Oral History Program Lula Moffett Millet Interviewed by Mike Cushman 11 August 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Lula Moffett Millet Interviewed by Mike Cushman 11 August 1971 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. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Millet, Lula Moffett, an oral history by Mike Cushman, 11 August 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 Lula Moffett Millet. The interview was conducted on August 11, 1971, by Mike Cushman, in the home of Norman Moffett at 972 23rd Street, Ogden, Utah. Mrs. Millet discusses her personal memories of polygamy in the early 1900’s, the Mormon Exodus, and the Mexican-American War. Also present and participating during the interview is Norman Moffett, brother of the interviewee. MC: This is an interview of Mrs. Lula Moffett Millet by Mike Cushman on August 11, 1971 for the Weber State Oral History Program at Mrs. Millet’s brother, Mr. Norman D. Moffett’s home at 972 23rd Street, Ogden, Utah. Mrs. Millet’s home is at 143 South Mesa Drive, Mesa, Arizona. Her brother is also present. Mrs. Millet, tell us when you were born. LM: I was born February 5, 1900, in Colonia Dublan, Chihuahua, Mexico. I lived there until I was twelve years old. In August 1912, we left at the time of the Exodus. MC: What are some of the first things you remember about the colonies? LM: They were a nice place. It was home until the Mexican people got to bothering us. Then in August, 1912, we had quite a little bit of uprising in that section of the country. One Saturday about noon, my father had been irrigating and he came to eat his lunch. He told me to work out in the yard, raking it, but to keep my eyes up the street to see what I could see. Very shortly I saw a great cloud of dust. I looked a little closer, and there was a Mexican flag flying above the dust. I could see that there were many, many horses coming down the street. I ran and told my father. By the time I had told him, the Mexicans had completely surrounded the Tithing Office, which was just a block from our 1 home. There were just Mexicans everywhere. My father went up to the Tithing Office because that was what the priesthood did. They stood together. My mother told me to run as fast as I could to my oldest sister’s house, Ellen Done, and get her and her children because they were by themselves. I went. I put two babies in the baby buggy. She told me to go just as fast as I could home. It was about a block. She would come very shortly. As we went, the Mexicans were riding around the street. Being just a child and with the responsibility of small children, I was frightened because they would ride right up to me like they were going to ride over me. One especially I will never forget, and I have nightmares yet, was a Mexican on a little yellow mule with a tall, plush sombrero on. If I ever had a mental picture of Satan, that was it as he rode up and frightened us. He just had his mule so close that we thought he was going to step on us. When I came to the gate at home, I pushed the buggy through as fast as I could and just rolled the children that were walking under the fence. It was quite a while till Father came home. When he did, he came home with the word that we were going to have to leave. The President of the Church and the President of the United States had decided that is wisdom because the Mexican army had decided to induct the Mormon men into their armies and that wouldn’t be good. We had twenty-four hours to get ready. Everybody was busy as could be. My father tried to put things away so that maybe they would be safe till we might get a chance to come back. They took precious pictures, books and things. My father dug a deep hole on a high spot where he figured there wouldn’t be much moisture, wrapped them good, put them down there in a box he made, covered them with a lid, put the dirt in and left them. Our home was just left like everybody else’s. Before we left, Father turned the cows, the horses, the chickens and 2 the pigs out so that they could shift for themselves. The womenfolk killed and dressed chickens and things like that so that we would have lunch on the way out because we knew it was going to be a long trip. I was the baby tender, and the poor baby cried all night long. I was trying to keep her pacified, but I wasn’t very successful. The next morning, being Sunday, they had a meeting. It just runs in my mind it was at the bishop’s home, Bishop A. B. Call. Some went, and some didn’t. Some had to stay home and keep things going. The bishop informed them of just what to do. Father came back, and told Mother what the verdict was. They got ready as fast as they could. We couldn’t take but very little with us. I could be wrong, but as I remember it, we had a good size roll of bedding, a suitcase, an old-time valise and a box with lunch in it. We waited up where the train was going to stop part of the night. The pile of bedding, suitcases and things was big as a mountain. The whole town was moving. When the train came, my parents, being older, were permitted to ride in the chair car, as was my invalid aunt. The rest of the people, my sister for instance, with her small children, were piled into the boxcar on top of a pile of bedding rolls and suitcases. There were no drinking fountains; there were no conveniences at all. They were just piled in. They were piled into cattle cars, flat cars, ore cars and all. It was a big long train. When everybody was load up they started out. On the way from Colonia Dublan to Ciudad Juarez it seemed like we stopped every few minutes. Something was wrong. It runs in my