Oral History Program Athelia Moffett Johnson Interviewed by Mike Cushman 5 September 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Athelia Moffett Johnson Interviewed by Mike Cushman 5 September 1971 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Johnson, Athelia Moffett, an oral history by Mike Cushman, 5 September 1971, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Athelia Moffett Johnson. The interview was conducted by Mike Cushman on September 5, 1971, in 864 Minlo Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah. Mrs. Johnson discusses her family history and her personal experiences while growing up as the child in a polygamist family. Present at the interview is also Arthur Johnson, husband of the interviewee. MC: The following is an interview of Athelia Moffett Johnson by Mike Cushman for the Weber State Oral History Program on September 5, 1971, at 5:00 P.M., at Mrs. Johnson’s home at 864 Minlo Avenue, Salt Lake City, Utah. Her husband Arthur Johnson is also present. Tell me the date you were born. AMJ: The day I was born was a hot June day, June 15, 1904 in Colonia Dublan. My brothers teased me all my life about that. They were out on the prairie herding cows, and they came home to a mousey little sister. I was just a little blond with hardly any hair. I wasn’t a pretty baby. My brother Ben was twenty-two, and he went and got the midwife. Mother had a real hard time giving birth to me. MC: What are some of the first things you remember about Colonia Dublan? AMJ: It was a lovely place to live. The thing that I loved most of all was our farm. It was three miles from town, and it was a lovely place to go. We used to go up there, take our lunch and spend the day when Father and the boys would go. There was a bamboo clump there, the only big bamboo clump in the valley. That was on the bank of one of the ditches. We loved to play there. The water was always clear in the Casa Grande River. It doesn’t seem to me that it ever got muddy. It ran clear, and it was clear in the ditches. 1 There were rocks and snails in the bottoms of the ditches and the ditches were all line with trees, on the farm and in town. It was a beautiful little place, and I loved it. MC: What were some of the first experiences you remember about Colonia Dublan? AMJ: I played with the neighborhood children, and we were all required to be home at sundown. We didn’t wait till the sun was down before we started home. We went home to get there by sundown. I remember one night when I got home, it was almost dark. I tried to sneak in without Father knowing it, but he reminded me that he knew what time I came home. There were Mexicans living all around among us. We weren’t really frightened of the Mexicans, but it was just a precautionary thing. Father wanted to make sure that the children were all safely home. The boys herded cows on the prairie and they became well acquainted with the Mexican children. As a child, I had no dealings with the Mexicans at all. Father had them working for him on the farm. Father was the watermaster on the farm ditch. My baptism was an outstanding thing. It came right in the middle of summer. My mother and my sister Verna planned a real birthday party for me. We invited all the little girls in town. There were thirty of them. They each brought their little lunch. We sat on the hay rack with a load of hay, and Father took us all to the farm. We spent the day at the farm. We waded, and we jumped the ditch. We played in the bamboo clump, and we had our lunch. We went down clear to the river, and we all went swimming. Father baptized me right in the middle of our swimming party. So I remember my baptism very well. That was just before the revolution broke out in 1912. My first inkling of the revolution as the Red Flaggers coming into town. My little friend, Maybeth Bowman, was passing our place. She had been over to May Done’s to get her music lesson. The soldiers came by while she was playing at our place instead of going 2 on home. Her parents were frantic because they didn’t know where she was. That was just before my birthday party, so they wouldn’t let her go to the party. Father baptized me, and my brother Loren confirmed me. I had to get a written statement from him many, many years later. I have the letter now that he wrote to me telling me that I was right in my memory. Father insisted that I must have been confirmed in sacrament meeting, the next testimony meeting, but Loren had just been made an elder. Mother was ill. She was at home with paralysis. She couldn’t go to the meeting and she wanted to see her baby confirmed. Loren confirmed me right there in the home and reported it to Dare LeBaron who was the ward clerk. My mother was paralyzed when I was five. My brother Loren tells that. He was with her when something went wrong. She didn’t know what was the matter. I don’t know exactly how it affected her right at the beginning. She sent Loren to my sister Laura, who was married. They soon discovered how serious it was. Her whole left side was paralyzed. Her speech was affected. She never could talk well after that. She would get a little better, and then she would get worse from time to time. Her paralysis was a great trial to her because she had always been a busy woman. She had never had very good health; her health was poor. She had a hard time carrying and delivering her babies. I was the tenth child of my mother. I was the last of the whole nineteen, of the whole bunch of us. So I was the baby, but I was not the booby. Mother had a real struggle with her life. It was a pioneer life, and it was full of hardships. Father tried to provide for his family, but for many years they were a poor family. They really had hardly enough to get along on. Mother had her trials. She had to sew and had to make everything, even Father’s overalls and his LDS garments. Sewing was hard for her, but she had it to do. She did lots of knitting. She knitted stockings and 3 socks for all of the children. She crocheted. They had lots of little tidies and things over the pictures and over the backs of the chairs that Mother crocheted and knitted. They made all the homes so colorful. That was the way they had of coloring the home up and making the home attractive. She had little horns of animals that Father had cut and polished. They were covered with crocheted things. They used them for wall vases. They would get dried grasses and flowers to put in those and put on the walls to make it colorful. She had a pair of window curtains that she crocheted. The thing I remember that my sister Verna reminded me of many years later was a knitted petticoat that mother had. It was her pride and joy. It was red. As soon as Verna mentioned that Mother had a knitted petticoat, I said “It was red, wasn’t it?” I was real small when that took place. Mother spent her time knitting. She would knit by the fire and get up early in the morning. She didn’t have to look at what she was knitting. She would have a safety pin in the sock or whatever pattern she was following to keep track of what she was doing. The thing I remember of my mother best was when we went to El Paso. I must have been about five. We spent Christmas there with my brother Ben who was married and had his little family in Ciudad Juarez. I was always glad that Mother and I took that little trip to El Paso because it made that one thing stand out in my mind as the one big thing in Mother’s life before she became ill and was paralyzed. She lived about four years after she was paralyzed. Most of my memory of my mother is of when she was almost totally disabled and had to just sit or lie. The world had to go by without her doing the things she had been used to doing. MC: What do you remember about Colonia Dublan as a town? 4 AMJ: It was a long, long town. It seemed to me like it was a large place. There was a ditch and a sidewalk on each side of the street and the wagons went up and down the middle. It seemed to me like it covered a lot of space. The center of town was the schoolhouse. It was the church house and the schoolhouse. We had church schools there, and it was the center of attraction. Oh, how I loved