Oral History Program Leo Stokes Interviewed by Jane Stokes August 1980 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Leo Stokes Interviewed by Jane Stokes August 1980 Copyright © 2014 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. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. 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 Kelley Evans, 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. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Stokes, Leo, an oral history by Jane Stokes, August 1980, 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 Leo Stokes. The interview was conducted in August 1980. Stokes discusses the settlement of the Bothwell and Tremonton area, including living conditions, medical care, agriculture, LDS Church and Apostolic Church development, and Indian interactions and communities. LS: Joseph Stokes and Sarah Eliza Summers Stokes settled in Bothwell. My father was an overseer on the central farm and had 50 men under him, and mother cooked in this cook shack along with Pheny Gibson, and they fed 50 men every day, three times a day. Father and Mother were on the central farm, and they had five sections of land, but he managed for a man from Salt Lake City or – no, anyway he came here – and he was the overseer of that piece of land, five sections. In the first year that they farmed it, they raised 5,000 bushels of wheat on the land on the five sections. JS: Is that a lot, or is that very little? LS: Well, a section is 360 acres. JS: But is 5,000 bushels of wheat a lot? LS: A very small amount. JS: Did they have irrigation at that time? LS: The canal came in 1892, and the ground was uneven. They had to make big go bevelers, sic go bevel the ditches and make streams, and push it over the land. Then it turned out to be mineral ground. But Father and Mother worked together, and they took up a homestead. The first year, they went and cleared the sagebrush off of 25 acres, and they planted it that fall. The next summer, the hot wind came and burned it up. They didn’t get no crop on it at all. That’s when Father took this job of being overseer on the 1 central farm. Then he sold his homestead right for $37 to Uncle Eff; that was his brother-in-law. Then Father had no more land that you could homestead. He didn’t have a chance to use his homestead right after that. So then he came up here and bought a 15 acre place, and they settled along the canal there, where they could get some water from the spring on the hill. They made kind of a little congregation – not a congregation, but a settlement there. I remember the families playing together. There was Uncle Tom Priest and Brother Hunsaker. JS: Who was Uncle Tom Priest? Grandpa’s brother? Joseph Stoke’s brother? LS: Uncle Tom Priest married Father’s sister, Aunt Maggie, and they settled there. Then they built a little schoolhouse right next door to them there. That’s where I went to school. But later they built a school down in the middle section, and then they had a school down there. We used to walk a mile and a half to school after they discontinued this little building up here. Then after they discarded or done away with that little schoolhouse, Father bought that school and built his home and remodeled his home with the material in it, and it still stands there. It’s been remodeled two or three times. JS: That’s where Dolores lives? LS: Yes. But Mother was a kind, sweet woman. She was real sweet. She was good to her family and good to her father. He worked for 22 or 23 years in a bishopric, and she helped him all through those years. She wasn’t an educated woman. She only went to about the third or fourth grade. She wasn’t a fast reader, but you could spell a word to her, and she could tell you the word right off, what it was. But she never had no schooling because she had to work to help her mother. She was a widow lady, so she had to work and take the money home to her mother. 2 JS: Mother mentioned that her father was a sheepherder and moved from place to place. Is that true? LS: Father had a herd of sheep, a ban of sheep. This valley was open, plenty of grass, no one to bother them until the people started settling here. Then they began to fence it up, and that’s what crowded Father out of the sheep business. He didn’t own the land, and he just ran the sheep on it. JS: But did your mother’s father, did Grandfather Summers have a sheep farm? LS: He died. No. They came here, Grandma with four boys and three girls, and they made their home in this little two-room shack down there. Of course Grandma passed away. JS: So the reason your mother was not educated was because she had to go out and work. LS: They didn’t think much of education in those days. There wasn’t any schools around, so they could go to school. I think Ella could tell you more about her than I could. She lived with her for so long. JS: Well, tell me about – what did her father do for a living? What