dilemma of what we were going to do with all of these people in our little four-room house. We always pitched a tent outside in the summer, where Fred and Roy liked to sleep, and so that would relieve the sofa bed inside, so that would make one more bed available inside. After thinking about it a good deal, my father hit on the idea of renting this old hotel-house next door to us that we had lived in when we first went to Myton, and fixing up a main floor bedroom for Keith and Eva. So that’s what he did. I imagine he was able to get it pretty cheap—it hadn’t been lived in since we had moved out of it. Guess who got to clean it up? I was sixteen that summer, and so with my scrub brushes and buckets and rags and what not, I spent the better part of a week over there cleaning out this room, with Mother making occasional inspections to make sure that I was doing it properly. We had an extra bed that we put up over there, and from somewhere Mother got some scrim. The nearest thing I can describe scrim as, is a pretty good grade of starched cheesecloth, white. It was used quite a bit in those days for an inexpensive curtain. She made curtains for the windows with this white scrim, and with one of her nice quilts on the bed, and when I finally got that floor to a good, clean white to suit her, and the windows washed, and the woodwork washed, and I’m not sure, but it seems to me that we calcimined (put white calcimine on) the walls, anyway it was rather a pleasant room with some of Mother’s braided rag rugs on the floor.

We decided that Keith and Eva could sleep over there, and Mrs. Maxwell and her baby could have the bed at our house, and Roy and Fred could sleep out in the tent, and everybody could take their meals at our house. When Eva had the baby, her meals could be taken over to her on a tray. That way everything was arranged very nicely. We even had a crib for the new baby.

This crib had given me a lot of trouble and I was glad when it finally was able to be used. My father had had a client who had come in one day and said that he was unable to pay his bill, but that he did have a small bed—if Father would like it, he could have it. I’ve already told you that I slept on a cot in the front room. Father, when the man said “a small bed,” he immediately envisioned a single bed that Mabel could have, and he said that would be just fine. When the bed arrived, however, instead of being a single bed, it was a very nice crib. I had been kidded about that crib a great deal. Father insisted it would come in handy some time, and it had been put away carefully. It must have been in pretty good condition, because I think it saw Max and Grant and Frank all through their babyhood. So, that in the room too made things quite complete.

Keith and Eva arrived, and they were very happy with the arrangements, and in due time Mrs. Maxwell and baby Grace and little Carl arrived, and they were very happy with their arrangements. Eventually, Max arrived, and I’m quite sure he was happy with his arrangements, too. The only person who wasn’t really happy that summer was Mabel. I was very happy about baby Max. He was a cute baby, very dark and big black eyes, and a real sweet little baby. Even though I did tend him a great deal, I didn’t mind that at all. The only thing that I was unhappy about was Carl.

He was two years old and he was really a little terror. He became my sole responsibility while his mother was taking care of Eva. He did get me into quite a bit of trouble, the least of which was getting into my mother’s very best tub and stomping up and down until he managed to get a hole in it. He was always getting away from me, and I was having to run after him before he fell in the canal or got into the corrals or climbed into the pigpen or got into the bullpen or anyplace else a little two-year-old boy could think of to get. I spent, it seemed to me, my whole summer chasing that kid.

All in all, it was a happy time. It was one time when we were all home again, except Jack, and we all enjoyed one another and we were all so thrilled with this little grandson, the first in both sides of the family.

Charles Wahlquist and his eldest grandson

Mabel and little Max

Maybe there might be time left on this cassette to tell you about two of my favorite horses. They were Buttermilk and Topsy. Buttermilk was Topsy’s mother. I don’t know just why we called her Buttermilk, whether it was because she was as slow as buttermilk, or whether it was her looks. She was almost the color of buttermilk, white with yellow spots that looked like chunks of butter on her. We used Buttermilk in our single buggy most of the time, and she was a most exasperating little animal, but we did love her. You’d give her a flick of the whip and she’d start out at a real good pace, but she would just keep gradually slowing down and slowing down, until if you’d let her, she would be stopped dead still in the road, sound asleep. She would have been a very safe horse for my mother to use, but Mother never did drive her. I don’t know that she would have been so good for Mother, because she’d never use the whip, and I guess she’d have spent most of her time sleeping by the roadside unless Mother got impatient and got out and walked. We had Buttermilk a long time.