Primary! I just loved Primary! We were always having the children’s dances and on celebration days, Cinco de Mayo, and the sixteenth of September and the July celebrations. We always had children’s dances and parties. Then we had our May Day on Cinco de Mayo down on the river. We always went to the river for our big ward picnic. That was a great experience. We loved that river. When we could go there to go swimming, it was great. Dublan was in a broad valley. It had railroad running through it. Our place was just a block from the railroad. We always looked forward to the trains coming. The children would run from all the neighborhood to watch the train pass with its whistle and its steam puffing out. That railroad was really a big part of our life. It was a long way to the stores. I often had to go to the stores, and I would go alone. But I would never go down the railroad tracks. The stores were on the railroad tracks, several blocks from home. I was afraid. I don’t know why. I loved that railroad track and I loved the train, but I was afraid to death to walk along the railroad track by myself. I would always go down on the other street. One of the outstanding things before the exodus was the opening of the canal. There were the three depressions out on the east side of town, on the edge of the prairie, right on the foothills. They made reservoirs out of those. It was a big celebration when they opened the canal that they dug from the river to the spot where the lakes were to be. Everybody in town went to the celebration. Everybody was invited; it was really an event. Along the 5 way there were cattle grazing on the prairie. I remember I had a new hat. It was red, sort of fur. I loved that hat. But it was red, and there were bulls in the herds of cattle out there. The kids all had me scared for fear the bulls were going to run right over that wagon to get at my red hat. I think that was mean because they tormented me about that. Then there were flowers out on the prairie. The most distinctive one was what we called “star lilies.” I have never seen no heard of star lilies like that anywhere else, only on the prairie in Dublan. They were white and they had six petals. They were six pointed, but the petals stood out straight. They didn’t cup up. They had a lovely perfume. We used to go out and gather them and bring them home for bouquets. I think now the star lilies are all gone because they have cultivated and made peach orchards and other farms out on the prairie. There isn’t any prairie any more. When I would have to go on errands from one end of that little town to the other it seemed like an awful long ways. It really was a long ways from Robinson’s house on the north up to Hedder’s place on the south. There were quite a lot of houses stretched over out onto the prairie and houses all along the back street which joined onto the fields. People who had their farms close to town had their fields between the town and the river. MC: What do you remember about the houses that you lived in in Colonia Dublan? AMJ: I was born in another house, the same house that Jed and Joe were born in. I was quite small when Aunt Olive decided it was time to build quite a large house. Father constructed this large adobe house. When it was half finished, Aunt Olive decided she didn’t want to live there, so Mother lived there. It never was finished. It was a large two story affair, but there was never any stairway built on the inside. The only access to the top floor was a ladder that went up outside through a window. My sister Verna and I had 6 a little bedroom on the north. Then there was a dining room and a kitchen. It was a real large room. The front room had homemade carpet on it. That was the pride of Mother’s life. That carpet was woven out of rags. I remember watching them have rag bees to make those balls of string that went into the making of the rug. They were so bright and colorful and pretty. When the rug was finally woven, Helen and Ruth Payne had a loom that they wove the rug on. When it was all woven and sewed together, and it was put down, it was magnificent. We put straw underneath it to make it soft. We could hear the straw crunch under our feet as we walked along. The job each spring when housecleaning time came was to take up the rug and take it out. The boys would beat it to get all the dust out of it. We would put some clean straw under the rug and put it back. AJ: I remember we used to take the back of the chair to stretch it. AMJ: In those days, in Dublan at least, when a family moved into a new home, the home was dedicated. At the time our home was dedicated, there were three patriarchs there. Each of the family was given a patriarchal blessing, whether they had had one before or not. Father, Mother, Aunt Olive, and all of the children received a patriarchal blessing. I was just a baby. That is my patriarchal blessing that stands. Winslow Farr gave me my patriarchal blessing. AJ: I think Winslow Farr was the man that went with Father down to Southern Utah and built for the Church. He was a builder, and he was given this job to go down to Southern Utah because the federal officers were after him to put him in jail because he had entered into polygamy. 7 AMJ: The blocks were divided into quarters. We had a fourth of the block. There was Potawatomi plums along the south end along the ditch. We just loved to play in that ditch. When the plums came, they were delicious. We had a crab apple tree to make preserves out of. AJ: I have tasted the Potawatomi plums. I thought they were very good for jellies and jam. They had a kind of peculiar taste to them. AMJ: They made good jelly. They were different from any other plum. Then we had a mulberry tree out in the corner by the sidewalk. We just loved those mulberries. I don’t think mulberries ever grew any better than those mulberries. We just had them for the shade and fruit. We used to play a lot in the upstairs part of the house. It was used just for storage. I had an old tomcat. I wrote a poem about it that Arthur thinks is quite fun. This is the Thomas Cat: “The pet of all the neighborhood was my old Thomas cat. The perfect babe, so well behaved, dressed in his gown and hat. We’d wheel him in a buggy too, or tuck him in a bed, or cuddle him in arms or lap, not one complaint he said. Then after hours of playing with us, He’d think, “With this I’m through.” He’d give no word of warning then, but leave without adieu. From neighbor’s house or street he’d dash, in trailing dress and shawl. We could not snatch or hold him more, nor would he trip or fall. Straight up the barnyard loft whisked he, flashed like on possessed. And in his special corner there, would wait to be undressed.” Arthur doesn’t get the significance of this one. I like this one because it is historical. In Dublan there were a lot of old mounds that had been buildings. They must have been pueblo-type buildings. All that was left when the Mormons got down there were just piles of dirt. The largest by far in the whole valley was on our farm. We called them Montezuma’s. I don’t know why they were called 8 Montezuma’s. But each family who had a Montezuma on their farm thought they had a prize because you could dig into them and find relics, bones, pottery, beads and stuff. So I wrote a poem about our Montezuma. “I love you Montezuma great. I wish that you could talk. For you’re the largest hereabouts. Sure chiefs you precincts sought. You’re just a mound of crumbled clay surrounded by our farm, but once you were a castle filled with life and savage charm. I have a picture in my mind of you when you were young. A pueblo chief designed your walls, three stories toward the sun. Where Father build our farming house, you had a tower high. Where chiefs could see for miles around and scan each passerby. The northern end where sycamore and gourds surround the well, was once a courtyard broad and long where animals could dwell. We had a barn, corrals and pens all on the southern end, but great chief ancient’s living rooms were there for kin and friends. The council hall was where the yards extended westward far. ‘Twas there the chief and braves would talk of exploits and of war. His treasure rooms and burial vaults were near the middle fence, for when we dug our silo there, the proof was quite immense. We found some beads and pottery, though broken, and some bones, crude arrow heads, mutates, too, and axes made of stone. I dream about brown children there who played upon your roof, or huddled scared behind thick walls when war was bravery’s proof. I hope when resurrection comes your inmates will arise, and are not angry if they find my dreaming wasn’t wise. The Montezuma was quite a central place. It was evident there had been a civilization there. They were all strung along the river. They didn’t go out onto the prairie. Apparently, the civilization that was there once had just settled quite close to the river. Those Montazuma’s were real historic spots. 