was Grandfather Summer’s life like? LS: Well, Grandpa Summers died, before he came here, with asthma... Yes, and heart trouble. He died and left the three girls and four boys: Uncle Eff, Uncle James, Uncle Tom, and Uncle Heber. Uncle Heber never married. But they all raised families here, and then Grandma passed away and Uncle wasn’t a married man only just a few years before Grandma died. He married Louie Payne, and they sold the place. Uncle Joe sold the place right from under Grandma and left her without a thing, and she had to sponge off her family to live. She went from house to house, that’s Grandma Summers JS: Did she live with you, too? 3 LS: Yes. Father was real sick. Father got so he couldn’t stand to have her there anymore, so he told them he couldn’t help anymore. But he did his part as long as he could... JS: So your mother, being the oldest of the family, probably had a lot of responsibility? LS: Oh, very much. Mother used to work out for a lady and, of course, Mother hadn’t been trained too much for housekeeping. But this lady took her, and she says, “Now, Sarah, I’m throwing some peppers in the corner so that I’ll know you are sweeping in the corner. When you get that pepper smell, I know that you’re deep cleaning.” But she was a kind woman, and she was a good wife to my father... JS: Was she a good cook? LS: Oh, excellent cook! Excellent! JS: If she couldn’t read recipes, how did she cook? LS: She had them in her mind. JS: Just this and that, huh? LS: You bet. And then Father used to always have the LDS general authorities come on Saturday night, or Friday night, and stay over Sunday. All day Sunday, Mother had to cook for them. She was always cooking for the general authorities, Father being a bishop. They didn’t do it like they do now. They had to come on the train from Salt Lake or Brigham or wherever they were, and they’d come and make themselves at home to the bishop’s place. Then he’d get the team and take them back to the train, and then they would go on the next Monday morning. JS: Where was the train station – in Corinne? LS: Tremonton. JS: My mother, Ella, said that your mother had some superstitions like she was afraid of 4 thunder and lightning, and she was afraid of different things. LS: She was a nervous person. She hated to have lightning. She’d go in the closet and shut the door so she wouldn’t hear it. But still, she was a swell mother. The family loved her a real lot. I went with Father and Mother up to the herd one time, and I remember we spread out a tablecloth and had our lunch underneath the buggy, and they called it the Mockingbird Canyon. Do you know where Blond Springs is? JS: Toward the Eastwest. LS: Yes, and then it’s beyond there 20 miles. That’s where the sheep were, and it would take us all day to get to the herd. The coyotes were so bad in the valley at that time that they’d sit lanterns out around the herd of sheep when they were lambing so the coyotes wouldn’t come in and kill the little lambs. But that didn’t prove to be very good. The coyotes would bring a lamb up around the light so they could see to eat it. JS: So your dad worked as a sheepherder at first, and then he went on. LS: He owned his own sheep, and then Father had this little place, 15 acres, then he had 90 acres down in Section 2, what we called Section 2 in the next section, and he could have bought any of this land for $4 an acre. JS: What’s it worth now? LS: The dry land that hasn’t got water on it sold for $2,500 an acre. JS: What’s the land that’s got water to it worth? LS: Oh, around $3,000 an acre JS: I had a botany class once, and they told me this land out here is the most beautiful land in the whole world. Have you heard that before? LS: Yes, it’s a strong land. Of course we have some land up here, blow sand, which don’t 5 amount to a lot. But there’s very little of it. But you know when Father and Mother first came here, they could turn their cattle out and get them at night, and milk them, and never had to feed them, just put a little for them in the winter. They had plenty of summer pasture. Of course that’s about what they lived on was their garden and our animals that we butchered for eating. We’d prepare in the summertime for the winter. But I remember Father when he was a presiding elder, he had three areas to look after – Promontory, Penrose, Howell and Bothwell, and Thatcher, and he was the presiding elder over that group. There were five wards. There weren’t very many people in it, though. JS: But that’s a lot of acreage. How much – I mean, that’s a long ways to go around. LS: It’s a long way from Promontory out to Howell. JS: So it kept him busy, didn’t it, just watching out for everyone? LS: Well, you imagine a horse – he rode a horse. Now, I’m doing more talking about Father than Mother. Now, she was there. She helped and she was a good helper. JS: My mother says she was a very good housekeeper. LS: She was neat, and