Some of the Vaughn kids are helping Dad with a massive de-junking of the house. It's incredible the amount of stuff that accumulates over time when you (uh hem) hoard things and then don't ever go through them!
We happened across more of Grandma's things. Family history things! And photos. I'm so excited because some of the photos actually have labels! Woo hoo! Seriously. Want to confuse future generations? Leave behind a bunch of pictures with no clue as to who's in them. Grandma has a billion pictures of a cactus. I'd think she was nuts if I didn't know if was Cochese, her cactus pup in Arizona. Well, she might still be slightly nuts...
Anyway, a picture with no context isn't much good. I can glean names from the labeled pictures and apply them to other photos now. I recognized several of the men so that's a start. I was right about one of them being Great Grandpa. I think the other might be Grandma's brother, Mack?
Off to work! I just wanted to share with you that we've found the mother load and I'll be working my buns off to get them scanned and online. The last posts look booooring when you scroll through. I didn't want to just post links though. Sometimes websites vanish.
Maida The Younger, I've found pictures of your half siblings and also Aunt Kathleen's kids which I know you'll be interested in. =)
Friday, May 14, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Unlikely Daniel Webster Jones
The Unlikely Daniel Webster Jones:
First Spanish Translations from the Book of Mormon
Jack McAllister, “The Unlikely Daniel Webster Jones: First Spanish Translations from the Book of Mormon,” Ensign, Aug 1981, 50
Orphaned at the age of eleven, Daniel Webster Jones launched himself West in 1847 with a company of Missouri Volunteers, off to fight in the Mexican War. “Gambling, swearing, fighting, and other rough conduct” were the order of the day and, like “white men generally, I looked upon all Indians as fit only to be killed.” (Forty Years among the Indians, Salt Lake City, Utah: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1890, pp. 18–19. Other references to this autobiography will be cited parenthetically in the text.) Thus, Daniel Webster Jones seems an unlikely choice to join the Church, spend forty years proselyting among the Indians, and with little formal training in Spanish help make the first Spanish translations from the Book of Mormon. As it turned out, he was a good choice for all three.
He does not talk about his early life, but somewhere he had gained a strong belief in God. During the three years he spent in Mexico with the American army, he “took part in many ways in the wild, reckless life that was common in that land” but still refrained from “strong drink and other worse vices that I could see were destroying the lives of my associates.” (pp. 18–19.)
Because of his life-style, he says, “I felt condemned, and often asked God in all earnestness to help me to see what was right, and how to serve Him; telling Him I wanted to know positively, and not be deceived.” In his rough way, he felt that his age was entitled to a prophet too, “that it was not a ‘square thing’ to leave them without anything but the Bible.” (p. 19.)
He left Mexico in 1850 with a large trading company en route to Salt Lake City. On the way, he was badly wounded by a gun accident, but managed to hold on until his companions got him to the Mormon settlements around Provo.
The Latter-day Saints were often the butt of ridicule by travelers of the time, but when he overheard some of his friends reading the Doctrine and Covenants and making fun of it, his “oft-repeated prayer” asking for modern revelation came to his mind. He left his companions, installed himself with an LDS family, and began investigating the gospel as he recuperated. (p. 36.) “Everyone was kind and treated me with great confidence,” he remembered. “I listened to the elders preaching and soon concluded they were honest and knew it, or were willful liars and deceivers. I was determined, if possible, not to be fooled, therefore I commenced to watch very closely.” (p. 37.) He was particularly impressed by the lack of bitterness that Latter-day Saints felt toward the Indians, in spite of recent battles.
When he learned about the Book of Mormon, “it seemed natural to me to believe it. I cannot remember ever questioning in my mind the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, or that Joseph Smith was a prophet. The question was: Are the Mormons sincere, and can I be one?” (p. 38.) When he decided that he could be, he spoke to Isaac Morley, one of the first members of the Church in Ohio.
It was 27 January 1851 and Brother Morley “was just starting out after a load of wood with his ax under his arm.” Remarking quietly, “ ‘I have been expecting this,’ ” Brother Morley used the ax to chop through a foot of ice—and Dan became a member of the Church.
The next twenty-three years were busy ones. He farmed, traded with the Ute Indians, was ordained a seventy, married Harriet Emily Colton, acted as Brigham Young’s interpreter when he dealt with some Mexicans in Sanpete County, helped rescue the handcart pioneers stranded by winter, and continued his friendly contacts with the Indians, both as a member of the Church and as a government official.
Then, in 1874, he was summoned to Brigham Young’s office and was called on a mission to Mexico. “I had expected this call to come some time. I had both desired and dreaded the mission,” he says frankly, knowing how hard a mission would be in Mexico. He and Harry Brizzee were both called and told to prepare themselves. Since “Brother Young said he would like to have some extracts from the Book of Mormon translated,” they “began to study and prepare for translating.”
Although both spoke Spanish, Daniel “often thought how good it would be to have a native Spaniard to help us.” (p. 220.) A few months later, Brother Brizzee brought a stranger, Mileton G. Trejo, who had heard about the Church in the Philippine Islands and had come to Utah to investigate it. He soon was baptized and began translating selections from the Book of Mormon into Spanish with Daniel’s assistance and support.
In 1875, Daniel reported to President Young that they were ready to start on their mission. Authorized by President Young, Daniel soon raised $500 by subscription to print the first set of Spanish selections.
In a later conversation with President Young, Daniel was asked how he proposed “to prove to the satisfaction of the authorities of the Church [none of whom spoke Spanish] that the translation was correct.” Daniel offered this trial: they would select a book, Brother Trejo would translate a passage into Spanish, Daniel would take the Spanish translation and, without referring to the original book, translate it again into English. Brother Brigham accepted the trial and, when they provided the translation again, President George A. Smith, then a member of the First Presidency, “laughingly remarked, ‘I like Brother Jones’ style better [than the original]. … The language is more easily understood.’ ” (p. 231.)
But that was not the only exceptional experience Daniel had in connection with the translation. He says:
“When the printing was commenced, Brother Brigham told me that he would hold me responsible for its correctness. This weighed heavily upon my mind. So much so that I asked the Lord to in some way manifest to me when there were mistakes [as we proofread the printed sheets].
“The manuscript as written by Brother Trejo, was at times rather after the modern notion of good style. When I called his attention to errors he invariably agreed with me. He often remarked that I was a close critic and understood Spanish better than he did. I did not like to tell him how I discerned the mistakes.
“I felt a sensation in the center of my forehead as though there was a fine fiber being drawn smoothly out. When a mistake occurred, the smoothness would be interrupted as though a small knot was passing out through the forehead. Whether I saw the mistake or not I was so sure it existed that I would direct my companion’s attention to it and call on him to correct it. When this was done we continued on until the same occurred again.” (pp. 231–32.)
In September 1875 Daniel left for Mexico in company with his son Wiley, James Z. Stewart, Helaman Pratt, Robert H. Smith, Ammon M. Tenney, and Anthony W. Ivins. The group went on horseback and took with them two thousand copies of their publication, “Choice Selections from the Book of Mormon.” (See Eduardo Balderas, “A Brief History of the Mexican Mission, 1874–1936,” English typescript of manuscript prepared for publication in the Church’s Spanish magazine, Liahona, August 1956. Typescript in possession of Brother Balderas, Church Translation Service Services. Brother Balderas corrects Brother Jones’ spelling of Mileton Trejo.)
After several frustrating experiences dealing with local officials, they received permission in Chihuahua to hold a public meeting, and on 8 April 1876 they preached to a group of approximately five hundred persons at the first LDS meeting in the interior of Mexico. After some other attempts to preach the gospel, they returned to the United States, arriving in Salt Lake City on 5 July 1876. Daniel served a second mission to Mexico in 1876–1877, again with Brother Trejo, Brother Pratt, and Brother Stewart. Also serving were Louis Garff and George Terry. Five converts were baptized.
In 1879, Elder Moses Thatcher of the Quorum of the Twelve officially opened the mission, accompanied by Brother Stewart and Brother Trejo. With interruptions caused by political conditions in 1913 and 1926, the mission has operated since.
The first complete translation of the Book of Mormon was finished in 1886 by Brother Trejo and Brother Stewart. Rey L. Pratt, the mission president from 1907 until 1931, revised this translation, assisted by some linguistic questions from Eduardo Balderas. Brother Balderas eventually became the Church’s chief Spanish translator and corrected the Pratt edition around 1949 for a new printing. A second revision, begun in 1969 and completed in 1980 by Brother Balderas, has recently been published and is in use in all Spanish-speaking missions of the Church.
Daniel Webster Jones, Missouri orphan, had begun a mighty work.
Illustrated by Dick Brown
The Man That Ate the Pack Saddle
This is also about Daniel Webster Jones.
"The Man That Ate the Pack Saddle"
by Wallace Stegner (1909-1993)
------- From The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail
New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964, 1981. All Rights Reserved.
-------
THE STORY OF THE MORMON TRAIL is as pat with crises as a horse opera, especially in 1856, ordeal along that thoroughfare was not climactic but serial. And so the rescuers of the Martin Company had hardly pulled away up the Sweetwater with a clinking of harness metal and a crunch of broad tires in snow-crust and a great fume of breath in the cold air before another ordeal began at Devil's Gate. If the theme of the handcart episode was the suffering of the innocent, the theme of this one was the steadfastness of the strong. Its hero, except for his Mormonism, could step into the boots of any Western hero who has been in danger, tested, suspected, and finally vindicated.
His name was Daniel W. Jones--not to be confused, though some historians do so confuse him, with the Dan Jones who looked as if he might convert all of Wales to Mormonism in the 1840's and early 1850's, and who in 1856 had come on with Franklin Richards' missionaries as far as the Platte Bridge, where he stopped to find out about a cached threshing engine, and so missed the rescue. This Dan Jones was an ex-Missouri Puke, an orphan, a harder Huckleberry Finn who from the age of eleven had made his rough way on a tough frontier. "Probably as willful a boy as ever lived," he said he had never been controlled except through kindness, "and this I did not often meet with." Like Huckleberry, rather than submit to being civilized, he had lit out for the territories: the Mexican War led him into the Southwest as a member of the Missouri Volunteers, and for some years afterward he lived among hair-trigger borderers in Texas and New Mexico.
But whether he knew it or not, he had the seed of civilization in him. Fighting, Taos Lightning, and Indian women did not fully satisfy. Helping to drive a band of sheep from Taos to California along the old Spanish Trail, he shot himself accidentally in the groin, and convalesced under the care of a Mormon family at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, in Utah Valley. The kindness with which he was treated smote his orphan heart; he found himself hankering after the security of the Mormon confidence in the Lord. Before long he joined the Church, married a Mormon girl, and settled down. It was proper that when Brigham Young stood up in the tabernacle at October Conference in 1856 and said that men were needed to rescue handcart emigrants caught by snowstorms somewhere on the other side of South Pass, Dan Jones should volunteer. Kindness for kindness. He was a man who honored his obligations.