9 MC: You talked a little bit about your brothers and sisters. Tell me a little more about each of them. AMJ: My brother Ben is the eldest in the family. HE will be ninety on October 16. He married shortly after I was born. He has always sort of fathered me. He took Joe and I under his wing even before Father passed away because we were both grown and married long before Father died. Ben sort of seemed to feel that he owed something to us as his youngest brother and sister, and to me especially, the baby. When I grew up and needed to finish high school, Father didn’t have the money to send me to high school. I went and lived with my brother Ben in Arizona for my senior year in high school. Ben has just been my ideal. He was always such a good man, such a good thoughtful boy. He thought and cared for his mother and his wife. He said in his writing that there were two perfect women. Ben, my eldest brother, wrote the following in his own history: “This Johnson family of Danish descent, an exceptionally modest, thrifty and frugal bighearted people. They were thoughtful and considerate of each other in the home; loyal to the Church and to their friends. Truly it is said of them, ‘in them there is no guile.’ Of Mother many have said, ‘she is the most merciful and patient person they ever knew.’ Mother, Maria Moffett, and her mother, my Grandmother Johnson, were truly guardian angels; too good to live in such a wicked world, and are now with the redeemed of our Father’s children, elect, anxiously waiting our qualification and coming. This is our heritage. Under another name or flag what might have been our lot? The cross between the good old Danish stock and the Scotch—Irish American, some still linger in the lives of their descendants. Who of us can truly say, ‘in me there is no guile?’ Who of us never speak unkindly to those we love best? Who of us would not deceive another?” Ben 10 often makes the statement that the two women in his life, his mother and his wife, were truly women without guile. He was such a dear, dear brother. We hope to get together on his birthday in October. His children want to have a real celebration for him. His wife passed away about three years ago. He has just rattled around in his lonely big house there in Farmington. He is a patriarch now. That is just the reward that he has for an almost perfect life. He is such a wonderful man. Then my next sister was Ella, Ella Moria. She died of scarlet fever when she was two. Then my next sister was Laura. Laura was very motherly toward me. She married into polygamy when she was seventeen. She married Will Jones. He came home off of his mission, and he was a spruced-up, eloquent missionary. I guess she fell for him, and he fell for her. That was while Mother was up in Weber County near Ogden in Eden visiting her mother for a year. She took Verna and Joe. Joe was about two. She left Jed and the other children with my Aunt Olive. But while she was gone, Laura fell in love with Will. They were married before Mother got back. Mother just couldn’t conceive of the idea that her daughter was really that old and that mature that she would want to be married. Laura’s oldest daughter, Edith, was just three months younger than I. We played together and had a great deal to do with each other. When I was five, Mother was paralyzed. Laura did a lot of sewing for me. Verna, my sister just ten years older than I, stayed home from school and kept house for Father and Jed, Joe, and I. Verna and Laura were very, very precious to me. Laura had very poor health. She had three children. Her second boy Lloyd died when he was quite small. Then she had Oren. She just had the two children to raise. We were very close as a family even though we didn’t always live in the same town. After the Exodus, Laura always was very much concerned about me and my 11 manners and my dress and to make sure that I had all of the instruction that a child and a young girl should have. Then my next brother was Willard. When he was eight or younger, he was kicked in the stomach with a horse. He died from that effect. He wanted so badly to be baptized before he died. He knew he was going to die. He knew he could never get well. He was baptized just very shortly before he died. Then the next one was Ether, Ether John. He died of diphtheria when he was two. Then my next brother was Loren. He just was the dearest man. He was just good through and through. The boys all worked hard. Father was a taskmaster. He worked hard himself. He never thought of being tired or giving up, and he expected his boys to do the same. I remember Ben saying in his writings that when he was thirteen, Father broke his ankle and was laid up. He expected Ben to carry on just like a man. Ben did just that. He expected each of the boys as they grew up to just takeover. They weren’t coddled in the least. When they were given a job to do, it had to be done, and it had to be done right. Ben and Loren both said in their writings that they felt at the time that it was hard, that it was rough, and that Father was over expectant of them. They both realized afterwards that it was the best training in the world that they could have had. When Loren was about sixteen, maybe a little older, he went to work out in Ciudad Juarez and lived with Ben. He only earned two pesos a day, but Father expected him to send the money all back home to him. He felt that he had sort of done his duty to Father as long as he was under his roof. Now his money should be his own. He sent half of his money to Mother, and he sent many little things. I remember a little bag of colored beads he sent to me. Oh, I loved those beads! I would string those little beads by the hour. He sent other little things to me, his little sister, and gifts for Mother and my sister Verna. Then Verna came 12 next. She has been more like a mother to me than anyone else because she was about sixteen when Mother was paralyzed. She had to take over. She taught me all I knew about housekeeping. Mother was a very meticulous housekeeper. Verna followed in her footsteps. I was taught to keep house and to make and to sew. I remember Verna was so good to Mother. Loren, in one of his letters to me, mentions how proud he was of Verna and I for being so good to my mother. My job was to feed Mother when she couldn’t feed herself and to trim her toenails and her fingernails and to keep the flies off. She couldn’t sleep with a mosquito net over her to keep the flies off. So I would sit for an hour at a time and brush the flies away. One of the things that Mother liked best of all was for me to sing and recite. When I was little I must have learned things without any effort at all because I could just spend hours going through my songs and recitations for my mother. She had several friends that she liked to have come. They would always have me go through my whole repertoire whenever they were together. I loved it; I loved it! One was Sister Cox. One was Aunt Julia Johnes. Aunt Julia Johnes was blind. So I would go get her and lead her along the path and over the bridges and along the streets up to spend the afternoon with my mother. I would go through all my songs and recitations for them. Then when evening came, I would take Aunt Julia back. How I loved Aunt Julia, and how Mother enjoyed those things! Verna would always sit with her sewing or