She had, oh, probably many colts, but the two that I remember, we called Bill and Topsy. Bill was sort of an ordinary horse. He was a trotter and he was also a good workhorse, and as he grew up, he made part of one of the teams. But Topsy was something else again. She was a little pacer, a beautiful little bay animal. I don’t know who her father was, but he must have been something special. The boys were all just crazy about Topsy. Before Keith went on his mission, the craze came in for horse racing, and I don’t know what you call those little tiny carts that they rode on and the horse pulled in the races, but anyway, Keith and Fred made themselves one.[4] They used to love to get Topsy pulling this and go around the big square that I suppose had been the original 160-acre homestead, which by this time had been broken up into many parts.

Mother would just be frightened to death when they would do this, and she and I used to go upstairs and she went from one window to the other upstairs and watched their progress. We could see their cart with Topsy pulling it flash by between the trees here and there along the way, and she would heave a big sigh of relief when they finally got back. I don’t know if Keith ran Topsy in any races or not, but he certainly did use her a lot that way.

One time when we were upstairs watching, Mother cut her hand very badly on a broken window. We always had at least one broken window—with four boys and their friends and baseballs, I suppose that was inevitable. Mother’s hand was badly cut and it bled profusely, and she always had the scar from that cut.

Speaking of broken windows, I remember we had an earthquake before Keith went on his mission, and it cracked a place right on the front of our house. Keith had to have a picture of that. It wasn’t until the picture was developed that anybody noticed the rag that someone had stuffed in the broken window until it could be fixed, in the window right above the crack. If we’d taken the rag out, we could have blamed it on the earthquake. As it was, it was inevitable that it was a baseball. Mother was always so embarrassed about that rag in that window.

Back to Topsy. One spring Topsy was stolen. We knew that she had been stolen because we knew that she wouldn’t have left on her own. It was a very sad summer without her. Then toward fall, one morning when the boys went out to do the chores, there stood Topsy with her head over the corral gate, with a rope hanging from her neck that she had apparently broken in order to get loose. She had been treated very badly while she was away and was very thin. Apparently whoever had had her had beat her a great deal about the head. She was never quite the same horse after that. When you pulled on the reins quickly, she would stop immediately, or if you would by accident touch her around the head, she would stop dead, trembling. She had learned to be afraid.

I haven’t mentioned yet that I used to love to ride Topsy, but I didn’t very often get a chance—my mother was very frightened and very nervous for me to ride Topsy. But occasionally I did. While she loved to have the boys ride her, and she would run, just gallop, and jump ditches, and anything that she could, and just have a glorious time, when I got on her she was very sedate. I would have to kick and tug and pull and work very hard to get her up to a canter at all, and she would jump only very small ditches with me and never a fence. When I would come back with her and my dad would take me off, he always patted Topsy and said, “Well, you knew you had precious cargo that time, didn’t you girl?”

After Topsy had come back and we had gone to Myton, I used to ride her sometimes when I would be going after the cows. I remember one time when I was riding her, and I think I said that someone had treated her very roughly. I remember one time I learned about this, to my sorrow. I was chasing the cows and I did have her going a fairly good speed. I was riding her bareback and I sort of started to lose my balance, and I reached forward to put my arms around her neck, and as I did that, she stopped short, and I went over her head and landed in a bunch of cactus. I’m sure Topsy was very sorry about it. She stood right still and waited for me to get myself picked up and brushed off the best I could and to climb back on her and go on our way.

It was always Topsy that Fred rode when we lived in Myton and he was making his long rides, morning and night, to the schools where he taught. She was a very sure-footed little animal and certainly a trustworthy, wonderful little friend to all of us. As far as I can remember, she was still alive and Fred was still using her for a riding horse when Mother and I left Myton.[5]

I’ve mentioned the Church a time or two on some of the other recordings. I thought maybe I might tell you just a little bit more about it now. I think I’ve told you that my father was the branch president and Mother was the president of the Relief Society most of the time that we were there. All of the family were very active in the Church. Certainly a great many of my memories of Myton revolve around our activities in the Church.

