During the summer of 1974, Mabel Wahlquist had cataracts that left her unable to do handwork or to read or to watch tv while she waited to have the operations. To keep her occupied, her niece Elizabeth Wahlquist bought her cassette tapes, and Mabel started to think out the stories that would become her own life history. She continued taping stories for about three years, in all about 20 hours of recordings. Part of that time she was laid up nursing her phlebitis. She always meant to tape more but somehow never did.
She hired a transcriptionist who typed all but the last two tapes. The last tape Mabel kept back, never meaning to have it typed. The second-to-last tape was left with the transcriptionist to finish but somehow was lost. Now both tapes are lost, alas.
She originally meant to tell only the family story so that her nieces and nephews, especially the children of her brother Keith (who died when the children were young) would be better acquainted with their father and older relatives, but Mabel’s own story throughout becomes the inadvertent focus. Her story is one of perseverance, intelligence, patience, and above all, love. Her dedication to her family may have seemed to her no more than expected under the circumstances, but her sense of duty reached a standard equaled by few.
My role in transcribing her story began when Elizabeth took me to Ogden one Thanksgiving when my holiday plans had fallen through. I met Mabel the night before Thanksgiving. The next day she told her nephew Keith that he should marry me. She was very happy to attend our wedding the following summer. A week after that same Thanksgiving, she fell and broke her hip, making it necessary that she move to a nursing home where she became very popular among the staff and other residents. She wanted this book to read there, and Elizabeth felt it would be best if she took a copy instead of the original, so I took the book and made two photocopies of it. Elizabeth and Mabel had never been satisfied with the transcription of the book; they had meant to correct it sometime, and I offered to listen to the tapes and compare them to the transcription, so Elizabeth gave me all the tapes.
It was faster to retype the manuscript than to correct all the problems. I listened to the eighteen hours of tapes, comparing them with the original transcription, and I made corrections as I created the electronic version. The length is around 130,000 words.
One of Mabel’s horrors was using poor grammar. Generally she was a very careful speaker in that regard. She told Elizabeth that she wanted all her “bad grammar” corrected; however, with the exception of providing a word or two in brackets that may clarify or complete a thought, I haven’t needed to change much of anything. She made penciled corrections to her copy of the transcript which I used as footnotes originally, but in this edition I typed her corrected version, unless in listening to the tapes I found that her original words were clearer but had not been transcribed correctly.
I realize the photographs are balanced heavily on the side of Mabel’s brother Keith’s family, but those are the ones we have in our possession. I had wanted to include at least one appearance by every grandchild of Charles and Elizabeth Wahlquist but missed a few.
Several professors whom I worked with when writing my doctoral dissertation saw this book and urged publishing it. Part of Chapter 3 was published in the Utah State Historical Society’s Beehive History, 19 (1993): 2–8. The article included photographs now missing and some we never had; especially interesting are those from the Vernal Library that include photographs of Waugh’s Store in Myton.
The original edition appendices included living people and have been omitted from this edition.
I am planning to post about 5,000 words in each section here, but the length will really depend upon where a natural story break occurs.
Marci Wahlquist
April 20, 2019
Chapter 1
The Campbells and the Wahlquists
As our Sunday School teacher said yesterday, I hope there is something to do in the next world besides genealogy, so I’m not going to attempt any dates or make any effort to be authoritative about anything that I am going to say—just to tell you some of the things that I remember from the stories that my mother used to tell to me and then to tell you some of the things I remember in our own family during my lifetime. Those of you who want facts and dates and figures can find them in a book entitled How Beautiful Upon the Mountains, which was compiled by the Wasatch Chapter of the Utah Pioneers—Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. I know there is one in each of your family libraries because Julia Anderson, Edwin’s wife, helped to compile the book and she pressured me into buying four copies, which I gave to Jack and Fred and Roy and kept one for myself which is here.
As far as I know, the first of our family who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was my grandmother, Elizabeth Davis, a sixteen-year-old girl in Scotland. Now, I do know that somewhere along the way when I was a little girl there used to be a Johnny Davis come to see us whom I remember as being my mother’s distant cousin, but where he fits in I don’t really know. Grandma Campbell, Grandma Elizabeth Davis Campbell, joined the Church in Scotland at sixteen as I said, and a few years later was married to Thomas Campbell who had joined the Church I think about a year previous to that time.