embroidery, whatever it was she was doing, while I was doing that. Sometimes she would prompt me, but sometimes I didn’t like to be prompted. I had sort of a routine, and I left the sad things until last like “Oh, Bertie, I am Tired Now,” because it always made Mother cry. I wondered why she cried, but it is a little story of a child whose mother is dead and the sister is left to take care of it. 13 AJ: She foresaw her own future, didn’t she? AMJ: Jed was always sort of exasperating. I had each of my brothers and sisters write what they remembered about my mother quite a long time ago. When Jed was writing, he said he didn’t know how he ever would have grown up without Mother. Mother was so understanding. Jed was born with a defect in his eyes. His eyes danced all the time. He couldn’t hold them still. The children made fun of him. He was just the brunt of their jokes. He had a real hard time growing up. He was bitter toward the world. Somehow or another, he said Father was just mean to him. He didn’t know why, but Father took out his spite on Jed for almost no reason at all whenever he would get angry. Father had quite a temper, and he would take it out on Jed. Jed said so often he would give him a whipping. The boy didn’t understand why. He would go to Mother, and Mother would console him. He said more than once Father would come in when Mother was consoling him after Father’s whipping. It made Father so angry to think that Mother would baby the boy after he had punished him. But Jed felt that Mother was his backing. He just never could have lived through life without her. I was going to tell you about one of Loren’s experiences when he was in his early teens. On the Fourth of July a bunch of boys went out on the railroad early in the morning and set off some dynamite. One of the boys was killed in the fracas, and the other boys were arrested. Loren tells about how understanding Mother was. The boys hadn’t ought to have done the thing, but it was just one of the things that the boys did. Mother didn’t accuse him; she didn’t blame him. She just reminded him that those things just never should have been done. {Tape Interrupted} 14 AMJ: When Jed, my brother, and his wife went through the temple and had their three children sealed to them, he forgave Father of all the misery that he had caused him all through his growing-up years. He really made peace between them. Loren and Jed both felt all through their growing up years that they were being imposed upon because they had to lackey for Aunt Olive. They resented it, and the resentment stayed with them, especially Jed, all of their lives. Now my youngest brother, just older than me is Joe. The whole family idealizes him because he has made so much of his life with so little. He was always a good boy. I remember as children he never had time to play. He did do some handy work. He carved a little train out of wood. I’ll never forget that little train. I just wish that somehow somebody could have kept it because as I remember it in my mind, it was real good. All the engines and the cars and the coal car, and the whole thing were just lovely. He had very little time to play. He always had to herd cows. Then there were always chores to do. It was up to Joe to do the chores. There was wood to cut. My job was to carry the wood and to gather the chips. That was every night we would gather chips in a pan to make the fire the next morning. Joe’s job was to cut the wood. Then he did farm work before he was old enough to ride a horse, to sit on a horse or to drive it. I’ll never forget the time we were moving back into Mexico after one of our exoduses. We went overland. There was my brother Loren and his new wife, Clessa, Father, Joe and I. We had two wagons and a one-seated buggy. They thought at first they would be able to break a young team of horses, Nell and Trixie, to pull one of the wagons. It was too much to expect of young horses, and they couldn’t do it. Most of the time they had to just lead them behind a wagon and the cows. We were going to haul two cows in the wagon, but that didn’t work out. The cows had to walk. It was up to 15 Joe to walk and drive those cows. He walked two hundred miles from Berino, New Mexico, to Dublan. He would start out early in the morning and take a lunch with him. He would start out before the rest of us. The horses were even finished eating. Then he would walk on. He would pick out a place for us to eat lunch sometimes, and sometimes he would take his lunch with him. It seems to me like it took us nine days, but it must not have been that long. He would pick out a campground for us to camp in when we caught up with him at night. It seemed to me that Father was real harsh with him, one night especially. We didn’t get there to the campground that Joe had selected until after dark. It was kind of lumpy. There was some kind of brush growing around on it, but it was by water. Father scolded Joe for not getting a smoother campground. It seemed to me like he always had the hard brunt of things. That was after Jed no longer lived with us. After Exodus, Jed didn’t live at home at all. After Mother’s death, Jed didn’t go back. Mother died in Canutillo, Texas, when I was nine. Mother didn’t go back to Mexico with us and Jed couldn’t have taken living at home without Mother. He was on his own after that. Joe was the one who took over and took responsibility of the farm and helping father. The summer he was sixteen he lost his right arm in a thresher. HE had just graduated from the eighth grade. He hadn’t been to high school, and probably never would have gone. I think that he wanted to be a blacksmith as he grew up. HE was fascinated with the blacksmithing job. Father saw that all of his boys learned to farm, and that they learned to use their hands and tools to build with and to be carpenters. Loren and Norman were both very good carpenters, and Ben was a good carpenter. Father saw that his boys had what he could give to them to make them independent. But when Joe lost his arm, that was such a tragedy. I will never forget. It was up, pretty 16 near the shoulder. It was apparent that he must go to school. Whether he would have gone to high school without that tragedy or not, I don’t know. He and Lula went to school the next winter. They had to go eighteen miles to Juarez to the USA, Juarez Stake Academy. He went to school for two and a half years. Then he got into the mission. President Joseph C. Bentley organized what they called the Bentley Mission. It was independent of any other mission in the Church, but he felt the necessity of preaching the gospel to the people in the near localities, to the Mexicans. Joe got in with the Mexican missionaries there. Before he got through with it, he had spent three years in the mission field. Then he decided to teach, so he and I taught school in Garcia, the first year either one of us had taught. He went back and finished high school after he had finished his mission, and then we taught in Garcia. He stayed in Garcia. I felt that it was in such an out of the way place. It was clear off the earth up in the mountains. Garcia was falling to pieces even then because the men in the community all left part of their families to keep the children in school. They went out into sawmills, so Garcia was falling to pieces even then. But Joe was intrigued with the mountain area and with the possibility of farming out on the other side of the mountain, on the Pacific slope as they called it. He stayed there for seven years until his little home that he had built with his own hands burned down and everything that he had had in it. That was right after Father had moved to Mesa. Joe got the biggest part of Father’s books, all the books that we had all left in the home there in Dublan. Joe had hauled them all up to Garcia. He had such a lot of precious things. He had kept a diary from the time he lost his arm. The first writing he did was in a diary book with his left hand. That all was destroyed when his home was burned. What he would have done had it not been for that house 17 burning down no one knows. Then he worked his way through college. His last year was spent