boy, I’ll tell you, she was neat! Clean! People would come, and she would get up out of bed and make supper for them. They’d come a long distance, like from Logan with a horse and buggy, and come to Father’s place at eight or nine in the evening. Father would always have a nice mutton hanging on the barrack sic , and he always tried. Brother Hawkins and Sister Hawkins came and said, “Oh, didn’t we used to love to come to your father’s place and mother’s place. We just love them.” So he got Brother and Sister Hawkins a place out here, and he loaned them a cow to milk. That’s just how poor the people were. They were just real poor. 6 JS: When you got sick, what kinds of medicines did your mother use since they didn’t have any modern medicines? LS: For Grandma, or for the family? JS: Yes. What did she use? LS: Epsom salts. Get a good dose of Epsom salts down you, and it will sure help you. Then they used to use Ward liniment to rub with. But you know, there were a lot of people that died with diphtheria and typhoid fever, all them old bad diseases. We had an epidemic of typhoid fever and diphtheria, and they buried three out of four people. Coles had a little girl that died, and they just pushed the casket out the door, and they wouldn’t bury them in the daylight. They’d take them in the night between two saddle horses in snow five feet deep, they drifted in that roadway up to the cemetery. Imagine them shoveling all that snow and then digging that grave, and then no services. They’d just lower the little infant in its grave, and then Coles pushed his little daughter out through the door. She had diphtheria when she died. They called the bishopric, and the bishopric was the undertakers and everything in those days. Of course, Mother, when she cared for us, that was after Father died. Ella, Olien, myself, and Mabel, all went down with that flu. She cared for all of us. Oh, we were sick for three weeks or four, couldn’t get out of bed. She just waited on us, and that was a terrible disease. JS: Was your mother a very affectionate person? LS: Oh, lovely. She was a sweet thing. The only thing about Grandma, she had her feelings hurt. She’d never talk back with you. She’d just shed a few tears. I’d say, “Mother, what’s the matter?” “Oh,” she said, “I’ve got the blues,” and the tears would drop down her cheek. We’d give her a pat on the back and give her a kiss and, you know, she was 7 tenderhearted. JS: Like all of us. I’m that way, too. Now how old was she when she got cancer? LS: Well, she died when she was about 63 or 64, but she had an operation on her breast about 10 years before that. JS: So when she was about 53, she got cancer? Wasn’t it unusual at that time to operate like that? LS: They would just take the breast right off. JS: Well, was that very common? LS: That was very common. They didn’t have it as much as we do now because there were less people then than there are now. There’s a lot of that cancer going around now. The world is full of it, isn’t it? JS: Yeah, and then she had a bad heart, didn’t she? LS: Yes. That’s what she died of. JS: I understand a lot of the Summers family had bad hearts. LS: Well, they died real young. There’s Uncle Eff. He died with a bad heart, and Uncle James died on the haystack, stacking hay. Uncle Tom had rheumatism so bad he couldn’t walk. He’d just hobble around. He never could do his work. He always had a hired man to help him. But they raised big families in those days. It didn’t seem like it made any difference. JS: Life just went on. Mother said that she had some cute sayings, or some different sayings, that she used to say, like, “This life and then the next, and then the iron stone.” LS: Then came the ironworks. JS: The ironworks, yeah. What does that mean? Do you know? 8 LS: Well, now, I guess maybe you have to go through the fiery furnace. JS: Oh, I see. Okay. LS: Then comes the fireworks, she said. JS: Oh, I see. The fireworks. LS: Mother was a kind lady. She never talked back to anyone. I remember one time when the boys down to the church house bothered her, and kept kicking away and pulling on her dress, and even took hold of her glove and pulled it away from her. I was really upset, so when I got outside, I hit him right in the jaw, and Father says, “Son, what did you walk home from church for?” “Oh,” I said, “I got tired of waiting for you, Dad.” But I was afraid maybe Dad would get after me for hitting him. But he says, “Son, that done me a world of good. He needed straightening out, and you did it.” I said, “Don’t you ever touch my mother again, and pull away at her scarf and things.” So when I he got outside, I belted him one. But, you know, I had a good friend in that fellow after that. He used to be my best friend. I had an old lady by the name of Sister Anderson. She lived in Thatcher, and she was the Relief Society president. She says, “Oh, I did look for your father.” She was Danish. She says, “I looked and