Morgan Pioneer History Binds Us 'Together you have to get away from here with your family. I fear that the mob will come upon you before you can get away." Father replied, "I will get away from here alright, and not very far behind you either." Father then took my oldest brother, George, and started for Missouri with a good horse and buggy, and says he traded with almost every man he met. He first met a man with a team and wagon, rather heavy, who was toiling along over very muddy roads. He accosted him in a neighborly sort of way. They chatted a few minutes and he bantered him for a trade. The man looked at his outfit and finally decided it might be a good thing to do as he was a traveling salesman and father's light rig would be better. Father continued to trade. He traded for everything and anything, cows, oxen, horses, mules, clothing, bedding, wagons and wagon bows and covers, buying and selling all the time and always to his advantage. He said it was perfectly marvelous to him how everything tuned to his advantage and surely the Lord blessed them. In a very short time they returned to Nauvoo with an outfit consisting of five good wagons, three good yoke of oxen and cow for each, and when they left Nauvoo they took with them two families besides themselves to Winter Quarters, and provisions and food stuff to last all for one year. When about to leave Nauvoo a man came and bought his place and paid him fifteen dollars more than Father had paid for it. This seemed wonderful for almost everyone left their homes unsold. We finally arrived and settled in south Salt Lake City. I remember how we got our first start of potatoes. Father brought some seed balls from the potato vines. They were about the size of a small fruit called the ground cherry and, like them, full of small seeds which he planted the next spring (1848), and they grew. From those seeds we raised our start of potatoes. The first crop amounted to about two quarts. Father brought them to the house in a small pan. They were all shapes, sizes and colors, the sizes ranging from a chestnut to a peanut. Some were as long as double peanuts, but smaller around and all were as full of eyes as they could be. They were treasured for seed the next year. Not until the third crop was harvested did we taste a potatoes. I remember my brothers used to bring segos home after herding cows on the Jordan river. We then moved to Centerville where father built a cabin and was a successful farmer. I have seen him refuse gold for grain in hard times saying, "If you have money, you will find some one to sell it to you. Mine is for the poor who have no money." Father was probably one of the first men to get timber from the tops of the mountains in Utah which he did from the steep mountain above Centerville. From the Mountain Top he went over far enough to see the beautiful little Weber Valley. It was early summer and that little well-watered and well-wooded valley was in strong contrast to with the hot, dry and then almost barren Salt Lake. It reminded him of his old home in Ohio. He went over to explore the valley. He and three friends went over and camped for three days. They found the valley well-watered, streams stocked with fish, the country covered with grass deer, fowl and game in abundance. They found plenty of timber and also found very good building rock. There was one problem however. The valley was surrounded with high and rugged mountains. The narrow canyon through which the Weber River flowed seemed the only opening through and none but the Indians traveled it; their trails sometimes winding half way up the mountain side, over precipice masses of rock to avoid the narrow passes where only the river could find its way in the canyon below. In the winter of 1855 Charles S. Peterson and two sons and son-in-law Roswell Stevens, Father and one son, two Englishmen-John Cousins and Thomas Bedington-camped and started working on a road. Later that spring Jedediah Morgan Grant sent three men with two teams to assist in putting the road through. In the spring of 1859, father sold our property to President Brigham Young for seven thousand dollars, taking his pay principally in cattle, sheep and horses, which he took into the valley on the Weber where the Territorial Legislature had granted to my brother-in law Jedediah Morgan Grant and my father Thomas Jefferson Thurston and my oldest brother George a large section of land for herd grounds. It consisted of all the south end of Weber Valley from what was to be designated as Line Creek (and still bears the name) and from where it emptied into the river. It followed the east fork of the river about two miles, then struck across eastward to the mountains, thus encompassing Round Valley. I don't