mind that we didn’t get to El Paso until the next day. The next day we rode into Ciudad Juarez. Then it took a long, long time to get things shaped up and cleared so that they could take the train on over into the United States. There was no drinking water or anything, everything was out of order. They went over across the line and switched around to a great big 3 lumberyard which was not in use. There, people were unloaded. My parents and their family went to a brother’s home, who was living in El Paso. Then we got a small apartment, and we stayed there. But my sister was in the lumberyard. They hung quilts up ever so far to give them just a little privacy, but it was awful! They had to stay there quite a while. To those who were at the lumber yard they issued government food, which was very necessary. They appreciated it. We stayed there for two or three weeks. Then Father decided he and the boys would stay in El Paso so that maybe he could go back in and take care of things. My mother, my sister Zella, just older than I, and I went to Idaho to stay with another sister, Lovenia Moffett Clark. We stayed until 1916. Father went back and got things rather well organized. Then we went back to Colonia Dublan. Not long before we went back there was a U.S. Military company that came through. They camped at the Tithing Office in the tithing corrals and barns. They camped there. They were just getting ready to move out. There were hundreds of people. Something happened. Some said a fellow was sitting on a box of dynamite and kicked it accidentally. That big explosion blew nearly every window in town out. It was six o’clock in the morning. My father said it just literally threw him out of his bed. When they got up to see what had happened, there were pieces of horse carcasses, pieces of people and everything strewn all over the place. To anyone that has never seen a military outfit from that day and time wouldn’t believe it because when the military train pulled in, the man with his wife and family and their earthly belongings were there. Their goats, their pigs, their chickens, whatever they had was all on that military train. We dreaded to see them come in because they were always hungry and they had to be fed. This explosion was a terrible, terrible thing. I don’t remember how my father said they finally left and left 4 the Mormon people to clean up their mess. There weren’t very many Mormon people there. There were just a few people that had gone back. They dug a big trench and plowed and scraped it. They put the flesh parts in the trench, poured kerosene over it, burned it and buried it. It was months before they got it all. Some of it lit on top of people’s houses and some of it on top of people’s barns. It was terrible! We got home a week or two after that happened. We got to El Paso, and we couldn’t cross the line. There was some kind of Mexican military trouble, so we had to stay around El Paso and the vicinity for two or three weeks before we could go on in. Finally, we went. We were glad to get back; it was home. I went to the Juarez Stake Academy two years. Poncho Villa was not really a bad man; he was merely trying to do what he thought was right. A lot of these killings and robberies that were laid at his feet were not his. They were bandits. He was more of a friend to the Mormon people. We got word that he had raided Columbus. That was in 1918. He went into Columbus and found that the United States had double-crossed him by shipping his opponent’s men around on the United States side so that they were there in Columbus. He wasn’t able to get the food, the ammunition, the clothes and things that he needed. Of course, it made him angry. He headed back to the Colonies. There were threats made that when he got there that he would allow men. He didn’t say, “I’ll do it” to do anything they wanted to do. They could kill the Mormon people and any Mexican that was on American property. We lived in dread for two or three days wondering what the next things would be. We couldn’t leave because the railroad bridges had been blown up. Half the time they were. We couldn’t go overland because of the bandits that roamed the country. It was on a Sunday night, I think. We had had sacrament and testimony meeting at one of the member’s homes. 5 Nobody knew what to do. Everybody was wondering what to do. The bishop told us in that meeting to go home, do what we had to do, then put out all lights and quiet down. That we did. During this two or three days of waiting, my father put a lot of the necessities in a double bedded wagon and hitched a team to it. He would change that team periodically, just to let them stand, in case that something should come up that we should have to make a run for it. My mother and father discussed it. They thought maybe it would be a good idea to take the family and go into a deep, tall corn field that father had. They thought too that may be a good idea to go out on the open prairies of town where my father had forty acres. You could see for miles because it was just open prairie. They decided against that and decided after the meeting to follow the instructions of the bishop. Father and Mother didn’t go to bed. They sat up. The riders came in every little while letting us know how Poncho’s army was advancing About two o’clock they heard this tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp. It fairly shook the ground. They didn’t know what it was, and they didn’t venture out to see. We had our gate fixed so that we could click it to draw attention when we would open. That was for safety’s sake. So when the gate clicked the next morning very