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| Elizabeth Davis Campbell |
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| Thomas Campbell |
There is some discrepancy between my memories and those of the Wasatch Pioneer ladies of the DUP as to what they did when they arrived. According to the story as my mother told it, they went to Sanpete County and took up a homestead there. I think they were probably a little above the average people in Scotland. My grandfather was a miner. I’m not sure that he was a mining engineer, but at least he was quite knowledgeable. He was a very intelligent man and very well read. My grandmother was a practical nurse, so she had been very helpful along the way with the things that she was able to do.
It soon became known that my grandfather knew something about mining, so Brigham Young called them to go to Southern Utah where they were trying to develop some coal mines. They went, considering it a mission and planning to come back to Sanpete County. I don’t know how long they were down there, but for some time. They lived in dugouts and did most of their cooking over an open fire. They were down there during the Mountain Meadows Massacre , and I’ve heard my mother say that Grandma wanted desperately to buy a kettle to cook over the open fire that was sold at auction along with the other articles that were sold from the people who were killed in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. But my grandfather refused to let her buy anything from the auction.[2]
I know that they were also down there during the Black Hawk Indian War period. The boys by this time were young teenage boys, and they acted as scouts and as runners, and the oldest boy even as a fighter in the Black Hawk Indian War. I remember going down to Springville for Black Hawk Indian War veterans’ conferences or whatever you call them with the folks at one time. I might tell you something about that later. As usual, I got into lots of trouble.
They had some other children while they were down there; all told, they had ten children. They had the four before they came. Mother was the youngest and I think the only one born in Heber, though Uncle Jim Campbell might have been, so they were down there quite a while.
But when they gave up the idea of the mines down there, I suppose that they might have stayed and helped to build up the area down there like many people did, except that they thought they had this land in Sanpete County. When they came back, however, they discovered that another family had moved onto the land and were developing it. Of course in those days there was nothing but squatters’ rights, so they were unable to take their land back. They were quite desperate when they came back; they had nothing at all.
I don’t know why they went to Heber, unless it was that there were a lot of Scotch people there, and some of them were people they had known in the old country. Heber, in my mind, was mostly populated by people from England and Scotland, English-speaking people. The Swiss people went over to Midway and there were a few Scandinavian people, but not very many to my knowledge.
When they got to Heber, my grandfather and the older boys worked on the old tabernacle there. You remember there was quite a fuss to save it a few years ago and people who have been from Heber were called upon for donations. I remember sending a donation; I think I did it mostly from nostalgia, remembering that one time when we were very small youngsters, we were there at a conference and President McKay, then an apostle, was giving a talk and he wanted to bring out a point. I don’t remember even what the point was, but he said, “What makes more noise than a pig caught in a fence?” And a shrill little voice came from the balcony, “Two pigs.” That little voice was Roy. We all thought it was very funny, and Jack went around mad for about a week because he hadn’t thought of it first. But that’s another story.
When Grandpa and the boys had worked a time, Grandpa asked for their money. They were told that it was to be labor tithing. Of course he explained that they had no money for food and he must have money for his family. The stake president who was in charge of the building told him that they could get food from the Bishops’ Storehouse, but they could not have money. Well, he was an old Scotchman too, and I guess two old Scotchmen, particularly when one was a Campbell, didn’t make out so well. So finally, my grandfather got the money, but he was told that he would never get any more work if this particular stake president had anything to do with it. In those days stake presidents were pretty powerful individuals.
This was probably a very unfortunate thing, because my grandfather then took his boys and went to Park City to the mines that were being developed at about that time. Thus, as a family, they did become quite financially well situated. One of the boys developed a lumber mill, and they homesteaded a very good piece of land right on the edge of Heber City and were quite well-to-do. My grandfather was only angry at the stake president, not at the Church, but it was unfortunate because it did cause his boys to lose their faith and interest in the Church. Grandmother and the girls still continued in their activities in the Church. That’s the beginning of the Campbell branch of our family.