Two or three weeks later, 327 miles of snowy mountains to the eastward, he volunteered again, more recklessly. When there seemed no way of getting the weakest emigrants in without unloading the freight from all the Hunt and Hodgett wagons, Jones said he would be one to stay behind and guard the cached freight. With two valley boys and seventeen of the strongest teamsters from the wagon companies, he organized a little Stake of Zion in the cabins of the trader fort just above Devil's Gate, and prepared for six months of snow, cold, and isolation. They were fifty miles from Last Crossing, where some mountaineers wintered, and 215 from Fort Bridger. And they weren't exactly prepared to stay: for supplies they had a few crackers and perhaps seventy-five head of skin-and-bones cattle too broken-down to go farther. Even these they were not supposed to eat if they could help it.
Around Devil's Gate at least two hundred cattle had died of bad water or in the early storms; the trail to the east was strewn with their carcasses. The scent of death blew east toward the Platte and west toward South Pass and north and south along the Laramie Range, and wolves from miles of wild country gathered to the barbecue. Trying to fatten their scrawny heard by driving it away from the fort to better feed, Jones's outfit found themselves facing packs that even in daylight looked dangerous. Wolves cut down cattle at high noon, under the rifles of the herders; and at night the corralled heard was sure to erupt at least once in a flurry of attack and a snarl of shadows and a panickd bawling, and when the guards arrived swinging firebrands they would find another steer down, and the snowy darkness ringed with the green flare of eyes. Within a week the wolves took twenty-five head.
The winterers did what they must--killed the remaining forty or fifty cattle before the wolves could beat them to it. A teamster who had once been a London butcher dressed and hung their beef in classy style, putting aside the worst of it, along with the offal, to be used as wolf bait in case they somehow managed to get hold of some traps. In the best Mormon cooperative work-party fashion they fell upon the cabins and rechinked them, laid floors of ox yokes in some and stored the freight in them, fixed a stable for their four saddled horses, and added to their stores (keeping careful account of what they borrowed) some coffee, sugar, dried fruit, and candles that they found while making their inventory.
Their pastimes were hunting for buffalo, which was generally unproductive, and shooting at wolves, which netted them greater results. Shortly their crackers and fruit gave out and they were down to beef alone; their salt gave out and they ate their leathery beef unsalted. A day or two before Christmas two Mormons, Eph Hanks And Feramorz Little, a nephew of Brigham Young's, came eastward with the valley mail and a letter of advice from Brother Brigham. He said among other things that they had better ration their flour (they had never had any) to make it last until spring, and he gave them permission to kill an occasional ox rather than run large risks hunting in Crow country. But Feramorz Little had a piece of more practical advice. Looking around just before he and Hanks took off for the Platte bridge, he suggested they ought to take good care of the hides of the slaughtered cattle. They might come in handy.
A few days later the Missouri mail came in from the east, switched from coach to packmules at Devil's Gate, went on until it ran into a massive blizzard on South Pass, barely made it back to Devil's Gate again, and finally dribbled back to the Platte bridge to winter at a lower altitude, leaving a passenger, Joseph Heywood, behind them. Heywood ten years ago had been one of the trustees left behind in abandoned Nauvoo, later he had been Salt Lake City's first postmaster, now he was going out as United States Marshal for Utah. He saw no reason to go back to the Platte bridge, for Dan Jones had recently beaten his way back there only to find the mountain men flourless and living on game alone. All Jones had got was some wolf traps.
They baited none of those traps. Twenty-one men eating nothing but meat can chew their way through forty skinny carcasses in a very short time. All the beef they had thought edible was shortly used up, and now they began on the wolf bait, so stringy that it satisfied their hunger not at all and nourished them little more. Then that too was gone, and after an unwilling interval they boiled a hide. It provided a gagging, gluey broth and strips of sheet rubber, both of which made them sick. While they redoubled their efforts to find game, they lived on coffee, but after a while coffee lost its power to satisfy, and one man threw a fit from drinking too much of it. East and west, the empty miles of the trail were snowed over without a track. It was still only early January.
One kind of script, at this point, calls for them to draw straws to see which should first be killed and eaten, but the Mormons, whatever their other capabilities, never showed any talent for cannibalism. Instead they did something totally unacceptable in a horse opera. They knelt in meeting and prayed for the Lord to direct them. He directed them back to the hides.
These lay back outside the cabins, half snowed-over, frozen as stiff as crumpled sheet metal. Reluctantly they scalded and scraped the hair off another one and cut it up and boiled it until it was soft enough to be chewed. It still had a lot of unpleasant glue in it, but they got it down this time; it stuck to them, Dan Jones said, somewhat longer than they desired. So Jones asked the Lord for further directions, and the Lord passed on His favorite recipe for boiled hide. Scalding seemed to give hide a bad taste. Scorch and scrape it, therefore, to get the hair off. Then parboil for one hour in plenty of water, throwing away the water and glue. Then wash and scrape again, rinsing often in cold water. Then boil to a jelly and allow to cool. Serve with a sprinkling of sugar.
It was a lot of trouble, but then they had plenty of time, and their interest in experiment had been aroused by three days of fasting. They asked the Lord to bless their stomachs and adapt them to this food, and then they fell upon the hide and devoured it. For six weeks they ate virtually nothing else. No one, Jones reported, got the gout.
But then came a day toward the middle of February--the monthly fast day, appropriately enough, for they still kept fast days--when it became clear that something ugly had begun to come among them. Some were secretly cutting meat off the unclean carcasses of cattle that had died months before and that had lain to close to the fort for the wolves to get. Some were casting looks at the offal in the butcher shop, and at the frozen wolf carcasses, nearly a hundred of them, stacked in the yard. In such a winter, only the wolves were fat; they could see yellow slabs of fat among the muscle. But Dan Jones did not favor using unclean flesh. Eat those wolves, and what next? Man-meat, Mormon-meat. He allowed that they were on the Lord's business and that the Lord would provide clean food if they would purify their hearts. In their re-united and refreshed state of mind, and as a climax to a fast day that had no foreseeable morning, they hauled all the cattle guts and the old frozen cattle carcasses and all the skinned wolves down to the Sweetwater, cut a hole in the ice and dumped them in. then they went back and washed out their storehouse and "presented it before the Lord, clean but empty." Lord's move.
That afternoon a visitor dropped in; for a moment it looked as if he might be bringing the clean supper they aspired to. But he turned out to be an Indian as empty-handed and hungry as they, and instead of getting anything from him they had to offer him their last piece of boiled rawhide. He took it gratefully, indicating by signs that he'd eaten it plenty of times before. Nobody was able to talk to him except in signs. Jones tried him on Spanish and Ute, and concluded he was a Snake. He did not offhand appear to be a messenger of Providence.
Then they heard a noise outside, and hushed. Human voices. "Here comes our supper!" Yelled Joseph Heywood, and led the rush to the door. The McGraw mail coach, making a second try to get through, was stuck in the snow. The noise they had heard was a French Canadian swearing at the mules, a music that needed no interpreter. Jesse Jones, the mail carrier, was glad to see them, for down at the Platte bridge they had concluded that the whole Devil's Gate crowd must by now be dead. But he was astonished at how happy they seemed to see him, and inquired the cause of their excessive friendliness. Because you are bringing us our supper according to the Lord's promise, they told him, and would not take no for an answer. Almost his entire stock of provisions, calculated to last to Fort Bridger, went into the pot, and the twenty-six of them left just enough for a skimpy breakfast.
Nothing in such a basic western plot as this is wasted. The French driver knew Shoshone, and could talk to the Indian, who said that his band was camped a day upriver, out of meat and hungry, but that he thought he could find game if some of them would come along to protect him from the Crows. The mail outfit, now without provisions to go on, had no choice but to lie over to see if the Indian could prove his brag. He did. He took ten men out and brought them back after dark with their mules laden with buffalo meat.
When they left, the mail carriers took Heywood along. That left only twenty men at Devil's Gate, but twenty were adequate to clean the cupboard. By March 4 it was bare again, and really bare this time. They had eaten up all the stray scraps of hide, all the worn-out moccasins, all the rawhide tires off abandoned handcarts and rawhide wrappings off wagon tongues, even a chunk of buffalo hide that had been used for months as a door mat. Now they took inventory and found nothing edible in the whole place except a set of harness (dubious) and a rawhide pack saddle (sporting).
In the snow, which was from eighteen inches to three feet deep, hunting on foot was an exhausting grind, for they wallowed, were easily spotted by the game, and as often as not missed out of sheer nervousness or exhaustion when they did get a shot at something. The wolves had killed three of their four saddle ponies. Jones judged that none of the men, unless possibly himself, was strong enough to make a desperation dash to the Platte bridge to see if there might be help there. He was just about to try what would have been a very desperate chance indeed when the Lord intervened again. This time His messengers were the Danite Bill Hickman, later notorious as a strong-arm man and self-confessed murderer second only to Porter Rockwell, and several companions. They were bringing through the first installment of mail for Brigham Young's new Y. X. Express, which had obtained a contract to carry the mail between Salt Lake City and Independence. The Devil's Gate boys had just put the pack saddle on to simmer, but seeing meat on the express men's pack mules, they took it out of the pot and consented to drink buffalo broth instead. Hickman and the other express men were a long time getting over that dinner they saw on the fire. For years they called Dan Jones the man that ate the pack saddle. He always denied it, but admitted that if they hadn't arrived just when they did he might have been talked into taking a wing or a leg.
None of their windfalls lasted them long. Having eaten their way clean through the rawhide, they had to live from day to day, but as the winter wore away and the trail began to open, windfalls became more frequent. Some of the mountain men from the Platte bridge made their way with some beef to sell, and took their pay in calico from one of the freight boxes. Their hunting went better, too, because Hickman had left them two mules. Moreover, the Snakes and the Bannocks came down in small hunting parties from the Wind River country, and with the help of a wordbook he got from the French Canadian mail driver, Jones was able to make deals with them for meat. Their first uneasiness about the Indians, at least about the Shoshones, disappeared. In fact, from then until the end of his life Dan Jones liked and valued Indians, the only people other than Mormons who had shown him kindness. These Ishmaels were full of the helpfulness of mutual starvation. It was probably they who passed the word down to the Platte bridge that the Devil's Gate boys were hungry, and so brought the mountain men with their load of beef. Indians and Mormons drank a lot of coffee and thin belly-filling soup and ate a lot of thistle roots together, and as March thawed off into April and the snowline crept up the hills and the game began working into higher country, the Indians brought in meat that they offered not so much in the spirit of trade as in the spirit of brotherhood. To Jones, old Chief Toquatah seem to feel toward the Mormon boys "something like a mother with a lot of hungry children."