I looked for your father to come and tell me how to run my Relief Society.” I remember she told me that when I was quite an old person. But she was a sweet lady. I don’t know, we had a group of Amish people that came into this valley and settled. It was predicted in the early days by some of our authorities that the eastern people would come and build this valley up. See, after the canal came in, it went to mineral. They had 9 to tile it, all the lower land. The water come up so close, it brought the mineral, and they couldn’t raise crops on it. JS: How come that happened? LS: Well, see the underground water brought the mineral up. JS: Oh, I see. LS: These people, even John Summers over here on the Salt Creek, he made a brickyard, and he made brick out of that clay on the Salt Creek, and they built the first schoolhouse with it. All these big tall homes that most everyone have done away with now, but they built two-story homes, and they brought money from the East, and a lot of them went away from here bankrupt. They were good people just the same. They were from the Apostolic Church, the Amish Church, they called it. They’d go to church all day and take their horses and buggies. Just going into Tremonton, where that canal runs through Tremonton there, there used to be an Amish church or Apostolic Church, and a big stable there, where they stabled their horses for the day on Sunday. JS: Where was that, now? LS: In Tremonton... when you just go into Tremonton. There’s a canal that goes there, and they were on the west side of that canal. They would stay all day, and the custom was that they would wash each other’s feet, you see. That was the custom. Of course it took after the Savior. He had his feet washed, you know, and anointed, and they would anoint other people. They were a good people, anyway. One of the boys said, “Even though your father was a Mormon bishop, he treated us boys just like one of his own. We loved him.” And Father was kind to everyone, and so was Mother. 10 They were kind, and if ever anybody would come, Mother was always up, 10 and 11 o’clock at night, making them supper. They couldn’t go to motels and restaurants in those days. Then they had a horse and buggy, and we had to feed the horse. I saw Mother and Father take the widow lady’s cows down in the corral, and they would come and milk them, and we’d feed them. You know, Father could have been a rich man. Of course he didn’t have any money to go with to help him as much as anyone, but he got sick too early in life. When he should have been doing something, he was sick, and Mother cared for him just like a baby. JS: You obviously had a good garden. Who would take care of the garden? Your mother or your father? LS: Well, Uncle Will came to our place to live. He divorced his wife after 13 children and came to live with Father, and he won more women. He won several women. He wanted to be a high priest in the life to come. And Father says, “Now, Will, you leave those women alone and go back and live with your wife. You’ve been on a mission, and you know better.” He said, “Oh, Joe, it’s true. We’ve got to have more women or else we can’t hit the highest celestial kingdom in the hereafter.” Father says, “You just forget that, Will.” But he used to come and stay with us all winter and all summer, and then he used to be the gardener. JS: What did he do with his other seven wives? LS: Oh, he finally, he’d pick up anything that would marry him. That was after he left Father and Mother. He went down into lower Ogden, and he did get seven wives because they said that there were seven women when they held the service. But he never did like me, 11 Uncle Will didn’t. JS: How come? LS: Oh, just because he thought I was too smart. I knew everything about everything, and I knew how to handle horses, and Uncle Will didn’t know how to handle a horse. Father was a teamster, a good teamster, but he wasn’t. But he lived with us a lot, and then he wanted to marry Mother after Father died. Mother says, “Well, Will, I’ll marry you, but no more women.” Then he was, “Well, then, I don’t want you.” I’ll have to tell you about him . He was always a great man to eat, and he liked cream cakes. Mother knew she couldn’t hide it from him while she went away, so she just took the – we had a trapdoor that went down to the cellar – and she set this cake on the first step. He could smell cake around there, and he stepped right in there with both feet. “Will, you old snooper,” she’d say, “you old snooper!” JS: You describe her to me how you remember her, will you? LS: She was a neat lady. When she put on a dress, she just looked beautiful in it, and she had long hair that she could sit on. Her hair was clear down to her hips, and she kept it so nice and so clean, and she bathed. We had an old tub. That’s what we bathed in. How would you like to live that way? JS: It would be hard. What color was her hair? LS: Kind of a dark