at the BYU. Then he taught school for a number of years in Arizona. Then he ran an Intermountain Feed Company for nineteen years. That folded up. Since then he has retired. He has recently filled another mission with his wife in practically the same area that part of his mission was filled in Namaquipa down by Monterrey. AJ: He doesn’t want any pity. He doesn’t want you to do something just because he has got just one arm. I have seen him fold a sheet up very nicely with just one arm. AMJ: This is the sort of thing he did with one arm and with a pocket knife. He made several big plaques, one that he gave to the school in Silver City and one that he gave to the BYU. He can do anything. He binds his own books. He binds his own history. He figured out a way to do it. He does them all by himself. He doesn’t need any help. There is nothing dependent about him. AJ: I never saw a man grown such a wonderful crop of greens in a five gallon can. HE didn’t have the land there in California, so he used five gallon cans. He got worms to enrich his soil. He had really some wonderful greens there. AMJ: He can’t quite get away from the soil. Right now he has a garden two miles away from where he is living. He just has to experiment and see what he can do with the ground and soil and seeds. MC: What were the other sisters and brothers on the other side of the family like? AMJ: I wish I had a list of them, but I don’t. I have loaned my sheet. Nellie, Norman, Zella, Lula and Lavina were the five that grew up. Aunt didn’t have as quite as good luck with her nine children as Mother did with hers. Nellie has always been the dearest, dearest 18 sister. She is just as sweet as she can be. She is a little younger than Ben. Her oldest was Reed. He was three months older than I. We lived within a couple of blocks of each other. Then her daughter Olive was just younger. We naturally played together a great deal. I remember Nellie was always so thoughtful. She didn’t have very much to do with. Brother Done had two other families, and Nellie’s children came along just as fast as children could come. They never did have very much in the way of house or food or extras, but Nellie always had something extra to give to the children when they came to play, some little treat. I remember several times, especially on Reed’s birthday, she would take a little basket of cookies, go to school and give the whole room a treat of cookies. I thought that was so sweet. AJ: She is a sweet old soul. I think a lot of Nellie. AMJ: She is a dear. Since I have been here and she has been living up at Norman’s in Ogden, Utah, she always manages to call me on the phone when she comes down to stay with Olive, her daughter. We don’t get to see each other very much very often. Once in a while we meet at the temple, go through a session together and maybe eat a meal together. She always calls me and we have a little chat. She has been so ambitious. She has done lots of netting in her life. She taught me to net. She isn’t a bit selfish with the things that she knows and can do. If she had a little clump of a plant that someone else wants, they are welcome to have a share of it. She has given me sage, comfrey and other things that she has managed to grow there at Olive’s and Norman’s there. I never was very close to Norman. All I remember of him before he went on his mission was that he kept company with Fannie Chandler. Norman was living up on the farm. He would have to take Fannie to a dance in a wagon and then take her home. 19 Then he would have to drive the three miles back up to the farm. She didn’t like to have him leave. She would stand with her back against the door to keep him from leaving. I remember that little story. He was called on a mission to the Central States. I don’t know how long he was there before the Exodus. When the Exodus came and there was no funds and now way of earning money to keep him there, he had to leave the mission. He went and met Father in Afton, Wyoming. There he met my cousin Florence and married her. She was my cousin on my mother’s side. They had their oldest son Ivin and their twins Olive and Oren before they moved into Mexico. While they were in Mexico, I was in my teens. I just loved Florence. She was the only cousin I had ever seen. I felt that she was something very extra special. I was always welcome to her place. Oh, they loved Joe! Norman and Florence just dearly loved Joe. He could go there any time, day or night and find something to eat. He was always wanting something to eat. I dearly loved Norman. I admired what he could do. He was such a good carpenter. He did such fine, meticulous work. Then when they left Mexico and moved to Ogden, he did carpenter work and building there for quite some time. When I went up there to see them once, he took me around to show me the houses that he had had a hand in building. It was at that time that he decided to be a masseur and not do carpenter work anymore. I just grieved at that. With him able to do such magnificent work with his hands and not to keep on doing it! You couldn’t take him away from his handy work. He continued to make beautiful things for his home and others. Lavina was a dear prize. I don’t remember her at all as a girl because she married and moved to Idaho before the Exodus. Then she divorced her husband. She had the two little girls, Della and Bessie. Bessie was about five and Della was about nine or ten when they 20 moved back into Mexico. They lived with us, so I was very close to Lavina. She was real generous with showing me things. She was so handy making flowers and dainty things. She was real generous with her knowledge and shared it with everybody. She made hats, and she was so good. Her daughter Della and I got along just beautifully. We never quarreled from that day till this. Lula and I couldn’t get along at all for one reason or another. She was about three years older than I. I guess she felt she should be boss, and I felt that I ought to have my way, too. We were always quarrelling. Father was always getting after us for everlastingly quarreling. I don’t know what we quarreled about, but we couldn’t get along with the housework. I wanted to do it one way, she wanted to do it another. No matter what it was we had to do, we disagreed on it. Della and I were just perfect pals even though she was five years younger than I. After she was married and I came up to visit her, she would introduce me to her friends as her favorite aunt, the one that she never quarreled with. Bessie was a lot younger. I taught her when I was teaching school in Dublan. Somehow we didn’t get along as well as Della and I did. She irked me somehow or other, but since we have both grown, I love Bessie and I get along with her fine. I’m sure that if I lived next door to her we would be perfect neighbors. Della and I have just been the ideal companions. Shew as handy like her mother, and she always was sure that I shared in the things that she learned to do. I lived down in Kane County in a little old out-of-the-way town where I didn’t have any chance for learning things. Della was always going to little night classes and WPA projects and learning to do things. She always saw that I had the same thing. She would send me samples and show me how to do things. She is just a chip off of the block when it comes to being like her mother. She was such a dear, and she still is. She and I 21 are great friends. Then there was Zella. Zella was different from any of the family on either side. I don’t know why, but she just was. She was headstrong. She couldn’t get along with Father. She couldn’t get along with her mother. As soon as she was able to leave the nest, she stayed in El Paso. They moved back into Mexico after Aunt Olive had been to Davenport to the chiropractic school, and she and Lavina and Lavina’s two little girls and Lula went back, Zella didn’t go. She stayed in El Paso, and she was on her own after that. She was good-hearted. She would give anybody her last sock if she had to wade in the snow barefoot. When it came to just plain getting along with people, she just didn’t. After I moved to Salt Lake, she was here, a widow