Travel loosened along the trail as the weather warmed. The second installment of the Y. X. Express passed eastward, leaving them a little flour, salt, and bacon. The first biscuits they had eaten in months choked them. Then a yoke of good oxen, one wearing a big bell that had probably kept the wolves off, wandered into the fort from somewhere and were promptly corralled as beef insurance. Just as promptly, they got loose and wandered off again, taking security with them. Jones and Ben Hampton pursued them on mules, but at sunset, after thirty hard miles, had not caught up. After dark they went on, feeling out the tracks in the snow, until they were stopped by a gulch full of snow that, only half frozen, would not support the weight of the mules.
They were deep in Crow country, the stars were glitters of eyes, the night set in to freeze hard. Even if there had been sagebrush for a fire, they would not have dared light one, and they had not come prepared with robes for a night out. Lying on the frozen ground, they chattered and shattered and hugged one another like lovers until, after some hours, they judged that the snow-bridge had frozen hard enough to let them cross. Then, trying to get up, they barely could. Their jaws were locked, their hands were tongs, their legs were sticks. They bumped into one another, fell down, couldn't hang onto the saddles to saddle up. It was so ridiculous that they had to laugh, and laughing, began bumping one another around, and bumping, stirred up enough life to get the saddles screwed down and go on. Forty-five miles from home they caught up with the runaway oxen, still so fresh that they took the back-trail at a trot.
Along in the afternoon, Ben Hampton's mule gave out so that thereafter they had to take turns walking, whipping along the cripple and the unspeakable and inexhaustible oxen. Long before they reached it, they could see Independence Rock, and off beyond it Castle Gate and the Rattlesnake Range, all of it in somber elephant-color streaked with crevices of snow. Just past sundown, the distances would have been blue and cold. Even when the belly is full, the heart is low enough at that time of a winter's day. But Jones and Hampton had not eaten since breakfast the day before, had ridden and walked a good eighty-five miles since then, had slept, if you could call it that, without covering on the frozen ground. Their hearts would have been low indeed. And then, beatitude. Smoke above the traders' cabins at the foot of Independence Rock, and as they pulled up bleary-eyed and groggy, the smell of roasting meat. Their stomachs rose up in them and grinned like wolves. Supper here, an hour or two of rest, and the remaining six miles to Devil's Gate might be faced.
Supper was offered them, even urged upon them. By all the free-masonry of the mountains they were welcome. But these were Mormon frontiersman, and the scripts are often wrong for them. They discovered that the four men they found at Independence Rock were stragglers harder up then themselves. They had come famishing into Devil's Gate the night before, one of their number with his feet frozen so badly that he might lose them: he lay gritting his teeth now from a blanket on the floor. The meat the men were cooking had been given them by the Mormons at Devil's Gate; it was all they had to get them to the Platte bridge. They had forty-four miles to go, and they had been all day making the six miles from Devil's Gate.
Maybe Jones, being who he was, would have refused to take the meat out of their mouths even if he had not been a Mormon. But it is legitimate to believe that his faith in the Lord, Who had already rescued them several times that winter, gave him the strength to say, Oh no thank you, they weren't hungry, they'd just warm up a little and be getting on back home. They clamped their teeth to keep from howling, and swallowed the juices surging up into their mouths, and turned out into the icy blue dark again. On the way the worn-out mule, for some reason that only the Lord could have answered, chose to run away, and had to be chased nearly a mile.
At Devil's Gate the worried brethren had been keeping a kettle full of meat and dumplings hot all day. Long after dark Jones and Hampton came in, sat down on a pile of wolf skins by the fire, accepted the plates that were handed them, and began to eat. They ate unhurriedly until nearly daylight, when the pot, which had contained rations for seven hearty eaters, was finally empty. Then they belched and rolled over and slept, to awake next day without a stiffness or a pain. But one thing they attended to immediately: rather than risk having to chase those independent and wandering oxen again, they made them into sudden beef, thus assuring themselves of meat to take them through to good hunting weather.
A little later, when a bunch of corn fed Valley Mormons came through setting up and stocking stations for the Y. X. Express, and said too loudly that they thought the Devil's Gate boys had been badly used and brought to a pitiable state, Dan Jones proposed an Indian wrestle of rawhide versus corn, and pulled the stakes of the strongest of them, just to teach them not to waste their pity.
One fact not normally stressed by the official histories of Mormonism is that the City of Zion, however millennial it might look from Wales or the black counties of England, was sometimes disappointing to converts who had torn up their lives by the roots to go there. Instead of the City of Enoch, paved with jasper and pearl and stones of fair colors, it was a ten-year-old adobe town in a desert valley; and to eyes made unhappy by that realization, even Brigham Young might look sometimes less like a prophet of God and more like a local tyrant consolidating his power over a gullible people and growing personally rich by their labors. The Profit, the Gentiles called him behind closed doors, and with the growing rumors of blood atonement and holy murder and the growing crisis with the United States territorial officials, the names they called him, and he them, grew brisker than that. Great expectations and gentle piety, brought to the valley, could crash against a reality that was often bleak and hard; the more the Church consolidated its power in the valley, the more that power came into conflict both with the temptations of California gold and with the external control that the United States, through territorial appointees who were sometimes the sweepings of the political caucus rooms, attempted to impose. It was inevitable that there should be numerous apostasies, that some who had barely made it to Utah should take the first opportunity to get out, either on to California or back over the trail to the States.
Some of these apostates were tough--it took nerve to defy Brother Brigham in the 1850's. For the purposes of our horse opera, which is seen through the eyes of Dan Jones, they may be designated the Bad Guys, though in the eye of impartial history they were often men of honor and some of them ended up as victims, rubbed out by Port Rockwell, Bill Hickman, Hosea Stout, or other fanatical Danites. But now, for this purpose, Bad Guys, to be treated with stiff-legged suspicion by any good Saint.
So around the first of May twenty well-armed Mormons came in from Salt Lake to reinforce Devil's Gate, saying that forty or fifty apostates under Tom Williams were on the trail, and would shortly be demanding a lot of the freight cached there, though many had refused to pay the Church trading company on the grounds that their goods had never been brought through. These men shortly appeared, and camped on the Sweetwater above the fort. To some who presented receipts and orders, Jones released freight from the storehouse; others who had no orders or whose orders looked forged he turned down. His refusal brought on a big dramatic scene, with Tom Williams and his apostates riding up in force and the forty Mormons taking cover behind cabins and posting themselves at portholes.
This whole scene goes like pure horse opera, and just possibly is. The apostate bully shouts his demand at the cabin, the camera pans first over his hard-faced henchmen and then over the faces of the defenders sweating behind their barricades. Then the door opens and the hero walks out alone into the open yard, in as orthodox a walk-down as ever Gary Cooper made. Williams demands, Jones refuses. Williams asks his men if they elect to take their stuff by force, the sound camera brings us their short, sharp, raw-meat growl. There is the moment of quiet while the mouth tastes metal and the held breath may let go any minute to the sound of gunfire. At the breaking end of that silence the hero says he wants to say one thing. His voice, not loud, carries even to the rear rank of horsemen, but his words are addressed to Tom Williams. In the pauses of his speech we can hear the tender rattle of young cottonwood leaves and the soft roar of the Sweetwater pouring its spring flood through Devil's Gate.
"We have been here all winter eating poor beef and raw hide to take care of these goods," Jones says. "We have had but little fun, and would just as soon have some now as not; in fact would like a little row. If you think you can take the fort, just try it. But I don't think you can take me to commence with; and the first one that offers any violence to me is a dead man. Now I dare you to go past me towards the fort."
Tom Williams was an uncle by marriage of Dan Jones's wife, and he knew what he was up against. After a minute he said, "For your family's sake I will spare you, for I think you d----d fool enough to die before you would give up the goods." And turned away, buffaloed.
That is how Dan Jones reports the episode. A man as steady, dependable, and brave as anyone between the Missouri and the Great Salt Lake sounds here as if he were quoting a dime novel. Nevertheless we should not let the falsity of the tone lead us to doubt the essential probability of the story. Whatever the expansions in Dan Jones's rhetoric, and whatever the justice of his cause as against that of the man wanting their freight, he may very well have walked out alone before fifty armed men and backed Tom Williams down. He was man enough.
Jones's heroics took care of the Bad Guys, but the Honest Citizens, unable to tell a Lone Ranger from a rustler, began giving Dan trouble as soon as he got back to Salt Lake City in the early summer. People whose goods had got lost on the desperate trail, people who may even have thrown their own goods away to lighten the wagon, now began to say that Jones had probably stolen them. They were full of the self-righteousness of the Reformation, which put neighbor to spying on neighbor and made everybody's sins everybody else's business; they had a normal Mormon suspicion of a man who had joined the Church only recently, and who came from Missouri at that; and they were truly Mormon in having a stern sense of property. They made so much talk that Jones went to Brigham Young and got from him the sort of security clearance called a "recommend." But even that did not suffice. Eventually his accusers brought Dan up before the High Council for theft.
They should have known better. Dan was good at these walk-downs and face-downs, and unjust accusations could not unravel his sense of humor. Among the charges brought against him was one which said that he must have doctored the accounts he turned in to Brigham, in which he had charged up the keep of twenty men all winter at seventy-five cents a week. He was obviously a liar in presenting so ridiculously small a bill, and therefore must be a liar in his account of what had happened to the freight. So Dan itemized the winter's expenses for them: forty head of cattle already dying, on whose meat and hides they lived for two months--no charge because they should have been paid for eating them; game on occasion--no charge; two weeks of thistle roots--no charge; one week of wild garlic bulbs--no charge; three days of minnows caught in a dip net, fish too small to clean and rather bitter to taste--no charge; several meals of roasted prickly pear lobes--no charge; quite a few days of nothing but water--no charge. What brought the costs to seventy-five cents a week per person was some meat bought from the Indians and eaten without salt, some beef bought from the mountain men from the Platte bridge and paid for in calico; and some soap, candles, and coffee taken from the stored freight.
Like the Bad Guys, the Honest Citizens backed down. Brother Brigham lit into them and was about to pronounce one of his more vigorous anathemas when Jones interrupted. He said he could bear the accusations better than they or anyone else could bear Brigham's curse. So instead he received Brigham's blessing and the assurance that if he had set fire to the whole caboodle at Devil's Gate, and ridden off by the light of it, Brigham would not have found fault. Brigham's recommend said the same thing. It ended, "The men who find fault with the labors of Brother Jones the past winter, we wish their names sent to this office, and when the Lord presents an opportunity we will try them and see if they will do any better."