brown. Is that the way you want me to describe her to you? JS: Yes, and her eyes. Were they blue like yours and mine? The pretty blue color? LS: Yes, but poor old Mother. She stayed up on the dry farm. Not a soul around. The Indians came and told her, “If you don’t feed us, we’ll steal your papoose.” So she got 12 the teakettle full of boiling water and took after him. He ran down the path, just a sagebrush path. He was hitting himself on the hind end, patting himself. And I said, “Mother, wasn’t you afraid of them?” And she said, “Well, it wasn’t nice to have them old buck Indians come and demand food from you.” A lot of times we didn’t have food for them. When we got up to that dry farm five miles one way, we’d take two or three barrels and put in the wagon and come down and fill it full of water, and take it back up there. Then the next few days, they would have to come again. That’s about all they got done. That’s how they proved up on their homestead. They had to live five months each year to prove up on it. Then they went into Bear River City to live through the winter. Some of our family was born in Bear River City. JS: What tribe of Indians was out here? Was it the Utes? Editor: Shoshone bands were the most populous in northern Utah and southern Idaho, although Utes and other tribal members also migrated through the northern valleys on a seasonal basis. LS: I believe it was. This valley was covered with Indians, and they would go out on the rocks and draw pictures on the rocks, stating so many miles to this place, and so many men. And it was all written on these rocks. If you want to see one of them, you stop over to the First Ward in Tremonton. They went up on the mountain and got this rock. I took the Scout boys up there, and we went over that mountain. These boys that were showing us, they could take us right to these rocks that had been written on. They’re still there. JS: Now, where are they? 13 LS: Out at Promontory, at Corner Springs, around the mountains from Thanes. We went on the mountain and found all these Indian rocks, writings on these rocks. The bishop went out and got one of the biggest rocks he could find and took over and put on the church property over there. And it’s still there. They was going to make them bring it back, but then they decided they wouldn’t. It’s still there. I wish you’d drive around there and see it. JS: I’d love to. We will. So, what kind of – so the Indians were really thick in this area? LS: Oh yes. Now, they used to winter here on South Creek, where the warm spring was, and they buried – when they dug that little canal, they found a little baby that was buried up in the rock. I’ve heard Ella tell that a good many times – Ella Anderson. JS: Were you afraid of the Indians LS: Well, I wasn’t around in those days. Some of the Indians, when I was younger, they came to our place begging, and we would always give them a slab of bacon or something, and Mother would fix them up a lunch. They would make their call. You know, they made a home for them up to Washakie, did you know that? Editor’s note: The Washakie community consisted of members of the Shoshone tribe. See, A History of Utah’s American Indians edited by Forrest S. Cuch: Utah State Division of Indian Affairs/ Utah State Historical Society, 2000. JS: Yeah, that’s in Wyoming, isn’t it? LS: No, it’s in Utah, just above Malad. Malad, Idaho. They were all west. And the church built them a church house up there, but they wouldn’t stay in the houses. They’d get their wick up and get outside and do their cooking. It smelled like a smoke town. 14 JS: They did? LS: Oh yeah. We took our Sunday school class up there one time. I was the Sunday school superintendent, and we went up there. JS: What year were you born, Uncle Leo? LS: 1899. JS: And what year were you bishop out here? LS: In 1942. That’s when I started. JS: And you built the church that’s presently here in Bothwell. LS: Well, they remodeled it again. They put another $270,000 on it. JS: Well, it still looks like a good church. LS: It is a good one. Of course the part that we built, they didn’t think it was big enough. But Bothwell isn’t building up like Thatcher and other communities. That’s because, I guess, we don’t have the land. Now Wallace’s brother-in-law, he sold his dry farm up there for $1,000 an acre to some people from Salt Lake City, and they are using all the frontage and selling the rest of it. He got $1,000 an acre for that dry land. JS: That’s Wallace Anderson? LS: Yes. That’s Mabel’s brother. JS: So, that’s a pretty good price for dry land, isn’t it? LS: Oh, I should say. JS: Well, how much land, when Grandfather Stokes died, did he leave this part of the land to you, or did you buy it after that? LS: There was a man that couldn’t get along with Brother Hunsaker right across the road 15 from where Dolores lives, and this neighbor was quarreling with him all the time. He and Mr. Payne was quarreling – Bishop Hunsaker – John L. Hunsaker, we called him. They just couldn’t get along. So Father had 90 acres down here in Section two. So he told Brother Hunsaker he had to get out of there or else there would be trouble. Someone would get killed. He said, “Well, Joe – Bishop – where am I going to go?” He said, “You’re going to go down on my land down there, and I’ll sell you 40 acres of it.” So he says, “Well, I can’t do that.” He says, “Yes, you can. In the morning we’ll come over, and we’ll jack up your house, and we’ll have Jake Webber – he had a steel engine, and he hooked on to this house and pulled it down there a mile and a half. Father – he didn’t pay for it honestly, didn’t give him a cent down on it. He just told him to live there, and he said, “You can buy it. Pay me when you can.” So they made a contract. Father should have never sold it. But when Father got real sick, he gave Mother the place up here. He gave me 10 acres, and Olien 10 acres, and Brother Les 10 acres, and then he had given Brother Tom 20 acres, so he just didn’t have anything when he died. He just give it all away. He should have never, never taken it. We should have let Mother sell it. Of course in those days, you could buy 10 acres for $1. JS: One thousand dollars was a lot of money, wasn’t it? LS: Yes, it was a lot. Nowadays, that’s just peanuts, isn’t it? JS: Well, not quite. LS: Just the shells. Mother was always so good to us as a family, and so good to Father and everyone that came here... She could make bread that would knock your eye out. Of course, we always butchered our beef, our cattle, and our hogs and everything, and 16 we’d put it down in the barrels. We used to cure it by ourselves. Put big side bacons and hams in the salt. Then we’d have to freshen it. JS: How did you freshen it? LS: Put it on the stove and boil it, then pour off the juice and fry it. JS: After all that? LS: Yes, after all that. JS: Sounds like a lot of work. LS: It was a lot of work. You bet it was a lot of work. Oh, my wife thought the world of Mother. JS: Did she? LS: Oh, she did. We lived with her for, I think, two years. I had a little house on Section two where Father gave me a piece of land. Mother had this old house up here that you could throw a ? under the door, it was so cold in there. Brother Joe came to me – he was one of the older boys. He said, “Leo, why don’t you let Mother go down and live in your little house, and you go and buy that piece of ground up there of Mother’s?” I says, “Well, she doesn’t want to sell it, does she?” “Yes, but we can’t leave her up there. It’s too cold for her. That old house, we can’t keep it warm. Will you take it, and you give us $250 a year for it.” I said, “Well, that won’t help keep Mother.” “Well, we’ll all have to help.” So then she married Jacob Jensen. She went to live in Brigham. I guess she just tormented the old man. She was just that age that she could beat him playing checkers, and he didn’t like that. Whenever we’d go down there to visit Mother, he’d say, “I can’t 17 support all of Bothwell.” I’d say, “Well, Brother Jensen, you know I’ve got a lot of food today, and a lot of things, and besides, I’ll give Mother some money.” I said, “I’ll pay my way, but if you don’t want us to come, why we won’t come.” But Ella would torment him a little bit and tease him, and says, “You can’t play checkers, Brother Jensen.” But she got tired of that. She thought maybe she could go to Brigham and be on the sidewalks. JS: And life would be better. LS: But she was quite a discontented woman after Father died. She’d sit and look out of the window, and say, “Leo, couldn’t we go to the show tonight? Couldn’t we go Saturday night?” I had the school then, and ... Kerry got up the children to take them down to school, and then I’d help Mother out. JS: Well, so when your mother died, was there anything else left to divide up among you? LS: No, she had her 15 acres and her home up here. JS: So then you sold that and divided that? LS: No, there was LaVon and Ella and Ethel that hadn’t had anything, so we gave it to them. What came out of the home was $2,100 we got for it. Of course the house was a wreck and Mabel and I, we moved up there. JS: So Aunt Ethel and Uncle Olien and Mother got that money? Oh, LaVon. LS: And LaVon. And Ella used hers to go to school with, I think. That would be $700. Now, Ella can tell you how she spent it. She’s lived with them since down there a while, you know, to go to school. I think they’ve all spent it, but then that isn’t neither here nor there because it wasn’t enough to say anything about. JS: I have a question I need to ask you about Mother. She, in the Bothwell records, it says 18 she was baptized in June and she was confirmed in September. She says she was baptized and confirmed the same day. LS: Well, you know, they didn’t keep very good records in those days. I think Ella would know about when it was. Now, Ella, when she got her