I think I told you that Myton was the non-Mormon town in the Uintah Basin. There could’ve been several reasons for that. The first was the fact that it was headquarters for the government Indian Agent. He lived there and the people who worked with him, and the people who were there to serve those people, the stores and the post office, the barbershop and laundry, and most of the business people were non-Mormon people. Also, the land around Myton was not the best land for farming, and there weren’t too many farms around. Most of the farming people were the LDS people who came out from Salt Lake and vicinity and took up or homesteaded land there and farmed. Most of them were near to Duchesne or Roosevelt, and that’s where they went for church. Practically all of our congregation was from the farming areas outside of Myton. I don’t recall any families, really, from town, except us and Harold Eldredge, who were LDS.

I think I’ve said that we met in what had been the Old Town Hall down in what was called Old Town. It was a very small building. I remember it as being adobe, but I could be wrong; it might have been frame. It certainly had never been painted. It had inside, along one end of it, a raised platform about a foot high, I guess, from the main part of the floor, and there was a wire across that from one wall to the other and a curtain could be drawn across. We used it as a stage, as I suppose that’s what was intended at the time it was built. We also curtained it off to use for a classroom for Sunday School. Down the center of the hall on either side there were about, oh, maybe six or eight handmade benches down the aisle. The floor was bare, and it had the usual pot-bellied stove in one corner that gave off a lot of heat to the people who were in the first two or three rows next to it and didn’t do very much for those of us who might be at the other end of the room. I don’t recall that there were any windows in the building. There was just an ordinary-sized door at back and at the front. It was not built on a foundation, it just sort of squatted there in the dirt. There was no lawn around it and there were no trees. There was no sidewalk in front of it; it just was there along that windswept lot, and there was a muddy old road that went along in front of it. It held marvelous memories for us. We did have some wonderful times there.

We had Sunday School at 10 o’clock and Sacrament Meeting at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. That gave the farmers time to get home to do their chores at night. In the wintertime we held Mutual and in the summertime we held Primary, if we could get enough children there. Primary in the wintertime was impossible because the children came from so many different directions and could not get there in time after school to get their parents to get them back home before dark. They were so far away that their parents would have had to bring them. In the summertime we did attempt to have Primary, and a parent would gather up a number of children and bring them in. It was a very small group. I’m sure we would have considered it very unusual had we had more than fifty people in attendance at a meeting; that would include all of the children. Usually we just had two classes: the little children up on the stage and the rest of us in one class down in the main part of the hall.

Eva and her boys

I remember once after Max and Grant and Frank were all born, Eva was staying with us one summer and she had little pongee suits for the children.[6] I don’t know if all of you know what pongee was, or is (I suppose it still is used some), but it’s the raw silk from China that hasn’t been converted into anything else, just a very lightweight tan material. She had made little suits for the boys; they were sort of the middy type, middy top and little short pants. When she got them ready that morning I thought that she was asking for trouble, because all of the children that came to Sunday School just came in their overalls and their heavy work shoes. That was probably all of the clothes that they had, their little dark blue work-shirts, or little homemade shirts from gingham or calico. Anyway, certainly that morning the teacher had taken the children outside. As I said, there was no lawn or trees or anything, so they were just out there in the dirt. They were playing out there during the class period, and all of a sudden I heard a great howling and bustle go on, and I knew what had happened, so I went out. All of the farm kids in the class had ganged up on these three little guys dressed up in their city clothes. But Max and Grant and Frank had held their own. Mother and Eva for some reason had not come that morning, and when I went home with them, they were so bedraggled looking, their clothes were torn and their faces were dirty and one of them had a black eye, and they really did not look like they were returning from Sunday School.