But Brigham did not, as he had intended, send Jones back to manage the Y. X. Express station now established at Devil's Gate. He said he guessed Dan had had about enough of Devil's Gate for any one man. And anyway, by that time it was midsummer, and by midsummer all of the stations ambitiously projected to give the Saints substantial control of the trail from the Missouri to the mountains would have seemed precarious. A few, particularly those at Fort Bridger, at Deer Creek, and at Genoa, a Mormon colony deliberately planted on the Loup Fork as a permanent way station on the model of Garden Grove and Mt. Pisgah, were already well established, along with others of a more tentative kind. But all would have been rendered dubious by the word that Porter Rockwell and some other riders brought to the anniversary picnic in Big Cottonwood Canyon on July 24. The word was that Utah's long festering quarrel with the United States had finally provoked President Buchanan to order an army of 2,500 men to march on Salt Lake City and bring the rebellious Mormons to obedience.
From The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail
All Rights Reserved.
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| THE STORY OF THE MORMON TRAIL is as pat with crises as a horse opera, especially in 1856, ordeal along that thoroughfare was not climactic but serial. And so the rescuers of the Martin Company had hardly pulled away up the Sweetwater with a clinking of harness metal and a crunch of broad tires in snow-crust and a great fume of breath in the cold air before another ordeal began at Devil's Gate. If the theme of the handcart episode was the suffering of the innocent, the theme of this one was the steadfastness of the strong. Its hero, except for his Mormonism, could step into the boots of any Western hero who has been in danger, tested, suspected, and finally vindicated. |
His name was Daniel W. Jones--not to be confused, though some historians do so confuse him, with the Dan Jones who looked as if he might convert all of Wales to Mormonism in the 1840's and early 1850's, and who in 1856 had come on with Franklin Richards' missionaries as far as the Platte Bridge, where he stopped to find out about a cached threshing engine, and so missed the rescue. This Dan Jones was an ex-Missouri Puke, an orphan, a harder Huckleberry Finn who from the age of eleven had made his rough way on a tough frontier. "Probably as willful a boy as ever lived," he said he had never been controlled except through kindness, "and this I did not often meet with." Like Huckleberry, rather than submit to being civilized, he had lit out for the territories: the Mexican War led him into the Southwest as a member of the Missouri Volunteers, and for some years afterward he lived among hair-trigger borderers in Texas and New Mexico. |
But whether he knew it or not, he had the seed of civilization in him. Fighting, Taos Lightning, and Indian women did not fully satisfy. Helping to drive a band of sheep from Taos to California along the old Spanish Trail, he shot himself accidentally in the groin, and convalesced under the care of a Mormon family at the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon, in Utah Valley. The kindness with which he was treated smote his orphan heart; he found himself hankering after the security of the Mormon confidence in the Lord. Before long he joined the Church, married a Mormon girl, and settled down. It was proper that when Brigham Young stood up in the tabernacle at October Conference in 1856 and said that men were needed to rescue handcart emigrants caught by snowstorms somewhere on the other side of South Pass, Dan Jones should volunteer. Kindness for kindness. He was a man who honored his obligations. |
Two or three weeks later, 327 miles of snowy mountains to the eastward, he volunteered again, more recklessly. When there seemed no way of getting the weakest emigrants in without unloading the freight from all the Hunt and Hodgett wagons, Jones said he would be one to stay behind and guard the cached freight. With two valley boys and seventeen of the strongest teamsters from the wagon companies, he organized a little Stake of Zion in the cabins of the trader fort just above Devil's Gate, and prepared for six months of snow, cold, and isolation. They were fifty miles from Last Crossing, where some mountaineers wintered, and 215 from Fort Bridger. And they weren't exactly prepared to stay: for supplies they had a few crackers and perhaps seventy-five head of skin-and-bones cattle too broken-down to go farther. Even these they were not supposed to eat if they could help it. |
Around Devil's Gate at least two hundred cattle had died of bad water or in the early storms; the trail to the east was strewn with their carcasses. The scent of death blew east toward the Platte and west toward South Pass and north and south along the Laramie Range, and wolves from miles of wild country gathered to the barbecue. Trying to fatten their scrawny heard by driving it away from the fort to better feed, Jones's outfit found themselves facing packs that even in daylight looked dangerous. Wolves cut down cattle at high noon, under the rifles of the herders; and at night the corralled heard was sure to erupt at least once in a flurry of attack and a snarl of shadows and a panickd bawling, and when the guards arrived swinging firebrands they would find another steer down, and the snowy darkness ringed with the green flare of eyes. Within a week the wolves took twenty-five head. |
The winterers did what they must--killed the remaining forty or fifty cattle before the wolves could beat them to it. A teamster who had once been a London butcher dressed and hung their beef in classy style, putting aside the worst of it, along with the offal, to be used as wolf bait in case they somehow managed to get hold of some traps. In the best Mormon cooperative work-party fashion they fell upon the cabins and rechinked them, laid floors of ox yokes in some and stored the freight in them, fixed a stable for their four saddled horses, and added to their stores (keeping careful account of what they borrowed) some coffee, sugar, dried fruit, and candles that they found while making their inventory. |
Their pastimes were hunting for buffalo, which was generally unproductive, and shooting at wolves, which netted them greater results. Shortly their crackers and fruit gave out and they were down to beef alone; their salt gave out and they ate their leathery beef unsalted. A day or two before Christmas two Mormons, Eph Hanks And Feramorz Little, a nephew of Brigham Young's, came eastward with the valley mail and a letter of advice from Brother Brigham. He said among other things that they had better ration their flour (they had never had any) to make it last until spring, and he gave them permission to kill an occasional ox rather than run large risks hunting in Crow country. But Feramorz Little had a piece of more practical advice. Looking around just before he and Hanks took off for the Platte bridge, he suggested they ought to take good care of the hides of the slaughtered cattle. They might come in handy. |
A few days later the Missouri mail came in from the east, switched from coach to packmules at Devil's Gate, went on until it ran into a massive blizzard on South Pass, barely made it back to Devil's Gate again, and finally dribbled back to the Platte bridge to winter at a lower altitude, leaving a passenger, Joseph Heywood, behind them. Heywood ten years ago had been one of the trustees left behind in abandoned Nauvoo, later he had been Salt Lake City's first postmaster, now he was going out as United States Marshal for Utah. He saw no reason to go back to the Platte bridge, for Dan Jones had recently beaten his way back there only to find the mountain men flourless and living on game alone. All Jones had got was some wolf traps. |
They baited none of those traps. Twenty-one men eating nothing but meat can chew their way through forty skinny carcasses in a very short time. All the beef they had thought edible was shortly used up, and now they began on the wolf bait, so stringy that it satisfied their hunger not at all and nourished them little more. Then that too was gone, and after an unwilling interval they boiled a hide. It provided a gagging, gluey broth and strips of sheet rubber, both of which made them sick. While they redoubled their efforts to find game, they lived on coffee, but after a while coffee lost its power to satisfy, and one man threw a fit from drinking too much of it. East and west, the empty miles of the trail were snowed over without a track. It was still only early January. |
One kind of script, at this point, calls for them to draw straws to see which should first be killed and eaten, but the Mormons, whatever their other capabilities, never showed any talent for cannibalism. Instead they did something totally unacceptable in a horse opera. They knelt in meeting and prayed for the Lord to direct them. He directed them back to the hides. |
These lay back outside the cabins, half snowed-over, frozen as stiff as crumpled sheet metal. Reluctantly they scalded and scraped the hair off another one and cut it up and boiled it until it was soft enough to be chewed. It still had a lot of unpleasant glue in it, but they got it down this time; it stuck to them, Dan Jones said, somewhat longer than they desired. So Jones asked the Lord for further directions, and the Lord passed on His favorite recipe for boiled hide. Scalding seemed to give hide a bad taste. Scorch and scrape it, therefore, to get the hair off. Then parboil for one hour in plenty of water, throwing away the water and glue. Then wash and scrape again, rinsing often in cold water. Then boil to a jelly and allow to cool. Serve with a sprinkling of sugar. |
It was a lot of trouble, but then they had plenty of time, and their interest in experiment had been aroused by three days of fasting. They asked the Lord to bless their stomachs and adapt them to this food, and then they fell upon the hide and devoured it. For six weeks they ate virtually nothing else. No one, Jones reported, got the gout. |
But then came a day toward the middle of February--the monthly fast day, appropriately enough, for they still kept fast days--when it became clear that something ugly had begun to come among them. Some were secretly cutting meat off the unclean carcasses of cattle that had died months before and that had lain to close to the fort for the wolves to get. Some were casting looks at the offal in the butcher shop, and at the frozen wolf carcasses, nearly a hundred of them, stacked in the yard. In such a winter, only the wolves were fat; they could see yellow slabs of fat among the muscle. But Dan Jones did not favor using unclean flesh. Eat those wolves, and what next? Man-meat, Mormon-meat. He allowed that they were on the Lord's business and that the Lord would provide clean food if they would purify their hearts. In their re-united and refreshed state of mind, and as a climax to a fast day that had no foreseeable morning, they hauled all the cattle guts and the old frozen cattle carcasses and all the skinned wolves down to the Sweetwater, cut a hole in the ice and dumped them in. then they went back and washed out their storehouse and "presented it before the Lord, clean but empty." Lord's move. |
That afternoon a visitor dropped in; for a moment it looked as if he might be bringing the clean supper they aspired to. But he turned out to be an Indian as empty-handed and hungry as they, and instead of getting anything from him they had to offer him their last piece of boiled rawhide. He took it gratefully, indicating by signs that he'd eaten it plenty of times before. Nobody was able to talk to him except in signs. Jones tried him on Spanish and Ute, and concluded he was a Snake. He did not offhand appear to be a messenger of Providence. |