early, my father went out. It was a young Mexican boy, Elias, anywhere from fourteen to sixteen, was at the gate. He told my father that when Poncho Villa and his men got to the lower end of town, they saw hundreds of soldiers marching up and down the streets of the town. Unbelievable! I don’t think there were a hundred souls in the whole town. Then they went across the country, right across Father’s forty acre piece of ground and on out to the lake. They stopped there for breakfast. There were lots of mesquite bushes. This boy slipped away through the mesquite bushes. He had been taken into 6 the army with his parents; and his parents had been killed. He was alone, and he was tired of it. As he was talking to my father, my father said, “well, what do you intend to do?” He said he didn’t know. Father said, “Would you like to be my boy?” He said, “Yes.” He came in and lived in our home. He joined the Church and was a very fine young man. He gave us this story firsthand. He lived in our home until he was grown. Then he went to look for some of his relatives. At age twenty-five, Elias got the flu and died. After Poncho’s men ate breakfast out there at the lake, they crossed the head of the lake and went over into the mountains to what they called the Chocileti Pass. It was a very narrow pass, straight up and down on both sides. I think Poncho Villa had an idea that if they got there they could just pick the United States Government troops off just as fast as they came into sight. When Poncho’s men came up, there were no soldiers in Dublan, but there was a prairie fire on the east hills, out east of town. Those prairie fires used to burn for weeks at a time until a rain would come to put them out or until the burned themselves out. They didn’t do any harm. They were just grass fires. We just let them burn. It was a reflection of that fire on the windows that made it look like people moving around. We felt that the Lord really saved our lives. Another time Pershing’s army came in and camped down at the lower end of town at Carilitus. We baked bread. Everybody in town baked bread, pies, cakes, doughnuts and cookies. We had a lot of honey on hand. My father was a beekeeper. We bottled that up in smaller jars. It was in five gallon cans. My father fixed a truck. Every morning at daybreak, he and I went down there to sell our load of the goods. We sold it for everybody in town. It was a big help for everybody. While we were down there selling that load, everybody was making up another load for the next morning. We worked at that until Pershing’s 7 army was ready to leave. Then my parents sent us girls out on the train along with nearly everybody else. They were probably going to come out overland in their wagon. They had two very small granddaughters with them. They discussed it, and they couldn’t make up their minds. The last hour had come. They were rolling up the bedding when my mother dropped her end of it. She said, “We are not going.” My father said, “That is fine.” So they stayed there, but they had many, many hardships. The Mexican people would come demanding things, and if they didn’t get them, they sometimes beat the men. My father was beat with the butt of a gun until he was almost unconscious. They wanted a horse which my father didn’t have. So my mother, a plucky little lady, loaded my father into the buggy and took this little horse which they didn’t want because they had ridden it to death. It had sores on its back till it couldn’t have been ridden, but she could hitch it up. She took my father three miles to the Mexican Army headquarters and showed the general what had happened. He immediately found the men that had done it. They were not supposed to do that. These were not Villa’s men. That helped for a while, but they were really trying times. After a time I went back to Mexico. That was about in 1919 when I went back. I stayed there until I got married and left. With all of that, Mexico was a fine place to have lived and been born. I don’t care to ever go back. I just have a dread of ever going back. Now I work in the Arizona Temple with the Lamanites that come on excursions from Mexico and down deep into South America. That is my job, and I enjoy it very much. I love the Mexican people. It was born and bred in me. My mother was a doctor. She had to doctor the Mexican people the same as the American. One night I heard a little confusion downstairs. I looked out of the upstairs window, and I saw a Mexican man with three donkeys. I saw my mother come out of the 8 house with her satchel and things, and they helped her on the middle donkey. There was a man in front with a lantern and a man on the back donkey with a lantern. Away they went with my mother. We didn’t hear of her for over a week, but we didn’t worry. My mother was able to take care of herself. She had gone way over the mountains to take care of some very, very sick people. When she was in those Mexican homes they didn’t have a bed for her. She laid down on the dirt floor on a cowhide for her rest. There no lights, except for a little fire in the middle of the floor. Chili and coffee was the diet. Of course, my mother took the chili. She worked with the Mexican people all the while. In 1926 my parents were invited to come to Mesa, Arizona. That is when the temple was being built. They built a little home just a block and a half from the temple. The main reason for them leaving Mexico was the Mexicans had gotten to where they demanded my mother to go and serve the military the same as a man doctor. She was getting old. She wasn’t able to keep up with it. They decided that the thing to do was to answer the call and come to Arizona. Their home is the home that I live in now. MC: Who were the people who took the leadership of the people on the train at the time of the Exodus? LM: I don’t even remember. I was a babysitter, too. I don’t know if Bishop Call came out on the train or not. When we got to El Paso, Arwell Pierce more or less took over. He was owner of a lumber business. He owned the lumberyard they put the people in. He was our temple president down there for many years in Mesa, Arizona. NM: Arwell Pierce was at that time just a presiding elder of a small branch in Ciudad Juarez. MC: There was only one ward in Colonia Dublan? 