Morgan Pioneer History Binds Us Togelhei Thomas Grover In the fall of 1854 we plowed our ground. Our plows were made at home by Telemacey Rogers. He took a piece of bar iron for the land slide and a piece of steel for a shear. Then he welded a piece to the mold board and another piece of iron and then bolted one end to the shear. Then they took pieces of wagon tire and hammered them thin and riveted them to pieces he had fastened to the bed piece. Then he bent them in the shape of a mold board, took native timber and made a beam and handles and bolted them on to the plow. It made a very good plow. In the winter there came a warm spell and the snow melted so Father sowed the wheat and I harrowed it in with a yoke of oxen. My legs would ache from carrying mud on my shoes until I could not rest at night. The next spring the grasshoppers came in clouds. Some days we couldn't see the sun for hours at a time. They seemed to know the tender grain and would light on that first and fill themselves up. They then would raise up and go into the air. But more would come and by the time they had eaten all the young and tender grain, our grain was ripe and we thrashed seven hundred bushels of wheat. Now I will tell you how we cut the grain. We cut it with a grain cradle and bound it with our hands. The cradle was home made, but the sythe came from the east. The scythe was a crooked stick with a hole in the big end and a post about one inch in diameter and one end put into the scythe. The post was two and one-half feet long with four holes, six or seven inches apart. It had four fingers the same shape as the scythe, with one end in the hold of the post cradle to hold the grain together. Then it was thrown back and laid in the swath behind. Grain cradle, on display at Morgan Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, typical of those used by early pioneers. The thresher was a concave cylinder in a frame. This frame was bolted to two bed pieces of timber that was long enough to sit on the running gears of a wagon. So when traveling, it would set on the wagon and when placed beside a grain stack, it could be let down on the ground behind the cylinder. Men separated the straw from the wheat and after the threshing was done, three men came with a fanning machine and separated the wheat from the chaff. We had more wheat that year than all the rest of the Salt Lake Valley together. The social part of the early days was real good. The dancing would start at one o'clock in the afternoon and we would dance until five o'clock. Then we would go home and feed the cattle and get our suppers, then we would go back to the hall and dance until eleven o'clock. Our dances were opened and closed by prayer. Everybody attended the parties, young and old. And they all did their part in making it pleasant. We had singing school on Sunday mornings and sacrament meeting the afternoon. Prayer meeting was Sunday night. Our fast meeting was held Thursday morning which would be the first Thursday each month. In the spring of 1862,1 was sent with five yoke of oxen from Farmington to Big Cottonwood Canyon to haul rock for the temple. We hauled one rock that weighed eleven thousand pounds. In June of 1862, a posse was called by acting Governor Kinney to go to South Weber and arrest Morris and Banks for firing at an officer. I was in the bunch that went to make the arrest. In the fall of the same year, I drove team for J. L. Stoddard hauling grain east for the stage line. We hauled the first grain that was taken to the Point of Rocks on Bitter Creek. The stage station consisted of hulk and a dozen cedar stakes set in the ground. It rained on us two weeks. All that time we didn't have a dry thread on us. We had to wade the creeks and ford the streams of water with our wagons. The water would sometimes come up to my neck. When we got to the Point of Rocks, we had to cut the grain sacks open, as the grain had sprouted and was growing through the sacks. The second trip that fall was to Church Butte on Black Fork. There were sixteen wagons, four with oxen. The others were mules and horses. The ox teams had to pull the mule and horse teams out of every ditch or muddy place on the road. Going up Echo Canyon, we had to pull them out of every creek crossing and when we got nearly to the head of the canyon, one of our wagons tipped over in the creek.