Then they heard a noise outside, and hushed. Human voices. "Here comes our supper!" Yelled Joseph Heywood, and led the rush to the door. The McGraw mail coach, making a second try to get through, was stuck in the snow. The noise they had heard was a French Canadian swearing at the mules, a music that needed no interpreter. Jesse Jones, the mail carrier, was glad to see them, for down at the Platte bridge they had concluded that the whole Devil's Gate crowd must by now be dead. But he was astonished at how happy they seemed to see him, and inquired the cause of their excessive friendliness. Because you are bringing us our supper according to the Lord's promise, they told him, and would not take no for an answer. Almost his entire stock of provisions, calculated to last to Fort Bridger, went into the pot, and the twenty-six of them left just enough for a skimpy breakfast. |
Nothing in such a basic western plot as this is wasted. The French driver knew Shoshone, and could talk to the Indian, who said that his band was camped a day upriver, out of meat and hungry, but that he thought he could find game if some of them would come along to protect him from the Crows. The mail outfit, now without provisions to go on, had no choice but to lie over to see if the Indian could prove his brag. He did. He took ten men out and brought them back after dark with their mules laden with buffalo meat. |
When they left, the mail carriers took Heywood along. That left only twenty men at Devil's Gate, but twenty were adequate to clean the cupboard. By March 4 it was bare again, and really bare this time. They had eaten up all the stray scraps of hide, all the worn-out moccasins, all the rawhide tires off abandoned handcarts and rawhide wrappings off wagon tongues, even a chunk of buffalo hide that had been used for months as a door mat. Now they took inventory and found nothing edible in the whole place except a set of harness (dubious) and a rawhide pack saddle (sporting). |
In the snow, which was from eighteen inches to three feet deep, hunting on foot was an exhausting grind, for they wallowed, were easily spotted by the game, and as often as not missed out of sheer nervousness or exhaustion when they did get a shot at something. The wolves had killed three of their four saddle ponies. Jones judged that none of the men, unless possibly himself, was strong enough to make a desperation dash to the Platte bridge to see if there might be help there. He was just about to try what would have been a very desperate chance indeed when the Lord intervened again. This time His messengers were the Danite Bill Hickman, later notorious as a strong-arm man and self-confessed murderer second only to Porter Rockwell, and several companions. They were bringing through the first installment of mail for Brigham Young's new Y. X. Express, which had obtained a contract to carry the mail between Salt Lake City and Independence. The Devil's Gate boys had just put the pack saddle on to simmer, but seeing meat on the express men's pack mules, they took it out of the pot and consented to drink buffalo broth instead. Hickman and the other express men were a long time getting over that dinner they saw on the fire. For years they called Dan Jones the man that ate the pack saddle. He always denied it, but admitted that if they hadn't arrived just when they did he might have been talked into taking a wing or a leg. |
None of their windfalls lasted them long. Having eaten their way clean through the rawhide, they had to live from day to day, but as the winter wore away and the trail began to open, windfalls became more frequent. Some of the mountain men from the Platte bridge made their way with some beef to sell, and took their pay in calico from one of the freight boxes. Their hunting went better, too, because Hickman had left them two mules. Moreover, the Snakes and the Bannocks came down in small hunting parties from the Wind River country, and with the help of a wordbook he got from the French Canadian mail driver, Jones was able to make deals with them for meat. Their first uneasiness about the Indians, at least about the Shoshones, disappeared. In fact, from then until the end of his life Dan Jones liked and valued Indians, the only people other than Mormons who had shown him kindness. These Ishmaels were full of the helpfulness of mutual starvation. It was probably they who passed the word down to the Platte bridge that the Devil's Gate boys were hungry, and so brought the mountain men with their load of beef. Indians and Mormons drank a lot of coffee and thin belly-filling soup and ate a lot of thistle roots together, and as March thawed off into April and the snowline crept up the hills and the game began working into higher country, the Indians brought in meat that they offered not so much in the spirit of trade as in the spirit of brotherhood. To Jones, old Chief Toquatah seem to feel toward the Mormon boys "something like a mother with a lot of hungry children." |
Travel loosened along the trail as the weather warmed. The second installment of the Y. X. Express passed eastward, leaving them a little flour, salt, and bacon. The first biscuits they had eaten in months choked them. Then a yoke of good oxen, one wearing a big bell that had probably kept the wolves off, wandered into the fort from somewhere and were promptly corralled as beef insurance. Just as promptly, they got loose and wandered off again, taking security with them. Jones and Ben Hampton pursued them on mules, but at sunset, after thirty hard miles, had not caught up. After dark they went on, feeling out the tracks in the snow, until they were stopped by a gulch full of snow that, only half frozen, would not support the weight of the mules. |
They were deep in Crow country, the stars were glitters of eyes, the night set in to freeze hard. Even if there had been sagebrush for a fire, they would not have dared light one, and they had not come prepared with robes for a night out. Lying on the frozen ground, they chattered and shattered and hugged one another like lovers until, after some hours, they judged that the snow-bridge had frozen hard enough to let them cross. Then, trying to get up, they barely could. Their jaws were locked, their hands were tongs, their legs were sticks. They bumped into one another, fell down, couldn't hang onto the saddles to saddle up. It was so ridiculous that they had to laugh, and laughing, began bumping one another around, and bumping, stirred up enough life to get the saddles screwed down and go on. Forty-five miles from home they caught up with the runaway oxen, still so fresh that they took the back-trail at a trot. |
Along in the afternoon, Ben Hampton's mule gave out so that thereafter they had to take turns walking, whipping along the cripple and the unspeakable and inexhaustible oxen. Long before they reached it, they could see Independence Rock, and off beyond it Castle Gate and the Rattlesnake Range, all of it in somber elephant-color streaked with crevices of snow. Just past sundown, the distances would have been blue and cold. Even when the belly is full, the heart is low enough at that time of a winter's day. But Jones and Hampton had not eaten since breakfast the day before, had ridden and walked a good eighty-five miles since then, had slept, if you could call it that, without covering on the frozen ground. Their hearts would have been low indeed. And then, beatitude. Smoke above the traders' cabins at the foot of Independence Rock, and as they pulled up bleary-eyed and groggy, the smell of roasting meat. Their stomachs rose up in them and grinned like wolves. Supper here, an hour or two of rest, and the remaining six miles to Devil's Gate might be faced. |
Supper was offered them, even urged upon them. By all the free-masonry of the mountains they were welcome. But these were Mormon frontiersman, and the scripts are often wrong for them. They discovered that the four men they found at Independence Rock were stragglers harder up then themselves. They had come famishing into Devil's Gate the night before, one of their number with his feet frozen so badly that he might lose them: he lay gritting his teeth now from a blanket on the floor. The meat the men were cooking had been given them by the Mormons at Devil's Gate; it was all they had to get them to the Platte bridge. They had forty-four miles to go, and they had been all day making the six miles from Devil's Gate. |
Maybe Jones, being who he was, would have refused to take the meat out of their mouths even if he had not been a Mormon. But it is legitimate to believe that his faith in the Lord, Who had already rescued them several times that winter, gave him the strength to say, Oh no thank you, they weren't hungry, they'd just warm up a little and be getting on back home. They clamped their teeth to keep from howling, and swallowed the juices surging up into their mouths, and turned out into the icy blue dark again. On the way the worn-out mule, for some reason that only the Lord could have answered, chose to run away, and had to be chased nearly a mile. |
At Devil's Gate the worried brethren had been keeping a kettle full of meat and dumplings hot all day. Long after dark Jones and Hampton came in, sat down on a pile of wolf skins by the fire, accepted the plates that were handed them, and began to eat. They ate unhurriedly until nearly daylight, when the pot, which had contained rations for seven hearty eaters, was finally empty. Then they belched and rolled over and slept, to awake next day without a stiffness or a pain. But one thing they attended to immediately: rather than risk having to chase those independent and wandering oxen again, they made them into sudden beef, thus assuring themselves of meat to take them through to good hunting weather. |
A little later, when a bunch of corn fed Valley Mormons came through setting up and stocking stations for the Y. X. Express, and said too loudly that they thought the Devil's Gate boys had been badly used and brought to a pitiable state, Dan Jones proposed an Indian wrestle of rawhide versus corn, and pulled the stakes of the strongest of them, just to teach them not to waste their pity. |
One fact not normally stressed by the official histories of Mormonism is that the City of Zion, however millennial it might look from Wales or the black counties of England, was sometimes disappointing to converts who had torn up their lives by the roots to go there. Instead of the City of Enoch, paved with jasper and pearl and stones of fair colors, it was a ten-year-old adobe town in a desert valley; and to eyes made unhappy by that realization, even Brigham Young might look sometimes less like a prophet of God and more like a local tyrant consolidating his power over a gullible people and growing personally rich by their labors. The Profit, the Gentiles called him behind closed doors, and with the growing rumors of blood atonement and holy murder and the growing crisis with the United States territorial officials, the names they called him, and he them, grew brisker than that. Great expectations and gentle piety, brought to the valley, could crash against a reality that was often bleak and hard; the more the Church consolidated its power in the valley, the more that power came into conflict both with the temptations of California gold and with the external control that the United States, through territorial appointees who were sometimes the sweepings of the political caucus rooms, attempted to impose. It was inevitable that there should be numerous apostasies, that some who had barely made it to Utah should take the first opportunity to get out, either on to California or back over the trail to the States. |
Some of these apostates were tough--it took nerve to defy Brother Brigham in the 1850's. For the purposes of our horse opera, which is seen through the eyes of Dan Jones, they may be designated the Bad Guys, though in the eye of impartial history they were often men of honor and some of them ended up as victims, rubbed out by Port Rockwell, Bill Hickman, Hosea Stout, or other fanatical Danites. But now, for this purpose, Bad Guys, to be treated with stiff-legged suspicion by any good Saint. |