One thing about Mutual was that we always waited to have our opening social until after school started. It was always a watermelon bust down at Brother Musser’s. We depended heavily on the school teachers for Mutual. There would be three, or when Fred was not teaching in Myton, there were four who would come besides Fred, and usually there would be young people from out Salt Lake way who were coming out there to get their first years of experience. We rarely got the same ones back the next year; they would move on to something just a little better. We’d wait anxiously for the news to come as to who was to be our teachers. We were always delighted if they were young LDS people, because they were a great deal of help to us in our Mutual.

In Mutual we pretty much had one class, though we did make an attempt one year to have a Beehive class [the class for 12- and 13-year-old girls], which I taught. I was president of the Mutual Young Ladies for quite awhile, and Fred, as I told you before, was president of the Young Men’s. Most of our Mutual was activities. We did have a lot of dances and parties in that little building. We had all of the old-fashioned things that you won’t remember. We did a lot of square dancing and Virginia Reels, and we had a fellow who could play the fiddle, and some waltzing, and that was the type of dancing that we did, mostly. Oh, and I used to just love when I could schottische with my dad. He was a marvelous dancer and when he came down the hall in a schottische, the floor really jumped.

Another thing we’d have was home dramatics. We nearly always put on one or two plays during the year. I loved that very much. My father was a real ham, and I guess I must have taken after him. Father was never in any of our home dramatics in Myton, he was always much too busy, but I do remember that in Heber he was very active in home dramatics and usually took a character part in almost everything that was done in Heber, sometimes much to my mother’s embarrassment. One night I remember, though, in Heber, she was too frightened to be embarrassed. In the part that he was taking, he was to be killed in the second act, and when the guy shot the gun that was to kill him and the smoke went flying in all directions, and Father hit the floor the way you’d expect Father to hit the floor, just as hard as he could. When they carried him off, there was real blood dripping all down the side of his head and Mother was really frightened. She thought that they had forgotten to take the bullet out of the gun. But it just so happened that Father went down with such a bang, and he hit his head on a nail that was sticking up out of the board, that was what caused all of the blood.

I was much like Father in that I liked character parts too, and I did take part in a number of our plays. A lot of our evenings I’m sure were spent rehearsing, rather than in any other Mutual activities, I suppose. We used to take our plays around. We used to take them up to Ioka, where Loreen’s family lived, and we used to go up to Roosevelt and various places with them, and it was a lot of fun.

Mother had a counselor in the Relief Society whose name was Sister Palmer. She was a dear little soul. I shouldn’t say she was a dear little soul—she was a dear big soul; she was a very large woman. She had a son named Arch and she really doted on Archie. Archie wasn’t fond of religion, but he was fond of dramatics. Another thing he was a little too fond of was the bottle. Every winter we always got Archie to come to Mutual by having him in one of our plays. I don’t know when we went out of town to take our plays just how Arch always knew where to find a bottle, but he always seemed to find one. That was the only problem with him, was trying to keep him sober throughout the play. One year we gave him a part of a fellow who was supposed to be a drunk in the second and third acts. I’m telling you that Arch gave a marvelous performance that year. By the second act he was always in real good form. The amazing part about it was he could always remember his lines. Well, not really remember his lines as such, but he could always remember the content. He could go along beautifully with the play, and it was just a little bit hard for the person who was playing opposite him to know exactly what their cue was. I’ve often wondered what became of Arch. He was an awfully nice guy and we all liked him very much and would have liked to have seen him be more active with us in other things than just in dramatics.

Another thing we did in the way of activities was dances. We had various types of box lunches that were popular to do in that day. The girls prepared a box lunch and you were supposed to disguise your box as much as you could so that no one would know whose box it was. We devised various ways of raffling off these boxes. Sometimes they were simply raffled off, and other times they were done by weight of the girl. The fellow had to guess the weight of the girl, and the one who came the closest to her weight got her and her box. We did all sorts of things of that nature to make our dances interesting, and we really had just an awfully lot of fun.

