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Show Emma Morris Kingston no 26 My mother, Emma Morris Kingston, was born at Deans Anger, Northamptonshire, England, on January 14, 1840. She was the daughter of Edward and Eliza Baily Morris. She left England to come to Utah in 1861 with a girl friend of hers. Her parents came the next year. The two girls walked nearly all the way across the plains. One day some Indians came to the camp and one of the white men jokingly asked them how many ponies they would give for a white squaw, pointing to mother. The Indians took it seriouisly and brought several ponies to the camp. Mother was terribly afraid of being taken by them and kept herself hidden for days. The Indians followed the camp for several days and seemed determined to make the trade. Mother lived in Centerville. She married my father, Frederick Kingston, there the following year. Her first child,Oliver, was born then in 1863. Very soon after his birth they moved to Morgan County and lived at Richville, where her second child, Lizzie Ann, was born. My father was sick with asthma for thirty-five years, and at times mother would have to make the living for the family. One winter he was in bed fourteen weeks. Mother would wash all day for fifty cents, and bought flour at $9.00 a hundred. We often went to bed hungry. We had nothing to burn but green willows, and we could not keep father warm. So we cleaned out an old dugout with a dirt roof and floor. We moved father’s bed into this, and someone made a sheet iron stove to heat the place with. By this arrangement we were able to make him more comfortable. For Christmas that year, Mr. Mety sent us a bucket of black molassess and a sack of corn meal. This was the first “sweets” we had tasted in years. We were the happiest children in the world that Christmas day. The next winter father sold our only cow and went down to Dixie for his health. While he was gone mother’s fifth child was born. Father used to mend shoes at home for a living. He also worked at the co-op store. About the year 1872 we moved over to the mouth of Monday Town Hollow. I remember the big flat stone in front of the fire place, where we used to sit in the evening and listen to the stories father would tell us. Our furniture consisted of a bunk nailed up in the corner for a bed, some stools made from slabs with pegs put on the underside for legs; a table made from slabs, nailed to the wall. We children made a new broom for mother everyday. We gathered rabbit on the hillside and tied it on a stick. Father belonged to the Militia and I well remember the blue soldier coat with brass buttons, that he work. At night we slept on a sheep skin on the floor and this coat served as a covering over us. Mother used to make sacks for Mr. Rollo at the mill. She mad them at night, be hand, for one cent a piece. We would tie a button, or a flat rock, in a rag, and put in a saucer of greace and light it. That was all the light she would have to sew by. We would go in the hills and pick the wool off the sage brush and the fences, or off dead sheep. Mother would wash it and have it made into rolls. Then she would spin it into yarn and knit our stockings. When I was fourteen years old mother was very sick and I knit stockings for the whole family. I remember the grasshoppers. They would lay their eggs in the gorund, and no matter how cold it was, the frost had no effect on the egss. In the spring they would hatch out. It was at this stage that we could drive them into the trenches and drown them. After their wings were formed we would be able to do nothing with them. They would fly onto a grain field and never leabve until it was all destroyed. After this they would all leave in a swarm and go to another field. They would be so thick we could not see the sun. I could hitch up a yoke of oxen and drive mother over to Morgan. The ox yoke had two bows attached to it which were placed around the neck of oxen. A chain was fastened to a ring in the woke and brought along the tongue to the wagon. Here it was fastened to the tongue with a large bolt, called the king-bolt. There were no lines or other harness to guide them. We just spoke to them and they understood what we meant. “Gee” meant to go from you, and “Haw” meant to come toward you. At one time we had an old well—a large deep hole in the ground—which was covered over with boards. It was muddy and our oxen, in walking over this, pushed the boards apart and both fell in, one on top of the other. The bottom one was pushed down so far that we never waw anything of him again, but we succeeded in getting the other one out. We saw lots of Indians in those days. They used to come and camp near us on the creek, as many as a hundred at one time with a dozen or more tents. We were not at all afraid of them. Old Soldier, one of their leaders, was a Mormon and a great friend of my father’s . He used to come and ask father to bring the oil and administer to his sick boy. We never saw sugar for years. We would gather wild currants, choke cherries, and service berries and eat them without sugar or sweets of any kind. We caught fish and dried them in the sun. These we thought were delicious. My father died February 24, 1895 and my mother died January 5, 1896, the day that Utah became a state. By…… Lizzie Kingston Peterson. |