So around the first of May twenty well-armed Mormons came in from Salt Lake to reinforce Devil's Gate, saying that forty or fifty apostates under Tom Williams were on the trail, and would shortly be demanding a lot of the freight cached there, though many had refused to pay the Church trading company on the grounds that their goods had never been brought through. These men shortly appeared, and camped on the Sweetwater above the fort. To some who presented receipts and orders, Jones released freight from the storehouse; others who had no orders or whose orders looked forged he turned down. His refusal brought on a big dramatic scene, with Tom Williams and his apostates riding up in force and the forty Mormons taking cover behind cabins and posting themselves at portholes. |
This whole scene goes like pure horse opera, and just possibly is. The apostate bully shouts his demand at the cabin, the camera pans first over his hard-faced henchmen and then over the faces of the defenders sweating behind their barricades. Then the door opens and the hero walks out alone into the open yard, in as orthodox a walk-down as ever Gary Cooper made. Williams demands, Jones refuses. Williams asks his men if they elect to take their stuff by force, the sound camera brings us their short, sharp, raw-meat growl. There is the moment of quiet while the mouth tastes metal and the held breath may let go any minute to the sound of gunfire. At the breaking end of that silence the hero says he wants to say one thing. His voice, not loud, carries even to the rear rank of horsemen, but his words are addressed to Tom Williams. In the pauses of his speech we can hear the tender rattle of young cottonwood leaves and the soft roar of the Sweetwater pouring its spring flood through Devil's Gate. |
"We have been here all winter eating poor beef and raw hide to take care of these goods," Jones says. "We have had but little fun, and would just as soon have some now as not; in fact would like a little row. If you think you can take the fort, just try it. But I don't think you can take me to commence with; and the first one that offers any violence to me is a dead man. Now I dare you to go past me towards the fort." |
Tom Williams was an uncle by marriage of Dan Jones's wife, and he knew what he was up against. After a minute he said, "For your family's sake I will spare you, for I think you d----d fool enough to die before you would give up the goods." And turned away, buffaloed. |
That is how Dan Jones reports the episode. A man as steady, dependable, and brave as anyone between the Missouri and the Great Salt Lake sounds here as if he were quoting a dime novel. Nevertheless we should not let the falsity of the tone lead us to doubt the essential probability of the story. Whatever the expansions in Dan Jones's rhetoric, and whatever the justice of his cause as against that of the man wanting their freight, he may very well have walked out alone before fifty armed men and backed Tom Williams down. He was man enough. |
Jones's heroics took care of the Bad Guys, but the Honest Citizens, unable to tell a Lone Ranger from a rustler, began giving Dan trouble as soon as he got back to Salt Lake City in the early summer. People whose goods had got lost on the desperate trail, people who may even have thrown their own goods away to lighten the wagon, now began to say that Jones had probably stolen them. They were full of the self-righteousness of the Reformation, which put neighbor to spying on neighbor and made everybody's sins everybody else's business; they had a normal Mormon suspicion of a man who had joined the Church only recently, and who came from Missouri at that; and they were truly Mormon in having a stern sense of property. They made so much talk that Jones went to Brigham Young and got from him the sort of security clearance called a "recommend." But even that did not suffice. Eventually his accusers brought Dan up before the High Council for theft. |
They should have known better. Dan was good at these walk-downs and face-downs, and unjust accusations could not unravel his sense of humor. Among the charges brought against him was one which said that he must have doctored the accounts he turned in to Brigham, in which he had charged up the keep of twenty men all winter at seventy-five cents a week. He was obviously a liar in presenting so ridiculously small a bill, and therefore must be a liar in his account of what had happened to the freight. So Dan itemized the winter's expenses for them: forty head of cattle already dying, on whose meat and hides they lived for two months--no charge because they should have been paid for eating them; game on occasion--no charge; two weeks of thistle roots--no charge; one week of wild garlic bulbs--no charge; three days of minnows caught in a dip net, fish too small to clean and rather bitter to taste--no charge; several meals of roasted prickly pear lobes--no charge; quite a few days of nothing but water--no charge. What brought the costs to seventy-five cents a week per person was some meat bought from the Indians and eaten without salt, some beef bought from the mountain men from the Platte bridge and paid for in calico; and some soap, candles, and coffee taken from the stored freight. |
Like the Bad Guys, the Honest Citizens backed down. Brother Brigham lit into them and was about to pronounce one of his more vigorous anathemas when Jones interrupted. He said he could bear the accusations better than they or anyone else could bear Brigham's curse. So instead he received Brigham's blessing and the assurance that if he had set fire to the whole caboodle at Devil's Gate, and ridden off by the light of it, Brigham would not have found fault. Brigham's recommend said the same thing. It ended, "The men who find fault with the labors of Brother Jones the past winter, we wish their names sent to this office, and when the Lord presents an opportunity we will try them and see if they will do any better." |
But Brigham did not, as he had intended, send Jones back to manage the Y. X. Express station now established at Devil's Gate. He said he guessed Dan had had about enough of Devil's Gate for any one man. And anyway, by that time it was midsummer, and by midsummer all of the stations ambitiously projected to give the Saints substantial control of the trail from the Missouri to the mountains would have seemed precarious. A few, particularly those at Fort Bridger, at Deer Creek, and at Genoa, a Mormon colony deliberately planted on the Loup Fork as a permanent way station on the model of Garden Grove and Mt. Pisgah, were already well established, along with others of a more tentative kind. But all would have been rendered dubious by the word that Porter Rockwell and some other riders brought to the anniversary picnic in Big Cottonwood Canyon on July 24. The word was that Utah's long festering quarrel with the United States had finally provoked President Buchanan to order an army of 2,500 men to march on Salt Lake City and bring the rebellious Mormons to obedience. |
Family Chart-I think it's safe to say this one is better!
Family Information Page.
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| Wiley Jones | Married: 15 February 1821 | Margaret Scott Cloyd | |
1. Mary Emily Jones | Married: 31 Jan 1876 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT | Justus Perry Jordan Born: 25 Dec 1851 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT Died: 11 Nov 1937 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT | |
1. Perry Jordan, 16 Feb 1877 2. Lois Emily Jordan, 7 Dec 1878 3. Harriet Eleanor Jordan, 22 March 1881 4. Roseltha Ann Jordan, 15 Feb 1884 5. Hugh Edwin Jordan, 10 Feb 1886 6. Byron Ransom Jordan, 19 Aug 1888 7. Mary Jordan, 6 Jan 1892 8. Ruth Jordan, 2 Aug 1893 9. Ross Elmo Jordan, 5 Oct 1895 10. James Owen Jordan, 1 Mar 1900 | |||
2. Frances Syrina Jones | |||
3. Daniel Philemon Jones | Married: 26 Aug 1877 Lehi, Maricopa, AZ | Mary Ellen Merrill Born: 15 May 1858 Lehi, Utah, UT Died: 26 Nov 1945 Mesa, Maricopa, UT | |
1. Daniel Dudley Jones, 26 May 1878 2. Orrin Cloyd Jones, 5 Sep 1879 3. William Orlando Jones, 14 Dec 1881 4. Guy Wesley Jones, 13 Dec 1883 5. Bertram Merrill Jones, 14 Feb 1885 6. Rollin Philemon Jones, 3 Feb 1887 7. Doctor Byron Jones, 23 Feb 1889 8. Collins Ray Jones, 19 Feb 1891 9. Elmer Jones, 3 Jan 1894 10. Emily Jones, 3 Jan 1894 11. Mary Lora Jones, 14 Oct 1897 12. Hugh Colton Jones, 30 Oct 1900 | |||
4.Wiley Cloyd Jones | Married: Dec 1885 | Rosetta Eleanor Pomeroy Born:4 Nov 1863 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT | |
5. Edwin William Jones | Married: 23 June 1891 | Rosetta Eleanor Pomeroy Born:4 Nov 1863 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT | |
1. Jessie Jones, 4 Nov 1892 2. Edwin Malcolm Jones, 23 Dec 1894 3. Byron LaRue Jones, 14 Mar 1902 | |||
6. Eleanor Ann Jones | Married: 3 Nov 1879 Lehi, Maricopa, AZ Married: 26 Jan 1888 | John David Ward Brady Born: 10 Nov 1857 Union, Salt Lake, UT Died: Aug 1885 Chihuahua, Chhh, Mexico Thaddius Wasatch Pritchett Born: 20 Dec 1867 Fairview, Sanpete, UT Died: 17 Jan 1929 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT | |
1. John Francis Brady, 26 May 1880 2. Harriet Eleanor Brady, 29 Mar 1882 3. Elvina Brady, 5 Jul 1884 4. Iva Pearl Pritchett, 7 Jan 1889 5. Ernest Edwin Pritchett, 23 Apr 1892 6. Leon Gay Pritchett, 29 Jul 1895 7. Lydia Margaret Pritchett, 23 Aug 1898 8. Franklin Carl Pritchett, 14 Jun 1901 | |||
7. Wesley Lamoni Jones | Married: 12 Feb 1886 Fort Mc Dorcell, Gila, , Az | Phebe Jane Sanders Born: 23 Jan 1865 Fairview, Sanpete, UT Died: 9 May 1950 Phoenix, Maricopa, AZ | |
1. Wesley Myron Jones, 31 Dec 1886 2. Amy Jane Jones, 2 Jul 1888 3. Wiley Colton Jones, 6 Mar 1890 4. Ernest Martin Jones, 10 May 1894 5. Curtis Lamoni Jones, 31 Oct 1897 6. Miles Franklin Jones, 13 Jul 1899 7. Perry Albert Jones, 2 Jan 1901 8. Edwin Stanley Jones, 6 Sep 1904 | |||
8. David Bryon Jones | |||
9. Margaret Elvina Jones | Married: 6 Jan 1892 Married:Date Uncertain 23 May 1900, 10 June 1900, 16 Dec 1910: Brandon, Manitoba, Canada | Henry E. N. Phelps Born: 1866 Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, UT Joseph Heber Wray Born: 19 Dec 1861 Hull, Yorkshire, England Died: 1 May 1930 Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA | |
1. Joseph Vivien Wray, 23 Mar 1901 2. Vaida Viola Wray, 15 Mar 1903 3. Willow Wynona Wray, 10 Aug 1905 4. Vina Fay Wray, 15 Sep 1907 5. Richard Goulding Wray, 28 Mar 1912 6. Victor Colton Wray, 25 Jun 1914 | |||
10. Lorenzo Ernest Jones | |||
11. Franklin Colton Jones | |||
12. Almira Elisa Jones | Married: 27 Dec 1894 | Daniel Bryon Lambson Born: 1872 Fairview, Sanpete, UT | |
1. Carmel Violet Lambson, 31 Dec 1895 2. Franklin Clifford Lambson, 6 Nov 1898 3. Byron D. Lambson, 24 Apr 1901 4. Eugene Field Lambson, 24 Sep 1903 | |||
13. Montgomery Milton Jones | |||
14. George Albert Jones | |||
Danile Webster Jones ~
I have copied and pasted this since Daniel Webster Jones is mentioned. Awesome talk.
"In His Strength I Can Do All Things"
Elder Jack H Goaslind
Of the Presidency of the Seventy
Ordinary men, blessed with the privilege of holding the priesthood of God, may be called upon to do extraordinary tasks and accomplish mighty feats through faith in that sacred power!
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As I tell their story, please keep in mind what power it is that unifies us and also connects us to them. The royal priesthood we bear is more than coincidental to this account. Theirs was the same priesthood which today empowers you to perform great and small acts of service to your fellowmen.
Ordinary men--including, and perhaps especially, young men--blessed with the privilege of holding the priesthood of God may be called upon to do extraordinary tasks. Holders of the holy priesthood can accomplish mighty feats of heroism, bravery, and service through faith in that sacred power.
The pioneers did not doubt it. They bore frequent witness that the Spirit of the Lord guided and directed them. In confirmation of their testimony, I declare unto you His Spirit is with each of us. He desires to bless and strengthen us. He will make us equal to every righteous task we undertake in His name. He will magnify many times over our own natural ability. You can succeed beyond your own strength if you learn to rely on the Spirit of the Lord.