and all alone. She just had one son. She was a real good friend of mine. We were good pals. I guess we had to grow up to learn to appreciate each other. We knew that there were things about each other that we didn’t like, but we sort of let that slip over. She was real good to me, and I tried my best to be good to her. The housework was divided evenly. We took turns. One week I would do the bedroom work and clean up the front room, and Lula would do the cooking. The next week we would trade around. We did the washing together and the ironing together. Those ironings we had! A big number three tub piled high with it! We had two ironing boards and the old sad irons that we heated on the stove. What a hot day it was when we had to iron. We would sing together while we ironed, and that was the most fun. The songs we usually sang would be out of the Deseret Sunday School Song Book. We would set up a song book, and we would go through it from one side to the other and sing those songs. There are other songs we would sing, but those are the main ones. I guess that is why we enjoyed ironing because we made fun of it. 22 AJ: Any work is a drag if you don’t have a purpose for it or if you don’t try to understand or appreciate it. I don’t know that I have felt well now. But I am so happy that I can do things, that I have the strength to do things. That is the thing that thrills me. AMJ: Since we have both been grown up and were not together anymore, we don’t even correspond. I have learned to appreciate her wonderful ability. I never, world without end, could have done the things that she has done. She raised a big family of stepchildren and worked hard side by side with her husband on their citrus orchard there in Mesa. She has not had good health for many years, but she still keeps going, no one knows how. I admire Lula very much. We had our differences. They are all very good Latter-Day Saints. The whole family are people that anybody can be proud to own as brothers and sisters. MC: Did your mother ever mention what she thought when she was first asked to enter polygamy? AMJ: No, not that I know of. That is one thing that they missed out on in raising their families. None of them talked about their families, their fathers and mothers, our grandparents, our uncles and aunts. They didn’t talk about their past. When Aunt Olive got down to brass tacks and wrote up a family history, it was just like digging up the dead. Nobody had taken the time, thought or energy to tell us about those things. I don’t know how Mother felt about it but I do know that Father and Aunt Olive prayed and fasted for three or four days when they decided to go into polygamy. I saw my uncle, my mother’s brother when he was real old. He was very, very bitter against polygamy because I believe three of his sisters had married into polygamy, Mother being one of them. He told us about it. He said, “Polygamy was just going round, it was just like a disease. 23 Everybody who came to visit the little town of Eden would preach polygamy. They would go to Conference, and they would hear polygamy. Any speaker who got up and bore testimony on Sunday preached about polygamy.” His little sisters caught it and married into polygamy. He said, “That Brother Eglleston came around to court my little Cathy. As he remembered it, he came to court her when she was only twelve years old. So the boys were bitter; they almost left the Church because of it. They just thought it was outrageous. I really don’t know how my mother felt. She was seventeen when she married my father. She must have been very sincere. Her father had married another wife, and she was a widow. They didn’t get along well. She was a domineering person, and they didn’t stay together very long. I guess maybe the boys had had a taste of polygamy firsthand. AJ: You wonder at seventeen whether they realize what they are going into. AMJ: I really wonder if Mother realized what she was getting into. Father was young and good looking, a strong, husky man, capable, a hard worker. I guess he was a man to be admired. Aunt Olive was a persuasive person. She was nice looking and kind and gentle. I guess Mother just felt like that was the Lord’s will. That is what it was; it was the Lord’s will. I was like a commandment to them. AJ: If they felt that it was the Lord’s will, nothing stopped them. I remember when my father told about when he courted Mother. Father was a big contractor in Ogden. At the time that he courted Mother, Mother had just recently come from England. He was quite wellto-do, but he didn’t want her to marry him for his money. Mother said, “I think your father hunted the rag sack.” Mother was knitting in a store of Lorin Farr’s. She had asked Lorin Farr to send her some money to help her to get from Illinois to Utah. Then she would 24 pay it back by knitting. She had the knitting machine. Brother Farr put up a bench up in his store by the window. Mother would knit there, and people would watch her. It drew customers for him. They would watch her turn a handle there and here comes out a stocking in just a hurry. One day he said to Bennie Rich, a son-in-law of Lorin Farr, “I want you to take a vacation. I want to propose to Miss Scott.” Father said, “If you marry me, they will probably put us both in jail.” Mother said, “That won’t matter if it is the Lord’s will.” He said, “I’ve prayed about it, and you can pray about it.” It wasn’t a very enticing way to get her, “If you marry me, we’ll both be put in jail.” They didn’t pad the walk. They didn’t make it easy. MC: You said you taught in both Dublan and in Garcia. Where did you teach first? AMJ: In Garcia. Joe and I taught school. He graduated from high school. In the schools down there, they couldn’t afford to pay top salaries for their schoolteachers. They gave us a course in high school. They called it pedagogy and psychology, a half a year each. Then we had some practice teaching. They trained the grade school teachers up in high school. When we graduated from high school, we were ready to be teachers. After Joe got home from his mission, he finished high school there. He was student body president. He really did a bang up job there that last year he went to school. Then I got my last year of high school the same year in Duncan, Arizona, when I was living with my brother Ben. We went there to teach in Garcia. We both feel that that was a very successful year. He got into scouting though he had never had any experience as a scout. He didn’t know the first thing about it. That was when the Church first took over scouting. He got a handbook. He learned scouting right along with the boys. Those boys did love him. They just thought the world of him. No one could help but like Joe. I wish 25 you could meet him. He taught a Sunday school class and I believe a Mutual Class. I was Primary chorister and taught the Seagull girls. They were the twelve and thirteen year old girls at that time. I did enjoy those girls. They were the dearest little girls ever made. We felt that our year there was extraordinary. We had gotten a lot of tips about teaching and the tricks of the trade from my niece Edith, Laura’s daughter. She had taught a year or two, and she had a lot of material. We were both in Duncan the summer before we went to Garcia to teach. She just turned over everything she had learned to us. We had a lot of good ideas to put over that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. We feel that year of school was very successful. Then Joe stayed there. I felt that if I left Garcia that Joe would. I had no idea he would stay there. When Dublan offered me a job, I went to Dublan. I taught two years in Dublan. I think that I did a good job of teaching because I loved it. I had taught in organizations since I was fourteen. I started teaching Primary when I was fourteen. One year when we went to high school, Lula and I both taught in Primary. I got my education right along. Every time I got a handbook or a teacher’s manual or a class manual, I would read the introduction; I would read the preface; I would read all the aids. I just made up my mind that whatever class I taught was the most important