Half of the fun of that type of a dance was the funny combinations that you came up with for your lunch. Very often the fellows would get a glimpse of their girl’s basket or box, and so they would know what they were bidding on. Sometimes they wouldn’t, and you would see some real young boy eating with an elderly lady, or a young girl with some elderly man or such. That was one of the wonderful things about a little branch like that. I don’t know of any place you could live where you really are closer than in a small branch of our Church. No matter how it turned out, everybody was just there in a little group, almost like a family, and everyone could laugh together and enjoy the joke on one another or on themselves and have a glorious time together.

You would think that our Sacrament meetings might be rather dull with so few people to choose from for speakers. Maybe it was because they got so much practice, but really, we had some very good speakers. You could always count on a good talk from Brother Musser or from Harold or Fred or Roy, and of course my father was a very fine speaker. At least I thought so. He did his speaking with the same zest that he did everything else, and sometimes he would get very emotional and have to get out his handkerchief and blow his nose and wipe his eyes and harumph a few times ‘til he got his voice cleared and could go on, much to the embarrassment of my mother and Roy. I loved his spirited talks, and he did understand the gospel and could explain it most beautifully.

I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Brother and Sister Musser to you, so I think I’ll tell you just a little bit about them. They were really wonderful people. He was a well-educated man, and so was his wife. I think they had both taught school before they were married. I don’t know, but my impression is that they might have married a little older than usual when they were married. Maybe it’s just because people aged faster than usual out in that dry, hot country that I think that, but they always seemed a little old to me for as young of children as their family were. They had only two children that I remember, a girl named Mattie who was much, much younger than I, and I can’t remember the boy’s name. I don’t know when they went out to the Basin, but it was much sooner than we did, but in all of the time that I knew them, they lived in two tent-houses. They had built floors in the tents and built them partway up the walls, probably three or four feet, and then the tents over the top. They had one for their living area and one for their sleeping quarters. Sister Musser was a fabulous, fabulous housekeeper. I don’t think the finest of mansions could ever have looked any cleaner or prettier or more homelike than she had made those two tent-houses look. She was a wonderful cook too. I remember when she used to come to church—they either came in their buggy or very often they walked; they lived about a mile down from the edge of town where we lived—but she always came in a dark skirt and a white blouse. Those blouses were the whitest white I’ve ever seen, and they had tucked fronts and ruffled lace fronts. I don’t know how many of them she had, but they were all made the same way. I’ve heard my mother so many times marvel at how beautifully she had ironed those blouses, the tucks and the ruffles were just so perfect. She always looked just like she had stepped out of a bandbox. You couldn’t believe that she had come from that long, dreary, hot, dusty trip from their place up to church. She was a very good speaker too, as was he. She was, I’m not positive about this, one of Mother’s counselors [in the Relief Society presidency]. I know that she was one of the people we depended on a great deal in the branch, because as I say, she was well-educated and a very intelligent person and a very sweet person.

I remember one amusing thing about Mattie. They were at our place for dinner one time and Sister Musser kept saying to Mattie, “Now Mattie, don’t eat so much. You’re going to be sick. You’re going to have a stomach ache.” Mattie was not easily discouraged and she ate a hearty meal. A little later she was lying on the floor crying, and her mother said, “I told you, Mattie, that if you ate so much you would have a stomach ache.” She said, “Well, that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I’ve got the stomach ache so I might just as well have eaten all I wanted anyway.”

I just played this over and decided that maybe a few explanations might be in order so that you’ll understand it better. For example, you might wonder why Eva and the children were with us that summer and not Keith, but this was not too unusual. Keith got all of his college education during the summertime. He would teach in the winter and then go to summer school all summer. Eva usually spent at least part of her summer with us or with her parents up at Altonah. Some summers they rented a place in Salt Lake and stayed there, but more often he simply rented a room and the family came out to the Basin. Jack did this too. Both Jack and Keith spent most of their summers in school, and that also accounts for why I mentioned Fred and Roy in talking about our activities in the ward. It was always a great event when either Keith or Jack came out. We had them for speakers at our church meetings the same as it was an event when some of the stake presidency or some member of one of the stake boards should happen to visit us. They could always count on speaking.