Now, the story I promised to tell you began before the October 1856 general conference, but that is where we will begin. President Brigham Young stood at the Old Tabernacle pulpit on this square and issued a call to go rescue the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies. Two days later, about 30 faithful brethren with good mule teams were dispatched to go bring in the handcarters stranded several hundred miles east. Dan W. Jones, a convert of less than five years, volunteered.
After arduous effort, the Willie Company finally was found. Caught in the storms of early winter, the Saints were freezing and starving to death. The relief party did all they could to improve conditions, but for some it was simply too late. The morning after the rescuers' arrival, nine of the company were buried in a common grave.
Some of the rescuers were assigned to escort the handcarters to the Salt Lake Valley, but others pushed further eastward in an effort to find the Martin Company. Finally they were found, along with the Hodgett and Hunt Wagon Companies, bogged down and helpless in the snow east of Devil's Gate, Wyoming.
Members of the Martin Company were in dire straits. Their food rations had been cut to a few ounces of flour per day. Only a third of them could walk, and deaths were recorded daily.
The leaders of the rescue party wisely decided to spare no effort in getting the suffering survivors to safety in the Salt Lake Valley. Because of the shortage of space in the wagons, it was necessary to leave most of the handcarters' possessions in storage at Devil's Gate till spring.
Brother Dan W. Jones and two others from the relief party, along with 17 young men from the wagon companies, were called to stay behind to guard the property. They were left to face five winter months in Wyoming, hundreds of miles from help, with scarcely anything to eat, and under conditions of extreme privation. Imagine the sacrifice! Offers were made to each man to join the wagons bound for the valley, but every one of them chose to stay behind, obedient to the call to serve.
That winter was recorded as one of the most severe ever. The intrepid watchmen struggled to repair the cabins at Devil's Gate; killed the remaining cattle; stored the tough, stringy beef for food; and reconditioned and stacked the goods they were left to protect.
They killed a few buffalo, but the hunting became bad. Soon they were reduced to living on animal hides, from which they scraped off the hair, then boiled the leather. They ate the leather wrappings off the wagon tongues, old moccasin soles, and a well-worn buffalo hide that had been used as a foot mat for two months. At one point Dan Jones was literally preparing to eat his own saddle!
In February of that extreme winter, a member of the Snake Indian tribe visited and helped them. That first night he and two scouts came to camp loaded with good buffalo meat.
The winter passed, and finally, early in May, the relief wagons began to roll in. Of the various communications Brother Jones received, one critical letter from Brigham Young had not arrived. Loading and shipping of the stored goods could not commence without it.
For days they waited, becoming increasingly anxious. Finally Brother Jones sought the Lord in prayer to know how to proceed. He recorded the following testimony: "Next morning without saying anything about the lack of instructions we commenced business. Soon some one asked whose teams were to be loaded first, [and] I dictated to my clerk. Thus we continued. As fast as the clerk put them down, orders would be given, and we passed on to the next. We continued this [way] for four days. . . . All the teams were loaded up, companies organized and started back [to the valley]" (Daniel W. Jones, Forty Years among the Indians [1960], 107).
The 17 young men were loaded on the last wagons departing to the Salt Lake Valley, where they would be reunited with their families and loved ones.
Brother Jones arrived later to report to President Young, feeling not a little uncertain how he would be received. Should he have waited for the President's written orders? As everything unfolded, it was learned that President Young had indeed dictated a letter of instructions, which was never received. Dan carefully presented his detailed report. It was a testimony to him to find that the inspiration he'd received in Wyoming was exactly the same as in the prophet's letter.
Dan Jones's young men had done more than they ever would have imagined they could:
I repeat, brethren: Ordinary men, blessed with the privilege of holding the priesthood of God, may be called upon to do extraordinary tasks and accomplish mighty feats through faith in that sacred power!
One of my Book of Mormon heroes, Ammon, the great son of Mosiah, explains how much two people can accomplish when one of them is the Lord: "Yea, I know that I am nothing; as to my strength I am weak; therefore I will not boast of myself, but I will boast of my God, for in his strength I can do all things; yea, behold, many mighty miracles we have wrought in this land, for which we will praise his name forever" (Alma 26:12).
To you young men of the Aaronic Priesthood and to you brethren of the Melchizedek Priesthood, I witness that we can perform "many mighty miracles," as testified by Ammon and by Dan Jones! They took the Lord as their guide, listened to and obeyed the Holy Spirit, and learned that they could indeed perform mighty miracles, which thing they never had supposed.
Our own challenges in this day will be great. Our needs will be significant. Our loyalty to great gospel truths must be no less valiant than that of those young men over 140 years ago.
It is my prayer, brethren, that each of us will make the Lord--and His revealed word through His servants, the prophets--the guiding influence in our lives. Each of us has a miracle to perform, a journey to complete, and a marvelous mission to fulfill.
May Heavenly Father bless you to know that you are one of His chosen sons in a blessed and royal generation, and that He has mighty miracles for you to perform. With His strength and the guidance of the Spirit, you too can do all things! To which I testify in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.
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Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Daniel Philemon Jones
I've been finding "proof" of our family in newspapers, books etc. online. My attempts to cut and paste photos onto the blog sometimes fail because of the format they are available in online. So. I'm going to include links as well as photos. Click here to go to the original site about Daniel Philemon Jones. There is a picture included and by all standards at the time it's not a bad picture. If for some reason the link doesn't work, the information is in the Latter-Day Saint biographical encyclopedia, Volume 3. Don't forget you can enlarge the pictures to read them better.
Here is some interesting information on Daniel Philemon Jones, the son of Daniel Webster Jones who was the author of Forty Years Among the Indians.
Here is some interesting information on Daniel Philemon Jones, the son of Daniel Webster Jones who was the author of Forty Years Among the Indians.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Maida
In Norfolk, Virginia
1945
Grandma at our old student house we lived at in Seattle while Dad was in school.
May 3rd 1992
Easter Sunday 1945
I'm not sure who the lady on the right is.
1945
Grandma at our old student house we lived at in Seattle while Dad was in school.
May 3rd 1992
Easter Sunday 1945
I'm not sure who the lady on the right is.
Family Pictures
Grandma wrote on the backs of some of these.
That's an everyday type Muu Muu-not very pretty. See our two French cars?!
Grandpa & Ken
Ken & Kathleen
Seattle 1954
Looks like the jungle, doesn't it? This is the garden behind the Woioli Tea Room where Robert Louis Stevenson's grass shack is.
Grandpa, Ken & Kathleen
That's an everyday type Muu Muu-not very pretty. See our two French cars?!
Grandpa & Ken
Ken & Kathleen
Seattle 1954
Looks like the jungle, doesn't it? This is the garden behind the Woioli Tea Room where Robert Louis Stevenson's grass shack is.
Grandpa, Ken & Kathleen
Young Grandpa Vaughn
Grandma's first husband and the father of my dad (Danny), Kathleen, and Kenneth (Ken).
He's the second from the left. Almost looks like Tom Hanks but with a longer face.
Benj says he looks like James Bond.
He's the second from the left. Almost looks like Tom Hanks but with a longer face.
Benj says he looks like James Bond.
Dad
Some pics of my dad (James Daniel), Grandma's youngest son.
Andrew has Dad's smile I think. I also think Matt and I look a good deal like Dad.
Check out the fluffy dress! Love it
Andrew has Dad's smile I think. I also think Matt and I look a good deal like Dad.
Check out the fluffy dress! Love it
Jones Family Tombstones
This didn't scan well since it was overexposed to begin with.
Daniel Webster Jones
26 Aug 1830-20 April 1915
Founder of Lehi Arizona
Daniel Webster Jones
26 Aug 1830-20 April 1915
Founder of Lehi Arizona
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Husband
Jones, Daniel Philemon (1GF)
Born: April 1, 1856 (Provo UT)
Died: July 6, 1935 (Mesa AZ)
Occupation: Farmer-State Legislator
Father's Name: Daniel Webster Jones
Mother's Name: Harriet Emily Colton
Married: Aug 26, 1877
Wife
Merrill, Mary Ellen (1GM)
Born: May 15, 1858, in Lehi UT
Died: Nov 26, 1945 in Mesa AZ
Father's Name: Dudley Justin Merrill
Mother's Name: Almira Huntsman
The Children:Daniel Dudley-May 26, 1878 (Lehi AZ) -Feb 13, 1958 (Kirtland NM)
Orren Cloyd-- Sep 5, 1879(Lehi AZ)- Oct 22, 1958 (Phoeniz, AZ) (GF)
William Orlando--Dec 13, 1880(Lehi AZ) -June 20, 1924 (Mesa, AZ)
Guy Wesley--Dec 14, 1882 (Lehi AZ) - Nov 27, 1955 (Mesa, AZ)
Bertram Merrill --Feb 14, 1885(Lehi AZ) - June 13, 1970 (Des Moines IA)
Rollin Philemon-- Feb 3, 1887(Lehi AZ) - Apr 4, 1970 (Glendale, CA
Doctor Byron-- Feb 23, 1889(Lehi AZ) - Mar 26, 1981 (Arcadia, CA)
Collins Roy --Feb 19, 1891(Lehi AZ)- June 6, 1965
Elmer (twin) --Jan 3, 1894(Lehi AZ) - Feb 29, 1976 (Mesa AZ)
Emily (twin) -- Jan 3, 1894(Lehi AZ) - Dec 25, 1917
Mary Lora -- Oct 14, 1896(Lehi AZ) - May 14, 1925 (Mesa, AZ)
Hugh Colton-- Oct 3, 1899(Lehi AZ) - May 20, 1918
Hugh Colton Jones
Hugh Colton Jones was born in Lehi, Maricopa Co. Arizona on 3 Oct 1900 (?). He was baptized by D.P. Jones. He was 5'10" weighed 150 and hi chest size was 38. He had blue eyes and brown hair. He was specially interested in Boy Scout work. Hugh died of lung trouble in Mesa, Arizona on 20 May 1918. D. Dudley Jones did Hugh's endowments by proxy at the Salt Lake Temple on 4 Apr 1919.
This was written about Hugh:
"Hugh was the baby but a very manly little fellow.
He was a leader among boys of his age and many of his older friends considered his advice above the advice generally received from young men.
He was exemplary in his habits and very studious in his school work and in his work in the church. He was a scout leader and the boys over whom he was, loved him for his kindness and big heart. He would have made a mark in the world if he hadn't been cut off in his youth."
This was written about Hugh:
"Hugh was the baby but a very manly little fellow.
He was a leader among boys of his age and many of his older friends considered his advice above the advice generally received from young men.
