ALFRED GEORGE WHITE 1856 -1932 PIONEER OF ABOUT 1862 or 63. Son of ELIZABETH AND WILLIAM WHITE OF LONDON, ENGLAND WRITTEN BY HIS ONLY DAUGHTER EMMA WHITE BUTLER. ALFRED GEORGE WHITE (1856 - 1932) By Emma White Butler (his only daughter) My Father, Alfred George White, was born In London, England in 1856 to Elizabeth and William White. He was their second child, I believe. In July 1939, while I was visiting London, I took the "tube" down town and rode out to Islington to find 16 Florence Street, the house where Dad was born. It was a neighborhood of clean, modest houses and apartments. I noticed many nautical and sea-faring signs on the taverns and shops. When I came to number 16 Florence Street, I stood thrilled to tears in front of a neat, white house, and tried to imagine my father as a small boy run¬ning about the place. It had an iron grill fence enclosing a tiny plot of garden. I was intensely moved to be standing on the spot of my origins, so to speak. The library at Islington had quite a history of the neighbor¬hood. In Queen Elizabeth's time Islington was some distance from London proper. Once the Queen rode out there to some revels. Several Whites were mentioned, but none that I could recognize as our own. Dad said he came over from England when he was six years old. He remembered something of the wagon train journey to Utah, the events of which have been recorded elsewhere. Recently (June 1952) I visited the site of one of his earliest Utah homes, the home¬stead at the mouth of Hardscrabble Canyon, near Porterville, Utah. It must have been a wild and lonely place to his family after city life in London. I found it beautiful. I also visited Hardscrabble cemetery where grandfather William and Aunt Bessie are buried. Dad used to tell stories of his childhood in that part of Utah. He never smoked nor drank, but one time in his life he became intoxicated. His mother was ill, and Alfred-ten or twelve years old - was put on a gentle old horse and sent to get the whiskey which had been prescribed for her. On the way home he thought he would just see how whiskey tasted. He opened the bottle, sipping again and again until he "passed out" and slipped from the horse. He was found asleep under a bush. Perhaps that was the Lord's way of teaching him to avoid liquor. The after effects were very unpleasant for him. Aunt Bessie's husband, Uncle Porter, was a bosom friend of Dad's youth. I can imagine the two of them squiring pretty girls around Morgan and Porterville. Dad married early, I believe, a woman somewhat older than he. The marriage was not a success, and there were no children. Dad passed the examination for his teacher's certificate in Logan, and taught elementary school in Mendon and in Snowville. I have a picture of his school in Snowville, with my handsome father standing in the midst of some forty pupils of all ages, his hair, eyes and moustache, but the posture and the expression is unmistakable. The picture is precious to me. Dad was an expert penman. He did fancy shadings and artistic drawings with his pen, using either hand; he was ambidexterous. He tried to teach us all the "muscular movement," called the Palmer method, I believe. We were hopeless. None of us ever learned it. While Dad was teaching in Mendon, he called at the Michael Murphy ranch and left on the blackboard of their private school¬room a sample of his artistic drawing and beautiful writing. The family of girls were all agog about the talented, handsome Professor White. Next time he called he met Alice Wilkinson, Michael Murphy's step-daughter (and my mother). After a short courtship (I can imagine how romantic and beautiful moonlight nights in Cache Valley were to them) they were married in Logan in 1891. My mother had attended Logan College and was able to help Dad in his teaching. They both sang a good deal, and were active in church and social affairs. They had many happy friendships both in Mendon and in Snowville. Dad was nineteen years older than mother, handsome and in his prime, just the kind and under¬standing person to keep a spunky young wife in hand. When I recently visited Mendon with my mother and my young¬est brother, (June, 1952) nearly everyone we met remembered Dad or had been to his school. Those I met who remembered him were Bishop Dan Hickman and Charles Nelson in Snowvillle; and in Mendon the Foster sisters. Joe Hardman, and Catherine and Otto Anderson. When we visited the grave yards in these two beautiful little villages, the names there were those we had heard all our lives; Birds, Gardners, Larkins, Sorensons, Bakers, Hardmans, Andersons, and