Chapter 1 ENTERPRISING YOUNG MEN 7 Edmund quickly learned that he had married not only Mary Jane but also the gregarious and dynamic Corey family. Her brothers, George Lyman, Warren Wright, Charles Joseph, and Bonesteel Corey were ambitious, iron-willed, and Amos enterprising young men. Characterizing his grandfather Warren years later, Earl Corey would remember that the old man possessed “a pretty strong, stubborn character. If he fell in the river, you’d look for him upstream.” As a frontier mother, Mary Jane also commonly displayed the indomitable Corey spirit. On one occasion, she captured and skinned a stray cat, then turned his hide into a pair of shoes for William Henry (W. H.)—his first foot coverings. The rigors of the family farm provided the Wattis children with no luxuries and little free time, but their parents insisted on education. Itinerant teachers, who seldom spent as long as six months in town, favored the McGuffey Readers series and Smith’s New Grammar. E. O., the eldest son, remembered the exceptional teaching skills of Louis Frederick Moench, who later helped found what would become Weber State University in Ogden. Farm chores, however, led to the development of more practical skills. By the age of eleven, E. O. could plow with a team of oxen as well as any grown Edmund Orson Wattis and Mary Jane Corey, whose families settled in northern Utah, married in 1852. They are pictured here around 1860. (Courtesy of W. Dee Halverson)