Now, my dad and his mother came much later to Heber. I would guess that Grandma and Grandpa Campbell came during the '50s, during the early '50s, and Grandma Wahlquist and my father came after the railroad, I think the first year after the railroad.[3]
I had planned to leave the Campbells here and pick them up again later, but I’ve decided that perhaps for those who are doing some serious genealogical research, that perhaps I should say that there is a Campbell organization. I suppose our contact with them would at this time be my cousin, Jenny Campbell, who lives in Orem, Utah. Roy and I received invitations to attend their Campbell conference a time or two, and we talked about going, but we never quite made it. Apparently it is a large group, and many members of the family are very active in it. I know that Fred attended once or twice, and I know that Jack was there at least once, because I remember him being very impressed at finding Governor Rampton there and learning that Governor Rampton’s wife had been a Campbell.
Perhaps the older members of the family knew, but I didn’t, that my Grandfather Campbell had an older brother, Alexander, who also joined the Church and who came to Utah and settled in Southern Utah. Whether this was the result of the research or whether the older members of the family knew it at that time, I don’t know. He had a large family and most of the Campbells or perhaps all of the Campbells in North Ogden are members of that family. Presumably Governor Rampton’s wife was descended from that family.
I’ve noticed in listening to this that I have said that Governor Rampton’s wife was a Campbell. It was not so—it was his mother who was a Campbell, so that made him a direct descendent of the Campbell line. Well, let’s go on.
Now, to go on, I’ll go back and say a little something about my grandmother and grandfather on my father’s side. My father, as you know, was Charles John Wahlquist, an only son. He had two older sisters, Sophia and Esther.[4] We called Aunt Sophia “Aunt Sophi.”[5] Esther had died much earlier in childbirth and we did not know her. This is another story that I’d like to tell a little bit later on and was the reason for my father being very much opposed to practical jokes.
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| Sophia Walquist Anderson, her husband and children |
My father’s father’s name was Anders Frederick Wahlquist, and of course he also was an only son. I seem to have the impression that he was not a large man. He was a cooper by trade, that is, a barrel maker, and apparently dipped a little bit too often into the barrel, which made for rather an unhappy marriage with my grandmother. His father was the elusive Olaf in our genealogy. He must have been a large man, or at least a tall man, because he was a member of the King’s Guard. It was at this time that he was given the name Wahlquist, which of course was pronounced Valqvist, and which my father changed to its present spelling and pronunciation when he came to the States much later.
We used to think Wahlquist was rather an unusual name, but apparently there are quite a number of Wahlquists about. My doctor in Minneapolis was named Wahlquist, and he had a brother who was a scientist who worked on the atom bomb, who had a famous son, Grant, of basketball fame. Elizabeth occasionally gets a note from a Mark Wahlquist in Australia who had happened to read Jack’s name in a book somewhere. Andrew received a letter from a lady in the southern states somewhere who had been a Wahlquist before her marriage, and she had seen his name in a publication and was interested. Of course there is the Wahlquist family in Salt Lake who came to America about the same time that my father came, and they have a large family, but we have never been able to make any connection and the fact that the name was given to my great-grandfather doesn’t make it logical that any of these people would be a part of our genealogy, but it would be very interesting to find out.
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| Anna Cristina Walquist |
Apparently Grandmother and my father had a pretty rough time the first years that they were in Utah, living in a country where they didn’t know the language and where they were not prepared to do any work. My grandmother worked in people’s homes as a housekeeper and kept my father with her when she could. He very often was able to do the chores for his board and slept in the barns. One of the first jobs he did have was herding cows in the pastures west of Heber City. It was there that he came in contact with other boys his own age who gave him rather a rough time because of his lack of English. I would imagine that he was rather a novelty to them and they thought he was very funny and they did tease and torment him. He had a very quick temper and I’m sure many fights ensued which made it more fun for the tormenters, but it also increased his determination to learn the language and to better himself and to show these boys up.
It seems that his father had begged him to stay in Sweden and had told him that if he would stay there, that he would mend his ways and would provide him with the best education that he could receive in Sweden, so I suppose he felt a certain obligation to his father too, but in any event, he did work very hard at trying to improve himself. He studied nights and took correspondence courses and became a well-educated person. In fact, he was teaching school before he went on his mission. I suppose that was—probably he went on his mission when he was around 25. Before this time, he and his mother had homesteaded land out at Daniels, near the mountains there south of Heber City, and had been instrumental in bringing his sisters’ families here. He had grown up very young and had worked on a construction crew in helping to build the road through Daniels Canyon in Strawberry Valley. He had also worked over on the Moulton Ranch between Park City and Heber, but he had never gone into the mines as my uncles on my mother’s side of the family had done.