9 LM: Yes. I think there still is only ward. It is the same in Juarez. NM: There had never been more than one ward I guess in Colonia Dublan that I know of. MC: Things kind of revolved around the ward then? LM: Yes. That was our life. That was our recreation. They used to have lots of parties, lots of celebrations and lots of home talent theatres and Primary plays. NM: Baseball and basketball. LM: They had everything, but it was all in connection with the Church. We even celebrated the Fourth of July in Mexico. On the Fourth we didn’t make such a big splurge, but the Twenty-fourth we really did. The sixteenth of September and Cinco de Mayo, the fifth of May, were big days. There was Easter. The whole town sometimes would turn out for a picnic down at the river under the great big cottonwood trees. They would put up big swings and everything. Every once in a while we would have a big town picnic. Everybody turned out. We were just more like brothers and sisters. NM: At that time there was Colonia Pacheco, Colonia Garcia, Colonia Chuichupa, Colonia Diaz, Colonia Moreles, Colonia Juarez, Colonia Dublan and Colonia Guadalupe. Now it has simmered down to Colonia Juarez and Colonia Dublan. MC: What was it like in Colonia Dublan? LM: There was a river flowing from south to north about two miles west of the town proper. The fields on the back street, on the west street, fronted on the street. They raised alfalfa, corn, hay and fruit. It was a very wonderful country. The main town was only about four big blocks deep from east to west. But it ran maybe fifteen or twenty blocks north and south. It was laid off like Salt Lake. Our home was on one quarter of the 10 block. We had fruit trees, garden and the barn yard on that quarter of a block. We had a high hedge all the way around it with hog wire in the hedge for safety sake. There was a nice pasture on the west quarter. We didn’t own the north half. The fruit that we raised and the vegetables that we raised were our living. We practically raised what we ate. My father was a beekeeper. We had several hundred hives of bees right outside the kitchen door. We had it for convenience sake. The bees were fairly friendly at times, but they got on the warpath once in a while, especially on a windy day. We all helped to take the honey out. My job mainly was to use the capping knife. When the bees fill the comb full of honey, then they cap it over with a thin wax to save it. In order to get the honey out of the comb, we had to take a very sharp hot knife and scaze that capping off and be awfully careful not to break the comb and be awfully careful not to cut into the brood. That was my job. Then some of the rest of them put it into the extractor. It was a machine which took two combs at a time and turned the combs round and round and round. As it was turning around, it threw the honey onto the barrel of the machine. IT ran out through a little facet into the bottles or cans. Out on the prairie on the other side of the railroad track there were acres and acres. My father had forty acres out there. Now I understand all that has been taken into orchards and fields. While we were there, my brother was working on the thrashing machine. He was clear to the upper end of town. It was a horse power machine. He had been working on the thrashing machine that summer trying to earn money so that he could go to high school the next year. The weather had been against them because there was so much rainy weather. Everything had been against them so that it was rather discouraging. That morning after he went to work, after they got started working, he looked up at the skillet wheel. That is the wheel 11 that transmits the power from the horse power into the thrashing machine. It goes so fast. He looked up at the skillet wheel and saw a loose screw. He thought he could step up on the wheel and tighten that screw without the machine having to be stopped. Somehow when he went to do that, the friction of that fast turning wheel drew his arm down into the skillet wheel. That skillet wheel went round and round and round in this part of his arm in his wrist here. I was out picking green corn for dinner. I could hear them shouting and hurrying their horses. I heard him yell. I dropped the corn, and I ran to the house and shouted at my mother, “Oh Mother something has happened to Joe!” By the time we could get out front, there the buggy was. The men had brought him home. We didn’t know how bad his arm was, and there was not one there to help out with it. My mother was there alone with her family and the neighbors. There was no other medical help. The Mexican’s had taken all of her instruments. She had very few instruments. We kept thinking maybe he was getting better. Maybe there was a little circulation in his hand. Then one morning Mother got up. She had been up practically all night. She came to the breakfast table and told us, “That hand is dead. It will have to be amputated.” That hit us pretty hard. That was