He was exemplary in his habits and very studious in his school work and in his work in the church. He was a scout leader and the boys over whom he was, loved him for his kindness and big heart. He would have made a mark in the world if he hadn't been cut off in his youth."
Monday, August 31, 2009
Elmer and Emily Jones
I was reading stories and charts from a box that was Grandma's (lots of her things ended up at my mom and dad's when she moved to the group home) and loved learning about Emily and Elmer. They are the siblings of Rollin Philemon Jones (Grandma's dad so our great great aunt and uncle).
Rollin Philemon (Grandma's dad) is the handsome one on the very right end of the top row. Elmer is the shorter boy in front of him and Emily is the girl between Elmer and their mother.
This next part is from some handwritten pages I found. I don't know by whom.
"I lived a couple of years in Mesa and used to go see Grandma Jones frequently. I remember the first year at Christmastime I went to see her and asked why she was not going to put up a Christmas tree. The pain was still there when she told me that Christmas reminded her too much of Emily's death which had happened on Christmas Day. Daddy told me that Aunt Emily had really fought death-stood right up in bed and said she would not die. Grandma Jones told me that if she had known at the beginning what she knew at the end about T.B. she could have saved all four of her children.
After eight boys, I'm sure Emily was the pride of her life. She would always laugh and tell how she even had to have a boy (Elmer)come sticking his nose in when she had her first girl.
I don't remember talking about Hugh with Grandma-so about all the information I have about him is what little daddy wrote."
*Hugh was the younger boy in the middle of the picture. He passed away about 6 months after Emily. That's what I gathered from the records anyway.
More about Emily~
Her full name was Emily Jones. She was born at Lehi, Maricopa Co. Arizona on 3 Jan 1894. She was baptized by D.P. Jones and her schooling commenced at Lehi Public school. She was a school teacher and had blue eyes and light brown hair. She was especially interested in music. Emily died of lung trouble in Lehi, Arizona on 25 Dec 1917.
I don't know who wrote this but I thought it was nice. I assume it was written for her funeral?
"Emily came into our life as a sunbeam. She had been wanted for a long time. Her eight older brothers looked upon her as an angel almost. She was the companion of her mother and the pride of her father. She counted her friends by her aquaintances, for to know her was to love her.
She was of a sunny and cheerful disposition and always willing and ready to give her service to make others happy.
She was a beautiful singer and cheered many a sad heart with her beautiful voice.
She loved life and her fellow man and for their sake she labored until she broke her health and was overtaken by that terrible disease..." Sorry, the photocopied paper cuts off here. That's all I have.
Rollin Philemon (Grandma's dad) is the handsome one on the very right end of the top row. Elmer is the shorter boy in front of him and Emily is the girl between Elmer and their mother.
This next part is from some handwritten pages I found. I don't know by whom.
"I lived a couple of years in Mesa and used to go see Grandma Jones frequently. I remember the first year at Christmastime I went to see her and asked why she was not going to put up a Christmas tree. The pain was still there when she told me that Christmas reminded her too much of Emily's death which had happened on Christmas Day. Daddy told me that Aunt Emily had really fought death-stood right up in bed and said she would not die. Grandma Jones told me that if she had known at the beginning what she knew at the end about T.B. she could have saved all four of her children.
After eight boys, I'm sure Emily was the pride of her life. She would always laugh and tell how she even had to have a boy (Elmer)come sticking his nose in when she had her first girl.
I don't remember talking about Hugh with Grandma-so about all the information I have about him is what little daddy wrote."
*Hugh was the younger boy in the middle of the picture. He passed away about 6 months after Emily. That's what I gathered from the records anyway.
More about Emily~
Her full name was Emily Jones. She was born at Lehi, Maricopa Co. Arizona on 3 Jan 1894. She was baptized by D.P. Jones and her schooling commenced at Lehi Public school. She was a school teacher and had blue eyes and light brown hair. She was especially interested in music. Emily died of lung trouble in Lehi, Arizona on 25 Dec 1917.
I don't know who wrote this but I thought it was nice. I assume it was written for her funeral?
"Emily came into our life as a sunbeam. She had been wanted for a long time. Her eight older brothers looked upon her as an angel almost. She was the companion of her mother and the pride of her father. She counted her friends by her aquaintances, for to know her was to love her.
She was of a sunny and cheerful disposition and always willing and ready to give her service to make others happy.
She was a beautiful singer and cheered many a sad heart with her beautiful voice.
She loved life and her fellow man and for their sake she labored until she broke her health and was overtaken by that terrible disease..." Sorry, the photocopied paper cuts off here. That's all I have.
Letter to Grandma (from Mary Eleanor??)
Dearest Maida,
I have been working on the Rollin P. Jones ancestral file (4 generation sheets) and have finally finished them, and had copies made for all the brothers and sisters. In a way, you might say I took over from Mack (Maida's brother). He had brought what he had done to the family reunion, and I had taken work I had done, and it wasn't till the night before we all left that we tried comparing them. He hadn't done a lot, and I had more, so I suggested I bring them home and send the additional sheets I had to him. Well, I ended up doing the whole thing. I had several different sources, plus I called Aunt Ella a couple of times, and went over to see Aunt Elsie because she has a lot of Uncle Elmer's (I think this could be Elmer Jones. He had a twin, Emily, and I have pictures of them as well as the rest of their family) records. Uncle Elmer really was "gung-ho" on genealogy. I also called cousins, and came up with the most accurate records I could. Then I decided that instead of sending all the copies to Mack and having him mail them, it would save postage if I mailed directly to each one. Mack will send the file into Salt Lake (Salt Lake city is where the LDS church headquarters are. They keep records on file so many members submit information) with himself as the family rep. These copies are for you to keep in your book of remembrance.
I imagine Kathleen (Maida's daughter I assume) has been working on the Donald Vaughn ancestral file? If she hasn't already sent in those sheets, maybe the Jones line (and Mack line) on those sheets will be of help to her.
I finally found a woman who knew what she was doing so I know these are the way they are supposed to be.
I have also completed the Aubrey W. McCown ancestral file, so I feel pretty good about that, as well. I just could never seem to get going - guess we all needed a deadline. As you no doubt know, July 1st is the deadline. I am naming myself as the family rep for the McCown file.
We have a new member in the Aubrey McCown family - Mark Aubrey McCown was born last night around 8, and both mother and son are doing fine. He was taken Ceasarean, which had been planned all along because of all the problems Joyce has with her pregnancies and deliveries. But this time went better (the letter cuts off here)
* I thought this might be useful for you (Maida, the younger) for your project. It gives some direction as to who has what information on the family and where. Oh, I'm not sure who the Aubrey McCown family is. I'll look into that.
I have been working on the Rollin P. Jones ancestral file (4 generation sheets) and have finally finished them, and had copies made for all the brothers and sisters. In a way, you might say I took over from Mack (Maida's brother). He had brought what he had done to the family reunion, and I had taken work I had done, and it wasn't till the night before we all left that we tried comparing them. He hadn't done a lot, and I had more, so I suggested I bring them home and send the additional sheets I had to him. Well, I ended up doing the whole thing. I had several different sources, plus I called Aunt Ella a couple of times, and went over to see Aunt Elsie because she has a lot of Uncle Elmer's (I think this could be Elmer Jones. He had a twin, Emily, and I have pictures of them as well as the rest of their family) records. Uncle Elmer really was "gung-ho" on genealogy. I also called cousins, and came up with the most accurate records I could. Then I decided that instead of sending all the copies to Mack and having him mail them, it would save postage if I mailed directly to each one. Mack will send the file into Salt Lake (Salt Lake city is where the LDS church headquarters are. They keep records on file so many members submit information) with himself as the family rep. These copies are for you to keep in your book of remembrance.
I imagine Kathleen (Maida's daughter I assume) has been working on the Donald Vaughn ancestral file? If she hasn't already sent in those sheets, maybe the Jones line (and Mack line) on those sheets will be of help to her.
I finally found a woman who knew what she was doing so I know these are the way they are supposed to be.
I have also completed the Aubrey W. McCown ancestral file, so I feel pretty good about that, as well. I just could never seem to get going - guess we all needed a deadline. As you no doubt know, July 1st is the deadline. I am naming myself as the family rep for the McCown file.
We have a new member in the Aubrey McCown family - Mark Aubrey McCown was born last night around 8, and both mother and son are doing fine. He was taken Ceasarean, which had been planned all along because of all the problems Joyce has with her pregnancies and deliveries. But this time went better (the letter cuts off here)
* I thought this might be useful for you (Maida, the younger) for your project. It gives some direction as to who has what information on the family and where. Oh, I'm not sure who the Aubrey McCown family is. I'll look into that.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Good news!
Exciting news! I just got in touch with a relation of Grandma's who has LOADS of family information. She's 84 years old but is going to make me copies of what she has and send it my way. There are genealogy charts, photos, a book (D. Jones and his Descendants) AND written stories about family members. I can't wait to see it. I'll figure out a way to scan everything and get it online. Mary (that's her name) had the names of Daniel Webster Jones's parents. I almost died! I've been looking for them for years. All the info I had was that he was orphaned at 11.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Cat!
Grandma says:
"Emily brought a cat home from a trip with the Heiserodts. My sister Phyllis and I played with it a lot. It turns out the cat had ringworms, and Phyllis got them in her scalp. She had to have her head shaved to prevent the ringworms from speading. "
*Emily and Phyllis are both Grandma's sisters
"Emily brought a cat home from a trip with the Heiserodts. My sister Phyllis and I played with it a lot. It turns out the cat had ringworms, and Phyllis got them in her scalp. She had to have her head shaved to prevent the ringworms from speading. "
*Emily and Phyllis are both Grandma's sisters
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Dad's trick
I remember hearing this story from Dad when I was younger...
One time Dad gave Grandma Ducks an elephant figurine which she put on display in her home. She didn't know this, but he had a whole collection of them, all identical and in various sizes-big to little. Every once in a while, he would switch them out so that over a period of time, it seemed like the figurine was shrinking and Grandma would wonder if she was crazy!
It's been a while since I've heard the 'story of the elephant' but I think that's fairly accurate. Maybe she had the collection and only one out and he switched them? I can't remember.
One time Dad gave Grandma Ducks an elephant figurine which she put on display in her home. She didn't know this, but he had a whole collection of them, all identical and in various sizes-big to little. Every once in a while, he would switch them out so that over a period of time, it seemed like the figurine was shrinking and Grandma would wonder if she was crazy!
It's been a while since I've heard the 'story of the elephant' but I think that's fairly accurate. Maybe she had the collection and only one out and he switched them? I can't remember.
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