I might say that you could get the impression that those boys being in silk suits meant that they were in something expensive, but pongee was about the cheapest thing that one could buy. At that time it would probably be about 25¢ a yard. Many years later when I was clerking in Ogden, it was 49¢ a yard. So they weren’t living beyond their means; it was just that Eva had dressed them as she would in Salt Lake City, and not as she perhaps should have dressed them in Myton. I did make the comment that there were no people in Myton who were members of the Church, to speak of, but there were just a few. One that I remember was Mrs. Holder, who always helped us with our dramatics. In the summertime a family named Stewart from Spanish Fork used to come out there. They had bees out in that country, and I couldn’t forget them, because Merle, their daughter, was just my age, and one of the very few people who were my age, one of the few girlfriends that I had in Myton.

It seemed that, like I suppose in most small places, we didn’t worry a great deal about age. Everybody was together. I don’t remember more than two or three people being my age. Les Maxwell’s wife Fern is about my age, and she lived in our ward for a few years. I guess my first friend in Myton was a girl named Susie Twitchell, who we thought was carried off by a traveling salesman, but many, many, many years later we discovered that she had gone with him quite willingly.[7] She never did let her family know where she was, and they grieved very much about her. Many years later when she wanted to go to Europe, she wrote them for her birth certificate, and that was the first that they had known that she was alive. It did do one good thing, I guess: it put a scare into all of the rest of us never to get into a car with a stranger, which is what the story had it for many years that Susie had done.

I remember one disastrous experience that Merle Stewart and I had together. It was a 24th of July celebration and we were in charge of the lemonade. Instead of making some sort of a base with the lemons and the sugar to start with, we filled up the milk cans that we were going to use for the lemonade with water and then started squeezing the lemons in one at a time. I don’t know, it seems to me an awfully lot of lemons went into each can before we could even tell that we had put a lemon in it.

Another thing that I remember, thinking of Jack and Keith being at home in the summertime, one time after church on a Sunday, the four boys went down to the river for a swim. There was supposedly a good swimming hole down there and the weather could get very hot, and our little church could get very hot. I think I’ve told you that there wasn’t a window in it, and when you came out if it, you felt like you had been in a steam bath sometimes. So they headed for the river, which wasn’t very far from church, and went in for a swim. The Duchesne River was rather a treacherous thing [before the dams were built]. There really wasn’t a lot of water in it at that time of year, I don’t believe, but there were a lot of eddies and whirlpools in it and undercurrents that one wasn’t aware of. Suddenly they discovered that Fred was in one of these and was not able to get himself out. And Fred was having a problem with his breathing—and as you know, his lungs were not very good to begin with—so Keith decided to get him out. He went for him first—he was the first one to notice it I guess—and he got into the same hole, and he got in trouble. Then it fell to Jack, who was by far the best swimmer of the bunch, to get them both out, which he was miraculously able to do. Fred was in pretty bad shape by the time they got him out, and it took quite a time for them to get the water out of him and get him conscious again. I’ll never forget when they brought him home, how frightened my mother was and how awful Fred looked.

I’ll also never forget my father’s reaction to criticism. My father was a very practical person, as I’ve said many times. He was very, very religious, but he was not fanatically so. When somebody criticized the boys for going swimming on Sunday, he said well, it was too bad, but the thing that was really too bad was that he’d had that meeting after church that he’d had to have with somebody, or else he’d have been with them and it wouldn’t have happened at all. I remember how shocked whoever it was that he said it to was. I do remember in all the years of our growing up that my father was like that. I remember he used to play ball with the boys between Sunday School and church. When it came time for church, why, he’d say, “Well, fellows, I’ve got to go to church. Is anybody going with me?” Can you imagine four boys staying behind when a father had played with them through the afternoon until church time came? I think he was a much smarter father than a lot of people realized.


