6 UTAH INTERNATIONAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF A BUSINESS ship Chaos, and sailed to New Orleans. From there they took a river boat up the Mississippi to Nauvoo, Illinois, the latest gathering place of the westering Mormons. In 1844 young Edmund’s father fell victim to cholera and died. A year later, Hannah married Elam Cheney, twenty years her junior, to whom she soon bore a daughter. Shortly thereafter, the family joined the first wave of Mormon pioneers trekking one thousand miles across the Great Plains to their new Zion in the Great Salt Lake Valley. Arriving in Utah in October 1847, Edmund spent two years helping to establish the new Mormon refuge at Salt Lake City. Family tradition maintains that Brigham Young called on him to join a party of two dozen men, headed by Amasa Lyman and Orrin Porter Rockwell, to collect the “tithes and offerings” of the gold field missionaries, whom Young had sent to California in hopes of bolstering the struggling Mormon economy. Edmund’s errand to collect these tithes became the stuff of family legend: They had been dogged by Indians for over 400 miles. En route they were attacked several times, but were successful in repelling each skirmish. As the party approached the halfway point to Sutter’s Fort, they came upon a white man being pursued by a small band of ferocious Indians. The man was severely wounded with arrows, but was able to outrun his pursuers. Later [the wounded man] told how three other men in his group were overtaken and scalped. After a wealth of similar adventures, Wattis returned to Utah where his family had moved north to Uintah at the mouth of Weber Canyon near present-day Ogden. Joining them there, he applied himself to farming, successfully coaxing a living from the rocky ground despite an arid climate and harsh winters. Thus established, Edmund married seventeen-year-old Mary Jane Corey on June 27, 1852. Their union produced seven children, arriving at two-year intervals beginning in 1853. The firstborn was Mary Jane, followed by three boys, Edmund Orson, Jr. (born March 6, 1855), George Lyman, and William Henry (born August 14, 1859). Next came another daughter, Eunice Elvira, and two more boys, Frank Archie, who died in childhood, and Warren Lafayette.