others. I never knew any of them personally, yet thesd dead were like friends because their memory was held dear by my father and mother. During his stay in Snowville, Dad built the rock T on the Snowville school house, and the Relief Society building there (which is still in use). He built several buildings in Mendon, too, including a new and beautiful little house where I was born. When we left Mendon, about 1905, our home was bought by Jimmy Bird. Later it burned (about 1932). Alfred and Alice's first child, George Alfred, was born in Mendon, where he eventually entered the primary class with his own father as teacher. Ivan James and Raymond Verl were also born in Mendon. Then in Snowville came Arnold Conrad and Irving William; and finally in Mendon again, I, Emma Lucille, was born-a girl at last! (1902) My mother and father went through the Temple at Logan and were sealed in 1898. Teaching in those days (as alas! in these) did not yield an adequate income to support a large family. Dad moreover had in¬herited the true pioneer spirit. In 1905 he moved to Carmel, California. For several years he worked there and in Pacific Grove at carpentery and building. Then, drawn to new horizons, and hearing of opportunities in British Columbia, he took his family by boat to Vancouver, B.C. There he bought property, and was soon joined by his brother William. There followed a period of dreadful sickness and hardships. Uncle Bill's second wife died after a long illness, leaving three little boys, Orlo, Okla, and Billy. My mother helped nurse the wife and took care of the nine children. Uncle Bill himself had to crawl about because of painful and swollen feet. It took the money of all the family and wore them all out. After that we were a short time in Port Moody, B.C., where we all attended school. Then we moved on up to Little Fort on the North Thompson river, many miles from the railroad, a beaut¬iful, timbered wilderness, where Dad and my brother George filed on pre-emption land (land controlled by the Canadian government.) These were days of terrible privation for mother and Dad, but I remember much glorious freedom and adventure, play and excite¬ment, and happy times. When Dad went away to work, his family had to stay for a time in a tent in the wilderness. Once George and Mother staved off some wild pigs (they were slavering because they smelled the supper mother was cooking) by scalding the leader with hot water. Often Indians would slip in and out of the clearing, asking for food, or to trade bear or deer meat for sugar, flour and lard. When Dad came home at intervals, my heart would nearly burst for the joy of seeing him again. Finally we had a snug log house with a fireplace, and spent the winter snug, warm, and protected. But although Dad worked hard, he did not prosper in a material way, partly because he could not bear to br grasping, agressive, nor bargin-driving. He did not have the aquisitive instinct necessary to financial success in this commercial civilization. His values in life were of another kind. Our last move in B. C. was to Trapp Lake, near Kamloops, this time the land was open country, good for grazing and wheat. For several years, helped by his sons, he farmed, with varying success. When we had good weather and rain, crops were excellent. There would be new clothes all around, lots of provisions, musical instruments, even a phonograph with little blue cylinder records, and much rejoicing. But every third year was dry and windy. The struggle against the elements was too difficult. Once when the crops failed Dad took our family to anew wilderness on Shuswap Lake. He and the boys had a contract cut¬ting cordwood for the lake steamers. To me that was a glorious winter. The lake froze over to a depth of eight feet. At night when the temperature was thirty below zero, the ice would crack open with a sound like thunder. We were snug in log cabins with lots of wood for warm fires, and good provisions, which the boys hauled on sleds eight miles over the ice. In the spring our only contact with the outside world was the weekly visit of the little lake steamer. The boat brought us mail and supplies, and picked up the cordwood that had been stacked on the lake banks. How deep and clear that water was! And the silence of that forest was sometimes frightening. Our cabins were built on a little promontory of white quartz called Marble Point. There were high snow-capped mountains in sight, and the view down the lake was expansive. When the little steamer was due, I used to watch for the smoke, which was visible long before the boat came into view. I