thing in the world. I would learn all I could about it. I had taught myself to be a good teacher. AJ: I believe you have because you are certainly well liked in your course of teaching in the Relief Society. The ward here just thinks you are tops in that. I think you must have been a good one. AMJ: I tried. I made up my mind. I have had this as my motto. Nobody else is going to teach this class, nobody else in the Church is going to teach class better than I do. I t might 26 not be as good as somebody else, but nobody well try harder. When I was in Dublan teaching those two years, I taught the Seagull girls. I had very good success with those girls. It was just wonderful. Now I am teaching the cultural refinement lessons in Relief Society. I have done so for several years. I have enjoyed it. I worked in the Primary for a number of years after I was married and lived in Alton. Primary was my big love. I was stake chorister and stake play leader when they had those things. I really enjoyed it. I loved my work, and everybody appreciated me. That was the one thing that kept me going was that no matter what class I taught, I was appreciated. That is what makes me have such an enjoyable time that they like it. I feel that I am doing a real good job in my Relief Society. So it is all worthwhile. MC: Which of your sisters were married in polygamy? AMJ: Laura. MC: How about your Aunt Olive’s children? AMJ: Nellie was the only one. MC: Were they married in Colonia Dublan? AMJ: Yes, they were married in Dublan. There was a controversy about that. I wrote it down just like Olive, Nellie’s daughter, told me, just like she wrote it down. When Laura and Nellie were married, they were sealed in Mexico. They didn’t go to a temple to be sealed. Norman to this day maintains that they are not sealed to their husbands. When they wake up on resurrection morning, they are not going to belong to their husbands. Nellie and Laura have both told me. I believe it was Lorenzo Snow who went down there and did a lot of sealing’s right at the time when they were going to cut off 27 polygamy. They weren’t going to have any more plural marriages down there. They were going to do away with that. There were quite a few that were married right there along about that same time. Whatever apostle it was went down there for that express purpose to seal those young married people to their husband’s right there. Nellie and Laura came up to conference at the same time and got their endowments. Neither one went to the temple and were sealed to their husbands because they were sealed down there in Mexico. AJ: Joseph Smith did some sealing not in the temple. At first he tested them, and made them feel that the Lord wanted him to take the wife of this man. Bless their hearts, they were willing to abide by the will of the Lord. When he saw how willing they were to abide by the will of the Lord, he took their hands and put them together and he sealed them. It seems to me that John W. Taylor, the son of President Taylor, was cut off from the Church for performing some plural marriages after the Manifesto was passed. Now whether he went down in Mexico and performed those plural marriages or not, I don’t know. But he was excommunicated. AMJ: Olive talked to Apostle Melvin J. Ballard about it once when he was in El Paso. She was living with her brother-in-law, Bishop Pierce, and Brother Ballard was there to conference. Olive pinned him down and asked him about those. She wanted to get it straight just what her mother’s status was. He told her, “Don’t you worry, Olive. Your mother and your father are sealed just as well as if they had gone to the temple and had been sealed. That work was done through the advice of the authority of the President of the Church. They are sealed.” 28 AJ: If he said that, I would worry about it then. It seems to me that that was the reason that John W. Taylor was cut off from the Church. He performed plural marriage after the Manifesto was passed. It was going on some afterwards, and there were a number of people that had to be excommunicated. Mathias F. Cowley, the father of Matthew Cowley, who was such a wonderful missionary in the Pacific, was disfellowshipped. For years he wasn’t used in the Church. I understand the last few years of his life he performed a wonderful work in the Eastern States, and died in full fellowship in the Church. John W. Taylor I am quite sure was cut off from the Church for performing plural marriages. MC: When was this that these sisters married in polygamy? AMJ: That was in 1903. MC: The manifesto was earlier than this. AMJ: It was in 1896, wasn’t it? AJ: It was in Wilford Woodruff’s time, so it would be before 1903 because by 1903 Joseph F. Smith became president of the Church. MC: What did your sisters think about living in polygamy? AMJ: I think it was just like it was with my mother. It was commandment of the Lord. They were doing the Lord’s will. They were going to be rewarded because of what they were doing. They were just as sincere as you or I are about going to sacrament meeting. We wouldn’t think of not going to sacrament meeting. They wouldn’t think of not living in polygamy. It was just that simple. They were just converted to it. MC: What did they do after they moved back into the United States? 29 AMJ: They just went right on. Nobody said anything. The people came back and lived in the United States and kept on living with the two wives. IF there was any trouble with the law, with their neighbors or with anybody, it was because there was friction between the two sides of the families. With the families who just went ahead and lived their religion, nobody questioned. There were not too many of them in my recollection. Will and Laura were there in Duncan, Arizona. Nobody questioned them. They were just good people, good citizens. As I recall, nobody made any bones about it. AJ: You might say there was a problem here. After the Manifesto was passed, my father kept his two wives. When the marshals were hunting the polygamists down, the plural wives would be moved around to different places. They took assumed names. I remember that Mother told me that she was living up in Logan I think at the time, when the Manifesto was passed. Some neighbor came to her and told her that she would never see her husband anymore. He wouldn’t have anything to do with her anymore. She said, “I will see my husband.” That night he came up to see Mother. Mother told him about it, and he said “take me to your friend.” He went and talked to her. He said, “I’ll be gun fodder before I will give up one of my loved ones.” There were quite a number of polygamists that gave up their wives, and it was a choice one. Maybe it was the first wife; maybe it was another wife. I don’t consider that they were thoroughly converted to the principal of polygamy. I think they were thoroughly converted to more than one wife. Father said that he was called to go into it and that his first wife wanted him to go into it. She said “you remember the promise we made.” She was very sick at the time. In fact, she was going to die. He said, “This is no time to talk about it.” She said, “Well, it is. We must keep that holy principal.” Father said, “Will you help me pick 30 her out?” “No, that is something you must do yourself,” she said. I feel that Mother and Aunt Lizzie got along wonderfully together. I think that Mother got along and Aunt Lizzie got along with the other wife’s children very well. I don’t think that Mother had any trouble with the children of the first wife. I thought a lot of Aunt Lizzie. I remember I lived with her one winter while I attended school. She was just as good to me as my own mother would have been under those conditions. There is bound to be a little jealousy. We would sometimes think that a little partiality was shown to one or the other. That is human nature. I remember when I was on a mission. I had understood that the people would rail to us about polygamy. Before they got a chance to say anything about polygamy to me, I would tell them I was a polygamous child. Never a one of them brought up an argument because I could have told them when they were lying. I would have known whether they were telling the truth or not because I had lived through it. I knew. It takes very good people. They have to be very unselfish. AMJ: I think the main thing is they have to be converted that that was the thing to do. AJ: Yes, I do too, Mother. MC: Tell me a little bit more about your father. AMJ: Father was very harsh with his older children. Everyone one of them will testify to that. I guess by the time I came along he was mellowed. He was not harsh with me. Maybe it was because I was the youngest, and he knew that I would always be the baby. Personally I don’t remember of Father ever whipping me. It seems that was his principle mode of discipline with the older children. It was just to give them a good sound whipping. Maybe it was to vent his own feelings. 