just as we were ready to have family prayer. We went ahead and had family prayer. We didn’t know what was going to happen. Father went and talked to the bishop. The bishop came down, and they administered to my brother. About noon we heard a big lumbering noise. We looked out to the main road, and there was a great big heavy black touring car down the street. It was just making the biggest dust you had ever seen. It went straight south to the store. Our bishop worked at the store. When that car stopped there, those men went in. They had come into Mexico to go hunting in the mountains. One was a doctor, and Bishop 12 Call said, “Oh, you are just what we need.” He said, “I don’t have any of my implements, any of my equipment with me at all.” They brought him down to our house. HE and my mother talked it over, what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. My father sharpened every knife, just as sharp as he could. We got some real strong thread and sterilized it in alcohol. My father sharpened a small meat saw he had just as sharp as he could. Those were all sterilized. We had a big dining room table because we were a big family. They put my brother on the dining room table. They got every lamp they could get hold of because we had nothing but oil lamps. My father handed them the implements, and my sister gave the ether. The doctor and my mother did the job. They started to take it off below his elbow, but they found they couldn’t. They had to take it off above his elbow. When it came to the last sewing up of it, my parents were very, very sensitive about it. My mother did that. She brought those inner skins, those veins and everything together. After it was done, that doctor said he never in his life seen a more beautiful job. Mother said she didn’t want any loose-ended nerves to bother him through his life. Then Father made a little box like casket, and he put the arm in it. We put cotton and gauze between each finger because there is an old saying that sometimes when a person loses a hand or an arm their finger get tangled. We didn’t want any of that. I heard it explained afterwards it was the end of the nerves where it had been cut off. That boy never has suffered a minute of discomfort for anything of that kind. He got well just as fast as he could. He was very despondent. One day my mother said, “I am going into the living room. I do not want to be disturbed for anything at all till I come out.” She took Joe in the living room and talked to him. I don’t know just all that she said, but she did tell him that he could do anything that anybody with two hands could do and do it 13 better. That boy has done it. It wasn’t very long till he could harness up a team with one hand as fast as another man could do with two hands. He played tennis; he built his home with help of his wife. He could unload a big truckload of potatoes and stack them neatly as fast as a man with two hands could. He started learning to write immediately with his left hand. He was a principal in some of the schools in the Gila Valley for years. He filled three missions. His first mission he darned his own socks while he was in the mission field. One thing happened when he was at home. We were going to Colonia Juarez, which was eighteen miles, to a ballgame. In riding in the light wagon somehow he tore the seat of his pants quite a tear, about two inches each way, a three-corned tear. He hadn’t brought any spare along. He had a little book with dozens of needles already threaded that he carried with him all the time. He got out of the wagon. He backed up and said, “Now I’m going up over the hill. I’ll meet you on the other side. You go around.” The road went around. “If I’m not there when you get there, just wait a few minutes.” He was there. That was the nicest darn job I ever saw. He had taken it, put it on his knee, used his left hand and just darned it. That is the kind of stuff our family is made of. MC: Were there other Moffett’s in Colonia Dublan? LM: There was just our family. My father had two families. We were all brothers and sisters. This boy, however, was a half-brother. MC: Did you consider the wife an aunt or a mother? LM: We called her Auntie. MC: What did you think of the situation of polygamy when you were growing up? 14 LM: I had no idea of anything else. It was right. It was right! The whole community was full of polygamists there. I saw things happen in other families that I am very thankful never happened in our family. There was much partiality in some families. There wasn’t too much in our family. MC: You talked about the other boys in the family. What were their names? LM: There was Ben, Benjamin Moffett, who is now a patriarch in Farmington, New Mexico. Loren Moffett passed away about fifteen years ago. Jed Moffett is still living in El Paso, Texas. Joseph Moffett lives near Twenty-Nine Palms, California. Norman Moffett is my only living brother. MC: What about other brothers that are deceased? LM: A half-brother Ether died with diphtheria in the early days in Mexico. That was before my time. Then there was Willard who got kicked in the stomach by a horse. He died from the effects of that. I guess Loren died of a heart attack about fifteen years ago in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These others were buried in Mexico. On my side of the family, Norman is the only brother I ever knew. My oldest brother is buried up the canyon from here in the bottom of the valley in old Eden along with some other graves that had to be moved when they built the dam there. They are moved to Huntsville. That was Jody. Then another brother Junius died in