remember it all so vividly! I was about ten, and madly in love with the boat's handsome and jolly young engineer. In 1948 I revisited three of the homesites Dad had chosen while in Canada, In each case the setting was beautiful beyond words ( as I had remembered them) and the old houses decaying, but solid and artistic looking. We owe our love of and appreciation of nature partly to Dad's choice of homesites. Something in these places satisfied his beauty-loving soul. "Man does not live by bread alone," and Dad knew it. We lived a glorious outdoor life in summer. In winter, beside the rough fireplace or around a big roaring stove, I remember wonderful evenings of singing "Come Where the Lilies Bloom", "Maggie", "Old Grey Bonnet", "Old Rugged Cross", "Nearer, My God to Thee" and many other beautiful old songs. We were poor and life was a struggle, but the boys learned to play fiddle, harmonica, guitar, and banjo. My heart still dances to the memory of our own music. Dad knew and loved literature. He often read to us or recited to us. He had great dramatic ability. I was held as by a spell when he recited with intensity things like Poe's The Raven; or the ghost's speech from Shakespears Hamlet, which goes like this: "I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up they soul, freeze they young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres. Thy knotted and com¬bined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand one end—How we loved it! Dad should have been an actor. In fact, he did take part in amateur dramatics in Mendon. It was in East Lynn, I believe, that Jim Whitney fired the blank cartridge too close to Dad's face, burned him with the powder, and knocked him down in good earnest. We studied, too, Arithmetic and grammar, geography and history. Since the Shuswap Lake job was temporary, we returned to Kamloops and the homestead. Soon after, the first World War came. My brother, George volunteered with the Canadians and was killed in action at Vimy Ridge, France, in 1917. That was the first grief and bitterness of loss I had ever known. My big brother, with his mop of curly black hair and his glorious singing, was dearly beloved of us all. Dad tried to comfort us. Then I remembered that, years before, when Dad had received news of his own mother"s death, he had gone away alone for the day to be with his grief and his home memories. I had been too young to realize his sorrow. Our family scattered then. Dad stayed in B. C. until 1920, and then joined some of us in Oregon, where I was going to school. The last house Dad built was on a pretty three acres near Salem, Oregon. He built it for me, he said; it had a huge fire¬place, and an upstairs studio with a French door and a balcony. But the heavy work was too much for a man of his years, in add¬ition to all the hard work he had done in the past. He was stricken with a bowel ailment, a displacement of the large in¬testines. He must have suffered several years without complaint. After a few weeks of illness, he died peacefully in a hospital in in Salem, Oregon, in 1932, with a loving and sorrowing family at his bedside. My father was a deeply religious man who lived a rich, spiritual life, although he rejected orthodox creeds, he had his own expansive and soul-enlarging philosophy which made him a peaceful, creative, happy man to the day of his death. He bore no grudges and had no quarrels. He played the organ and sang. He wrote stories. He never stopped studying. Just before his death, he was doing algebra for the fun of it, and he and I conversed in elementary Spanish a little. He had the linguaphone records, and his insatiable love of words made him an apt student, even at seventy-five. He loved to garden, was fond of animals, and adored his small grandchildren. By his own wish, his body was cremated and his ashes were scattered under a great oak tree on the Salem property. I sent a red talisman rose to be planted there. His immediate family and their children are as follows: 1. Mary Alice White, his wife, aged 80, Grass Valley, California Ivan James White, the eldest living son, Red Bluff, California (Not married) Ramond Verl White, son, Cupertino, California Grandson, Raymond Gardner White 18, Granddaughter, Phillis White 20 Arnold Conrad White, son, Chico, California Granddaughter, Margaret Williams 25, Great Grandson- Stevie Williams 4 Great Grandson Arnold Dean Williams 1 Granddaughterr - Emma White Barrington- 23 5. Irving William White, son Granddaughter, Muriel Johnson 26 Great Grandson, Dickie Johnson 6 Great Grandson, Robert Johnson 2 Great Granddaughter, Lynn Johnson 4