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Notes:

1. Mabel had low thyroid and took medicine for it all her life.
2. June 19, 1920.
3. The baby girl was Grace, born the previous July.
4. This was in Heber City.
5. Topsy would have been at least 12 years old by then, probably more.
6. 1924 or 1925; Frank would have been the youngest at age 2 or 3.
7. Mabel herself found out Susie’s true fate when she discovered by accident that a nephew’s wife was related to Susie’s people and knew about it because when Susie won “Queen for a Day” in Hollywood and needed a passport to claim her prize, she had contacted the family after decades of silence. Susie’s parents had died before then, so they never did know what had become of her.

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Go to Part 7.
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Mabel’s Memories, part 5

This is part 5 of the memories tape-recorded by Mabel Wahlquist in the 1970s and transcribed and edited by me. Part 1 can be accessed here. Part 4 is the beginning of the stories of Mabel’s youth in Myton, Utah.

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.

Ute Indians in Myton, Utah
(adapted from www.mytoncity.com)

I think I should tell you something about our Indian neighbors, the McKuens. I told you Mother was so frightened of them when we first went there, and that we did grow to love them dearly before we left. Old McKuen, the head of the family, lived in a tent by the side of his house. The government had built a house for each Indian family, but if anyone died in the house, the family immediately moved out. McKuen had several grown sons who were married, and they also had their tents scattered about the yard, so it was rather a tent city. They had many dogs, and they had some horses. They didn’t have any cows—I’ve already told you the story of them getting their milk from us. When their tents got so dirty that they were no longer able to get in and out, they just simply moved the tent. My father always insisted that that was a very practical idea and perhaps should be adopted by some white people.

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.

Ute Bear Dance

Bear dance was a springtime affair and a very happy occasion. It celebrated the bear coming out of his winter sleep and spring coming again to the world. During the bear dance, the town of Myton was full of Indians. The bear dance was held in a large enclosure with the older squaws and bucks sitting around the edge of the enclosure on the ground. The “orchestra,” I guess I’ll have to call them for lack of a better word, would be on one end of the enclosure with their tom-toms, which were drum-like affairs that had been covered tightly with skins and made a drum noise. They had their own way of playing them and got an awful lot of rhythm out of them. The dancers would line up in two rows, the men all in a row and the women all in a row facing them. Then they would start across the enclosure to the rhythm of the tom-toms, going three steps forward and two steps back, three steps forward and two steps back, until you came to the end of the enclosure. Then you reversed your order and went three steps back and two steps forward, three steps back and two steps forward, until you were back to the other end of the enclosure again, to the sound of the tom-toms. Then the dance was over and they visited a few minutes and then started dancing again.

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.

Myton, Main Street when Mabel lived there

The other side, going back up to the same corner across from Waugh’s Store, was the pool hall, which was probably the biggest building on that side. The bank was across the street, and it was a fairly good-sized building for Myton, and one end of it had a little building built onto it that had been a little real estate office, and that was what my father later had for his office. Next to the pool hall was a vacant area, and then there was a little string of buildings. One was a little restaurant, and one was a meat market, and one was a little beauty parlor where a lady gave marcels, which were the fashion at that time. Beyond that I’m sure there was another little building, but I can’t remember what it housed. On down the street across into the next block was the livery stable. That took care of Main Street.

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 think I’d like to tell you something about Mr. Cook, who was the editor of the Myton Free Press. I can’t tell you very much about him, because I don’t think anyone knew very much about him. He came from somewhere for some reason and had been there for some time. He was a very brilliant man, a very well-read, well-educated man, I’m sure. He was an atheist. He and my father were very, very good friends; they enjoyed each other very much—they enjoyed one another’s minds. I don’t think they ever tried to talk religion, but they were able to talk about so many things that I’m sure Mr. Cook must have hungered for until my father came. They used to could just spend hours together, talking about so many things. Mr. Cook didn’t have any wife or family (at least he didn’t have any with him—he might have had some at some time). He was a man about my father’s age. He was instrumental in opening this little library that I talked about, and I’m sure a lot of the books there were his.

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:

1. Despite decades of effort by various groups, the railroad never did come to Myton.
2. Keith and Eva were married September 3, 1919.
3. 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.

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Go to Part 6.
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