Mexico. He had been up in the mountains after a load of lumber. They had terrible storms up in the mountains. My mother prayed that he might be spared to get home. He wasn’t very old. He was sixteen. He arrived home in the morning and visited with the family. He brought us pine gum which was a great treat. I was only two years old. Then he and my mother sat up and talked quite late at night. He had been sleeping out, so he said, “Mother, I think I 15 will put my bed right here by the kitchen door, the north door, so I can get more air.” He went to bed. He hadn’t been in bed a very short time when a very loud clap of thunder wakened my mother. She knew that my brother was gone. She ran in there. The lightning had come down the chimney, crossed right across him, gone out through the screen door, made a big hole in the screen, and made a big hole in the ground where it went in the ground. He never knew what struck him. MC: What about your own sisters? LM: Mrs. Done, the other sister that has been here, is the oldest. She had lived here with my brother for quite some time. Verda died when she was a baby up in the mountain colonies in Mexico. Then Della died in Colonia Juarez at about the age of twelve. Lavina was married and had a family. She passed away in Mesa, Arizona. Then Zella died of a heart condition in Salt Lake City, Utah. There were the other family’s girls, half-sisters. Laura died after she had raised her family. Elle died as a baby in the mountains of Old Mexico. Verna is still living in Verden, New Mexico, and Athelia is still living in Salt Lake City, Utah. My mother was the one who forged ahead. She and father always broke the ice. Mother was that way. Auntie was more timid. She got real nervous and upset over things. My father decided to go up into the mountains and helped build the sawmill. But Auntie didn’t want to go. So Mother went. We were just talking about it today. Mother would always go ahead and get things started. {Tape interrupted} LM: I asked my brother why every time we got home and settled in it, we had to move to another shamble and let the other family have that house. 16 NM: The first family fixed the house up for the second family. We moved out and fixed another one up. LM: It was because my mother was one who would go ahead, and she and Father could do things that way. The other woman liked to stay home and take care of her family. Mother did too, but she didn’t have a chance. NM: Mother was a doctor. She was out from about six till about two. I had to stay home with the girls and my brother because Mother was away. We had to prepare our own meals. MC: What was the Juarez Stake Academy like in 1918? LM: It was a church school, one of the finest schools in the world. It was just a good, rounded-out, wonderful church school. Lucian Mecham was the principal, and a finer man you never met. He works down there in Mesa now with the Lamanites. Brother Ernest Young was one of our very good teachers. Nelle Spillsbury was another. She wrote some books. Those are the three or four teachers I remember mostly. We lived eighteen miles away in Colonia Dublan. The school was in Colonia Juarez. The roads were terrible. We had to just move up there to go to school. We rented rooms, and three or four of us would move in together. There was Brother Joe, sister Athelia, myself and another girl, Willa Thane, roomed together one year. It was real nice. We had lots of fun. We enjoyed our school. MC: How many students do you think there were at the academy when you were there? LM: I would say maybe around two hundred. MC: You married a man who lived in the colonies, too? LM: No. 17 MC: Where did you meet your husband? LM: In El Paso, Texas. MC: Tell me about your father, your mother and your aunt. LM: My father was Joseph Ammon Moffett. My mother was Olive Catherine Emmett Moffett. Our Aunt was Moriah Ann Johnson. NM: Moriah Ann Johnson was from Eden. My mother was from Pinto, in southern Utah. My father was born in Eden, Utah. He was raised here in Ogden Valley. My grandfather was Scotch and Irish. The Moffett’s are Scotch-Irish people. My grandfather came across the plains. He came with not the first few, but later. He came into Utah in Salt Lake City and went into Brigham Young’s office and reported that he was here. Brigham Young said, “Brother Moffett, go up to Ogden.” Grandfather came to Ogden and settled down at 23rd and Ogden Avenue now. He called it Moffett Lane. He built a blacksmith shop and ran it there. Then he homesteaded in what is the bottom of the lake, Pineview up here. He built his home there. An epidemic of smallpox was in the country. They took the corpses over across country and through the little towns and spread the smallpox. They stopped that. They had to bury their dead then out where they were and not carry them up through the highways. He carried on the rules. He buried twelve down in the bottom of what the lake is now. I remember his graveyard. They took all those up and put them in Huntsville graveyard when they built the lake. LM: Our great-grandparents Moffett’s and Emmett’s joined the Church and lived in Nauvoo. We are proud of that. 18 NM: Yes. The Moffett’s went here, too. The Emmett’s, my mother’s side, went down in southern Utah. So they knew what the pioneers were. MC: Your father was one of the original settlers in Colonia Dublan? LM: One of the very first. He went down with President Ivins when President Ivins went and made arrangements. Those men went to the capital to make arrangements for the people to settle on. When they got down there, the Mexican people were in very poor circumstances. They didn’t know how to