He was a very fun-loving fellow, and I’ve heard him say that he had worked all day in his gum boots and walked over to Wallsburg, a distance of several miles, and danced until midnight and walked back, still in his gum boots, which was all he had. His tuition [admission] for the dance had been a few carrots or potatoes or any other produce that he was able to take from the farm.
It’s always seemed rather peculiar to me that he could have lived in this small town of Heber and not known my mother up until the time when he returned from his mission. Perhaps it’s because they moved in different social circles, because my mother’s family were fairly well-to-do, and my father, being an immigrant and of a nationality that was not very well known in Heber, and being very poor, probably had not attended many functions in Heber but had gone more to Charleston and Wallsburg and Daniels and places where the people of his nationality and of his social standing went.
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| Charles John Wahlquist |
I’ve thought it was odd that my father and my mother should have lived in the small community of Heber so long and not ever met one another, and I’ve been thinking, perhaps the reason that they didn’t meet was not so much his, as her circumstances. Mother was a very pretty girl, but she was also very shy, and I’ve heard her laughingly say that she usually got the first date with the fellow, but that when he returned it was to pick up her more lively and vivacious sister, Mary. And too, being the youngest in the family, she probably found herself at an early age, probably her late teens, as the one left at home to care for her aging and ailing parents.
Grandfather Campbell had always been a very sensitive person, and I’m sure the rigors of pioneer life had been very hard on him, and in his older years he was not well. He had a bad stomach; probably nowadays we’d say he had an ulcer. He had bad migraine headaches and was just generally not well. He spent his declining years reading his books and puttering in his garden. He died several years before my grandmother did. My grandmother, on the other hand, was a very strong¬ natured, determined woman, and you know I’ve mentioned before that she was a practical nurse. She was very well known in the community because she had brought many babies into the world. She had a certain knack with herbs and teas and poultices and such, which caused people to call on her very frequently in illnesses.
At about this—well, I guess probably before my grandfather died, she developed cataracts. My mother took her to Salt Lake for surgery, and the surgery was a success, but during the time of the healing process she developed an infection. Of course in those days there was nothing to fight infection, and it spread very rapidly from the one eye to the other, and she became totally blind and was blind for seventeen years before her death. Mother has told me many times how very courageous her mother was, how determined she was not to let her affliction keep her from doing the things that she liked to do. With Mother leading her, she still called on the sick and did all that she could to help alleviate their problems, and she insisted on attending all of her meetings. After my grandfather’s death, she considered herself very much the head of the house, and if there was a noise outside, she was up and out to investigate. I remember Mother telling once of going out to find her and she was standing right on the edge of an open cellar that they had been having dug for their winter vegetables. She didn’t dare to call to her, but somehow she was able to reach her before she fell into the cellar and was injured. I’m sure all of this added to my mother’s own very nervous state and made her the nervous person that she was throughout her life.
Another of Mother’s duties of course was to read to Grandma, and my grandmother loved to hear her read the Wasatch Wave, the weekly paper. The minute it came into the house, it had to be read from cover to cover. About this time, my father was a missionary in the Scandinavian mission and he spent a good deal of his time in Copenhagen. He wrote for the Eastern Star and he traveled a great deal, and he wrote a letter home each week to the Wasatch Wave. His letters were more in the nature of a travelogue, as he told about the people and their customs and their dress and about the countryside. My grandmother found these letters very interesting. The minute that the paper came into the house, the first thing that Mother had to read was the letter from Charlie Wahlquist. So for about two years, without knowing Charlie Wahlquist, she had been reading his letters and of course had gained many impressions of him from the letters.
When he returned home, she was still not, of course, acquainted with him, but Grandma was very anxious to meet him, and as soon as she learned where he was going to be speaking, she insisted that they must go and hear him. After his talk, not being shy like my mother, she insisted that they must go up and meet him, and so they did. My father immediately fell in love with my mother, but he was so different to her, or seemed so different from his letters that it was some time before my mother found a great deal of interest in him. But he was a very determined person, and as I said before, very outgoing. Before they were even engaged, he began building the house that was to be their home: a small, cabin-like house right next to his mother’s house on their land in Daniels.