Social Security, didn’t she have to make out an application and tell when she was baptized and when she was confirmed and so on? JS: She has a birth certificate, so she took that. But when she was baptized and confirmed, the records don’t make any sense. So I was wondering if you remembered anything about it. She said she was baptized in a canal. LS: Well, I was around when Ella – Ella lived with us a lot. She lived with us quite a lot, and she and Mabel got along just fine. They were just like two kids. I don’t think Ella’s forgotten that. She loves Mabel. JS: Yes, she thinks yours was her second home. You know her home that she really didn’t have with her mother and her father. LS: That’s right. Ella did pretty well for herself. She went to school. She could have gone more if she would have had more money. But Ella was a good girl. She was a real good girl. She didn’t crowd around with everybody, I’ll tell you. She always, why, if she ever made a date with anybody, she’d have to see Mabel and Leo before she’d go. I remember the day that Jack, he came in the middle of the night! Did I ever tell you that? Oh, I loved your dad. I’ve been so lonely for him. We used to do things together. He always was a joker, and we had a lot of fun with him. He loved to trade horses and trade cows. I went up to Chris Scowby, and I said, “Mrs. Scowby, what will you take for that 19 cow?” Jack and I were buying it together, and so Father didn’t have any money and wrote him out a check. He says, “Gosh, I got to hike right over town and put this check in that you gave me.” And he says, “I haven’t got any money in the bank.” So Mr. Scowby came in as he went out. That was a close call, but I think we made $20 on that cow. Your father loved to come up and see the horse. Yeah, he’s a good Jack. You ought to be proud of him. JS: Well, is there anything else you can think of, like how many rooms in the house did you have, with nine children and your mother and dad? LS: We had two rooms facing this way, and then Father built another little room on it for a kitchen. He and Tom Priest went up on the hill and there was an old white house up there that they had for a place for the hired man to come. They took care of the horses all through the valley. That’s before they homesteaded it. Father went up and got two rooms and Uncle Tom got two. That was our first home. JS: So all of you lived there in that one home? LS: Well, yes, that’s right. We had to double up and sleep on the floor and had an old folding bed. Have you seen one of those folding beds that we’d turn and fold down and make a bed out? JS: Did your mother sew a lot? Did she make all of your clothes? LS: Mother was a good sewer, but it seemed like we was close to the store there, and we bought most everything. Father was making pretty good money on the central farm, more than a lot of people would have made farming. But there are a lot of people that came in and bought the cheaper land. Their children are wealthy today. 20 JS: That’s right. LS: That’s the way it goes. Of course Bob Harris and George Harris were people who came here and married. Both of them married sisters, and they were both schoolteachers. They came from north of Ogden up in that valley up in there, east of Ogden. But they came here, and they’d buy every little piece of ground. It didn’t matter. If somebody wanted to sell a little piece of ground, they’d buy it. It didn’t take much money to buy. I remember Robert Harris telling me that the first year they lived down here on a piece of land, they lived in a tent. His first baby was born in a tent. JS: When your mother had her children, were there doctors around then, or did they just have midwives? LS: Yes. JS: So she just had them in the home up there? LS: Yes, at home. Not only that, but they went to Bear River City for the winter. There was Brother Tom and Joe and Les that was born in Bear River City. JS: That’s why. I could never figure out on that genealogy sheet why they were born there; but that’s why. So Joe, Tom, Les, and Mary were born there. LS: And then we had an old lady that used to come and take care of Mother when she was confined after that. Oh dear, flies, flies so thick. JS: Flies everywhere, huh? LS: Oh, and mosquitoes. We could live with them. My sister, Mary, got up early one morning, and she couldn’t sift the flour, and we had raisin bread out of flies. Oh dear, dear, dear. It was dark, you know, and we only had a little light. I guess we ate some of 21 them, I don’t know. But somebody discovered them. And mosquitoes! Everybody in this valley would start a fire, and then we’d throw green weeds on it to get rid of the mosquitoes. JS: For the smoke from them. LS: Uh huh. And then they’d get out of the way then. Then we’d go to bed, and we’d have to lock up our house. It was so dang hot we couldn’t sleep, and then have the mosquitoes buzz around you all night. I don’t know how we ever lived. 22