plow. They plowed with a forked stick. They would get a stick about like and hitch a donkey on to the end there and just plow with that sort of thing. It just scratched the top of the ground. They didn’t raise enough to get along on. When the folks went down there, there was just nothing. They nearly starved to death before they could get themselves started out. NM: The only thing that saved their life was that the year before the Mexican people had stacked their wheat. They had no way of threshing it, only by putting a bunch of horses around and tromping it out. MC: Did they tell what kind of a home they first lived in? LM: When they first camped on the river in Dublan, they lived in the wagon. I think there were two babies born. My mother had a child, and my aunt had a child in those wagon boxes. A lot of other people had them. They lived up towards Juarez. The river bank was high, and they dug dugouts in the bank. Then they built something onto that so it made fairly good living quarters. My father was always a great hand. Wherever he put his family, he always saw to it that they had water. Somehow he would see to getting a small stream of water close to the house. He was a good provider to the best of his 19 ability. While they lived at this place above Juarez, they had an earthquake. My mother said that they could hear it rumbling, rumbling, rumbling. They would look out across, see he dust and see the earth like waves. It came right on to the river. It didn’t hurt anybody or do any great damage, but it came and opened up several springs of water. They were about out of water at the time. Then they lived up in the mountains, up in Pacheco, and they lived in Corrallas. Then they moved to Juarez. Mother went over to Elviah. The people went over there, and they were going to settle Elviah. My mother always went to break the ice. When they were over there, they discovered there was a very bad influence there. They were advised not to stay there, so they didn’t. They went back to Juarez. They moved to Dublan. Father had a farm about three miles out of town. The home was built on top of a Montezuma. They very often in their diggings for silos, the found skeletons, walls of rooms, ollas and even chicken bones in the ollas. It was rather interesting. We had quite a nice home there, a nice farm. Then we moved to town. It was not advisable for us to live out there on the farm. It was three miles out. My mother, through her efforts of doctoring, paid for and had built a large adobe house. She sent away and got trees of different kinds. They had a very nice orchard, a very nice vineyard, strawberry bed, and everything there. Then Mother moved from that up to the place we called the Patton place. The roof leaked, the yard was all run down, and it was just a mess. They got it fairly well fixed up, but they never liked it. They then moved down near the tithing office into a small brick house. The house was entirely too small, but it had very high ceilings. After several years, my father and my brother lowered the ceiling and built three lovely bedrooms upstairs. That was our home. WE had the nicest variety of fruit and vegetables, I think, of anybody in the town. I was quite conceited. 20 There were other nice homes there, too. Dublan was quite a nice little town, so was Juarez. We stayed in Juarez during the school years. There were many nice homes there. It was a very nice vicinity with nice chapels and nice recreation. NM: Colonia Juarez was the stake center. The stake president lived up there and also the stake academy was there. One of the stake presidents was Guy C. Wilson. He was over the school during my school time. MC: What did you mean when you say your father built “on top of a Montezuma”? LM: It is a mound. In the early days of Mexico they must have had a very large house, a hacienda. As years passed, it deteriorated and fell down. It left quite a mound there. We owned half of it and the Harris’s owned the other half. On that Montezuma we had all of our buildings, our corral, our barn and our grainery and our machinery. When they went to fix the silo for the hay, they dug down in. There they found adobe walls, rooms and skeletons laid out there with ollas by the heads. They always put food there for the deceased. There were rooms and rooms and rooms under us. But the top was just a mound of dirt. NM: It had been in ruins so long. The wind blew the trash in and filled, and the adobe walls melted away down in. It covered over. Scyatone grass which used to grow that high just gradually covered it over that way. LM: Sometimes the river would get so high that it would cover all of our field’s right up to the Montezuma. One year we had a big patch of squash. They were beautiful! Great big old fellows! The water came up over all the fields. That wonderful crop of squash looked like they were going to rot before we could get them out of the field. They decided to hitch 21 one of the horses to a light wagon with a shaft instead of the wagon tongue, go down and get some of those squash out. But when they got down there, the poor house fell clear to his belly. They had a hard time to get the horse and the outfit out, much less the squash. I will never forget seeing that horse. She had no legs. She was just laying on her stomach there on the ground. The idea of having our home built on top of the Montezuma was for safety from water. NM: August and September was the rainy season down there. You got some pretty high water in the river. MC: What was the relationship between the members of the colonies? What was it like between other families and your family? LM: Brothers