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| Charles and Elizabeth Wahlquist, wedding portrait, 1895 |
I guess they must have had a great time with those two mothers-in-law. They just did not get along at all. My Grandma Wahlquist was equally strong-willed and just as determined as my Grandma Campbell, but in a different way. Quite differently from my father, she had refused to accept the ways of America. I’m sure she had had her feelings hurt deeply many times when she was working in other people’s households when she first came to America, and she had become quite bitter. She refused to learn the language and continued to keep her Swedish ways, including her manner of dress. So of course my mother and her mother could not communicate with Grandma Wahlquist, and Grandma Wahlquist didn’t bother to come to see them or to make any effort to be friendly with them. As my mother has often said, when Grandma Wahlquist would talk to my father it would usually be out in the yard, and Grandma Campbell would say, “Well, now you’re catching it.” Fortunately, my mother and father were both blessed with a good sense of humor, so they managed to work it all out.
It might be interesting to say here that Grandma Campbell learned to do so many things in her blindness. In making their carpeting for their floor, Mother said she would cut the rag strips and put them in separate piles of different colors and then she would take Grandma’s hand and put it on each pile and say, “Now this is red, and this is blue, and this is yellow” and so on. Grandma would feel the material and feel the position of the different colors on the table and then she would go ahead and with Mother threading the needles, she would sew the rags. Mother said that it was really amazing the beautiful patterns that she came up with and that she would never make a mistake in her colors, that she would always get them exactly the way she wanted them.
I suppose they had many hardships and I’m sure it must have been very difficult for my mother and probably for my grandmother during those years, because my father had very little except what he could earn in his off hours when he was free from the farm. Also, he was studying very hard at this time—a correspondence course in law—and had little time for much in the way of pleasure or really to do anything other than work.
I would imagine that Grandma Wahlquist was quite jealous of my mother. I suppose it is quite natural that she would be. My father was her only boy and she considered him as almost a gift to her from the Lord. She had waited on him hand and foot and I suppose had spoiled him pretty badly in many ways.
My mother, sweet, gentle person that she was, was also a rather determined young lady, and so she decided quite early in their marriage to take him in hand. There is a funny incident that she used to tell that happened quite soon after they were married. It seems that he had only two good shirts, and one morning, one Sunday morning he got up to go to Priesthood meeting, and when he went to put on his shirt, the button was off, and so he took the shirt, went over to the stove, and put the shirt in the stove. So my dear little mother (I can scarcely believe this, but she insisted it’s true) quietly went to the closet, got his other shirt, walked to the stove, took the lid off the stove, and put the shirt in the stove and let it burn. My father, after standing absolutely aghast for a few minutes, his sense of humor got the best of him and nearly died laughing. He then put on his old work shirt and went off to Priesthood meeting. This is one of their early experiences in their married life, but I think she continued to do these things and in her gentle, sweet way, she changed him to the point where I never did see my father lose his temper except twice in all of the years that I knew him.
My folks lived at Daniels, it must have been several years. My brothers Keith and Fred and John were born there, and Keith had some memories of his grandmother. My dad was the bishop of the Buysville ward. It’s always been a puzzle to me about Daniels and Buysville. As far as I’m concerned, they were the same locality, but perhaps it was called Buysville Ward from a Church standpoint rather than a geographical standpoint. I really don’t know. My father was, as I said, bishop there, and it’s my impression that both of the grandmothers died during the time that they lived there.[8]
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| The cabin in Daniels that Charlie Wahlquist built |
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Notes:
- “The handcart company” refers to the ill-fated Willie and Martin Handcart companies that traveled so late in the season in 1856 that they suffered the deaths of hundreds when early winter struck them while still on the Great Plains. There were handcart companies both before and after those two. The Campbell family came across the Plains to Utah in 1855.
- 11 September 1857. Juanita Brooks wrote an excellent book about this infamous episode in Utah history.
- The Wahlquists came by railroad in 1877; the Golden Spike was driven 10 May 1869.
- The sisters were Eva Sophia (1858–1921) and Esther Margaretha (1860–1889).
- Rhymes with “know why.”
- Anna was born in 1823; her son Charles in 1866 when she was 43.
- The elder daughter, Sophi, was married and came to the U.S. later; the younger daughter, Esther, came with her brother and mother.
- Anna Wahlquist died in 1899; Elizabeth D. Campbell in 1901.
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Go to Part 2.
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