31 AJ: I believe in many cases that is what most people do. AMJ: I think so. But somehow or another I didn’t get in on that. He was not really tender until after Mother died. Mother died in Canutillo, Texas. We almost immediately after that moved back into Mexico. Verna had just married. Verna and Ernest had gone into Mexico just ahead of us. We followed their trail. There was just Joe and I at home. I guess Father felt that he had to be both father and mother to me and to Joe. He wasn’t lenient with us, not in the least, but he wasn’t harsh like he had been with the older children. I always knew my Father was a dyed in the wool Mormon. We never would think of working on Sunday or not going to church, not going to Sunday school, not doing our duty. I would never have thought of missing Mutual, Primary or whatever it was I was supposed to have been to. Father never missed a priesthood meeting. Whatever we were supposed to do in the Church, we just took it for granted just the same as you get up in the morning and have breakfast. We got up in the morning and went to church. We did whatever we were supposed to. Father was a strict tither payer. There was a tenth of everything went to the bishop for tithing. It was given in kind. We paid our wheat or flour or hay or corn or whatever it was we had. After he left Mexico, he didn’t have the kind to pay in. He was just living on the rent or the price that was being paid for his farm that he sold in Mexico when he was living in Mesa. He had a big long pouch purse. It was divided down the middle. On one side he would put his tithing. When he would get his money, when he would get his payment, one side would be for tithing, and the other side would be to use. The first chance he got, he went to the bishop and he made his tithing out. It was divided off before he ever spent a nickel. HE was just as staunch with fasting and prayer. We never, worlds without end, went without 32 Morning Prayer and Night Prayer. I remember some of the phrases he used in his prayer to this day. I often think about it, and I can just hear my father praying. He always sounded like he was talking to God, that he really believed that God was right there and heard him. We were brought up with that spiritual atmosphere. We like to sing hymns together. We always had either an organ or a piano in the home. It was just a homey atmosphere, just the nicest atmosphere that one could ever expect. So I had great admiration for my father and reverenced him as a God-fearing man. AJ: I think that one thing that you said has made me have great respect for your father. When that Mexican desperado was going to come in there with his band and wipe out your town, your father and most of the priesthood members went to the meeting. Your bishop told them after the meeting, “Now you go home and put your lights out, go to bed and everything will be all right.” He went home and he said, “That is the word of the Lord to me.” That shows the man right there. AMJ: Yes, he always had respect for authority. We never heard a word about anybody, from the President of the Church down to the last home teacher. When ward teachers came, our house was turned over to them and we just let them take over. HE was very respectful for everybody. We just knew that he loved and respected the bishop. The bishop was a God-given man. He was just someone who was to watch over us. MC: What do you remember about the Exodus? AMJ: What I remember about the Exodus! We got word that we were to leave. The president of the stake, Junius Romney, conferred by telegram with the President of the Church and told all of the nine colonies that it was the opinion of the Church Authorities that the Mormons had better leave Mexico. They weren’t going to be safe there anymore. It was 33 quite a lark to me. It was after I had turned eight. It was just the excitement of packing up things somewhere, doing something different. I was frightened of the soldiers marching up and down the street on their horses, but it was because everybody else was frightened. Those soldiers looked great going up and down the street. It was just like a parade. That was the way I felt about it. Mother was paralyzed. She was privileged to go in a passenger car. There were only a few passenger cars allotted to Dublan. Verna had to go to take care of her. I was the baby, so I went. Aunt Olive and all the rest of them went in boxcars. They were just crammed in there like a bunch of sardines with their luggage and all they possessed. When we got to Ciudad Juarez, we stopped there for customs. The trains stopped, and the inspection went on. It was at night. My brother Ben was living in El Paso at that time. He was there to meet us. So we were favored. I don’t believe Aunt Olive went to Ben’s. I think she just fared along with everybody else and was just dumped in El Paso. There was a big lumber shed where everybody who didn’t have anywhere else to go could go and camp. Ben took us in. For the first week or so or whatever it was until we could get a home rented, we were at my brother’s. I missed all of the experience, just going and being dumped out practically on the street like so many of them were. But it still was a great lark. I didn’t realize the seriousness of it. I had to leave some of my precious things. I took my favorite doll. But my doll buggy had to be left. My little play cupboard and all the dishes were left right there. I thought I would come back. I never dreamed that maybe I would never come back there to all that. Some of them came out overland with cows and horses. Another time we left Mexico again after we moved back and came out again. That time I had the privilege of coming out in a box car. That was fun! We just had big 34 lark, just stashed in there with all our things. They had those big wide doors. They had boards nailed across to keep up from falling out. All the children in there would sit with our feet dangling out of the boxcars as it went along. The trains was so slow the biggest part of the time. We went around the shoo-flies. That was when bandits had blown up the railroad bridges. They had built just what they called the shoo-flies, the railroad track going out around the wash, out around where the bridge was supposed to be. It felt like it was going to tip the cars right over. We could see the end of the train from where we were going, circling around those big shoo-flies. We had fun. The boys would even slide down under those boards, walk along and gather up flowers and pretty rocks. Then we would come and boost them back in. That was as slow as the train went as it went around those shoo-flies. When we got to Ciudad Juarez, it was night. We had to go through inspection. We didn’t have anybody to go to at that time, nobody to meet us. Ben had moved away. We had to stop in the night and wait for morning to come. I remember old lady Fredrickson fell in the canal. She had been in the same boxcar with us. It was quite a thing to think that she had insisted on getting out and walking around. She was tired of being cramped up in the boxcar. It didn’t hurt her. It just got her wet. It was a real experience, I’m telling you! But Aunt Olive’s story will tell all about how the family fared and where they moved after the Exodus. AJ: I am kind of glad I eavesdropped. I am sure you haven’t told me all these things. MC: Thank you. 35