and sisters. MC: Are there some people who stand out in your mind in the colonies, besides Bishop Call? LM: Liza Tenney was the Relief Society president when I was a little girl. I have a mental picture of her. She was a very stout lady, and she wore long full skirts to the ground. That woman could walk from one end of town to the other. She lived clear to the very last house on the south end of town. She was one of the sweetest women I ever remember. She tried her best to see that everybody was taken care of. My mother used to work with her a lot. We had close friends. Willard Call’s family that lived right across the street. They were fine people. I think taking it as a whole, the colony people were just mostly brothers and sisters. That is the way I like to look at it. NM: There was Bishop Thurber there too. LM: He was a wonderful man. 22 NM: He later left there during the Exodus and went up to Idaho. They made him a bishop up there. MC: Where did you go in Idaho after the Exodus? LM: Blackfoot, Idaho. I picked up potatoes in big wire bushel baskets and put them over my head. I was only twelve years old. I boosted them way up over my head into the sorter. I worked just like all the rest of the Indians to try and make a living, (laughter). NM: They worked harder than the Indians. They don’t work as hard as that. LM: I topped beets; I thinned beets. We didn’t think anything of walking three or four miles to the job and working all day and walking three or four miles in the evening. There was a bunch of us kids that did it. We sang more songs than you can ever imagine to and from work. MC: What other people can you remember in the colonies? LM: It is hard to remember because we left when I was twelve. There were the Farnsworth’s, the Robison’s, the Thanes, the Carroll’s, the Thurber’s, the Joneses, the Done’s, the Hurst’s and the Penny’s. Each one of these names represents several families. There were the Moffett’s, the Pratt’s, the Tuckers, the Smiths, the LaBaron’s and the Young’s. That is about it. MC: What would you consider some of the advantages of living in a polygamous family? LM: About the biggest advantage I can think of right now is that my parents were obeying authority. When my father was told to take another wife, he and my mother didn’t hardly see how they could take it. They fasted and prayed for three days. They didn’t even take a drink of water. They would take cool water and bathe their neck and their faces. 23 They were very humble about it. Then father went, found this other wife and brought her home. When he brought her home, he said to my mother, “Now, Olive, I want you to be a mother to Moriah.” That is where all this stemmed. My mother was very responsible for the other family as well as her own. My half-brother, who is a patriarch in Farmington, New Mexico, was staying with my mother. My father was away. He and the rest of the kids were all in the garden cutting weeds. They cut the head off of a rattlesnake about so far. They stuck a stick in its mouth and it didn’t do a thing. They played around with it, and then they dared each other to stick a finger in its mouth. Mr. Ben stuck his finger in its mouth. He ran quite a distance screaming all the way, “Oh Auntie I’m killed!” He was just tearing down the road with that snake hanging on. That just put it all through his system. When he arrived at the house, there Mother was with all those children and that boy. She slit the end of his finger to try to draw the blood, but it didn’t do any good. So she had the children go to the spring and bring back basins of cold water and mud. She packed that arm in that all night long. She said that that go t so hot from the poison that it was just hot. Then she would use a fresh basin. By morning he was better. So he lived. It drew the poison off. Another time someone had had diphtheria in the United States and had sent some clothes into Mexico, into the colonies, not knowing what they were doing. They had an epidemic of diphtheria. Many families lost all of their children and some children and adults the same. Mother’s family was very sick. My sister had diphtheria very, very bad. It just looked like she was going to die. Father was over the mountain at the other wife’s place, and Mother was just beside herself. She prayed that she might know what to do. Most of her doctoring was done with that help. It was shown to her a bar of soap and how it was rolled out into 24 pills. She remembered that little bar of sweet soap that her mother had tucked down in the corner of the trunk when she left to go to Mexico. She got it out and did what she knew to do. She gave those pills. The sister was getting better. All the children were getting better. A rider came. Father sent for Mother to come quick. The one baby was dead and the others were dying. She called in a neighbor to look after her children, as sick as they were, and away she went to dress for burial the one and take care of the others. She took the soap along with her. They all got over it okay. But that was my mother’s lot in life, all the way through. NM: She was a doctor. She had to use what the pioneers away from everyone used. She often got inspiration. MC: Do you think there were any disadvantages to having a polygamous family? LM: I wouldn’t say so. I am proud of it. I am proud of the role my mother played. I am proud of the role my father played. I am proud of all of the family. Everybody didn’t always do just as we would have like them to have it, but does anybody? There were nineteen children in all, ten in the second family and nine in the first. MC: Thank you very much for this interview. 25