Mormon Stalwarts.--A Waif on the Plains.--Death of Celestia
Kimball.--Two Indian Girls Tortured.--Sally's Death.--Ira Eldredge's
Dog and the Wolf.--Delicious Rawhide Soup.--Eat Thistles.--The
Devastating Crickets.--Deliverance Wrought by the Sea Gulls.
Having foreshadowed the immigration movement in general, I turn back to
the parting at Winter Quarter's. Owing to the poverty of our people,
and to the lack of men, conditions were such that in making up the
Pioneer Company many families were divided. Such was the case in my
father's family. My dear mother, poor in health, was left behind with
my only sister, Harriet, to follow several years later.
It fell to my lot to cross the plains in Captain Jedediah M. Grant's
company. Brother Grant was a man of wonderful energy. In fact, the
various companies which followed on the heels of the pioneers were led
by a host of stalwarts; so that in my youth I became acquainted with
many solid men of Joseph's day. Foremost among them, to my mind, were
Brigham Young, John Taylor. Geo. A. Smith, Parley P. Pratt, Uncle John
Smith, and Uncle John Young.
The last-named stood as a father to me; and yet, during that pilgrimage
I was like a waif upon the ocean. The camp fire was my home, and I was
everybody's chore boy. While this arrangement taught me self-reliance,
it chilled my heart, and turned me against those finer, more tender
endearments of life which ever abound in happy, lovable homes; and from
this experience I have learned to pity the child that grows up without
a mother's care and caress.
On reaching the Valley, our people at first all lived in the "Old
Fort." Father was the first to move out. He had built a two-roomed log
house on the lot where Uncle Brigham later built the Bee-Hive and Lion
Houses.
On one of father's trips to the canyon for wood, he took me with him.
As we returned, we saw Apostle John Taylor and George Q. Cannon running
a whip saw. They gave father a red-pine slab, which he hauled home and
later placed across City Creek, and it remained in use for years as a
foot bridge. It lay with the round side up, and after the bark peeled
off, it became very slippery, especially when wet.
After Presidents Young and Kimball moved onto their lots the path
leading to this footbridge connected their homes. One day Aunt
Prescinda Kimball's little daughter Celestia, unknown to her mother,
started to go to Aunt Zina's. It was in the spring of the year, 1850
and City Creek was swollen by the melting snows. The child evidently
slipped off the slab and was drowned.
As soon as the family missed her, a cry of alarm was given. I was
confined to the house with a painful flesh would in my left leg.
Hearing the tumult, and seeing the excited people running along the
creek, I surmised what had happened. Running to the slab, I dropped
into the water and was carried by the swift current to Brother Wells'
lot, where the fence had caught flood wood, and formed a dam and
eddy. I dove under the drift, and finding the body, brought it to the
surface, and gave it to Dr. Williams; but the precious life was gone.
Soon after we moved on to our city lot, fall of 1847, a band of Indians
camped near us. Early one morning we were excited at hearing their
shrill, blood-curdling war whoop, mingled with occasional sharp cries
of pain. Father sent me to the Fort for help. Charley Decker and Barney
Ward, the interpreter, and others hurried to the camp.
It was Wanship's band. Some of his braves had just returned from the
war-path. In a fight with "Little Wolf's" band, they lost two men, but
had succeeded in taking two girls prisoners. One of these they had
killed, and were torturing the other. To save her life Charley Decker
bought her, and took her to our house to be washed and clothed.
She was the saddest-looking piece of humanity I have ever seen. They
had shingled her head with butcher knives and fire brands. All the
fleshy parts of her body, legs, and arms had been hacked with knives,
then fire brands had been stuck into the wounds. She was gaunt with
hunger, and smeared from head to foot with blood and ashes.
After being washed and clothed, she was given to President Young and
became as one of his family. They named her Sally, and her memory has
been perpetuated by the "Courtship of Kanosh, a Pioneer Indian Love
Story," written by my gifted cousin, Susa Y. Gates.
But Susa gave us only the courtship, while the ending of Sally's life,
as told to me by a man from Kanosh, was as tragic as her childhood days
had been thrilling. After she married Kanosh, several years of her
life passed pleasantly, in the white man's house which he built for
her. Then her Indian husband took to himself another wife, who became
jealous of Sally, and perhaps hated her also for her white man's ways.
One day when they were in a secluded place digging segoes, the new wife
murdered Sally and buried the body in a gully.
When Kanosh missed her, he took her track and followed it as faithfully
as a blood hound could have done, and was not long in finding the
grave. In his grief he seized the murderess, and would have burned her
at the stake, but white men interfered.
In due time the Indian woman confessed her guilt, and in harmony with
Indian justice, offered to expiate her crime by starving herself to
death.
The offer was accepted, and on a lone hill in sight of the village,
a "wick-i-up" was constructed of dry timber. Taking a jug of water,
the woman walked silently toward her living grave. Like the rejected
swan, alone, unloved, in low tones she sang her own sad requiem, until
her voice was hushed in death. One night when the evening beacon fire
was not seen by the villagers, a runner was dispatched to fire the
wick-i-up, and retribution was complete.
Sally's funeral had taken place only a day or two previous. Over a
hundred vehicles followed the remains to their last resting place,
and beautifully floral wreaths covered the casket; for Sally had been
widely loved among the white settlers for her gentle ways.
Just across the creek on Brother Kimball's unoccupied lot stood an old
gnarled oak tree. Ten feet from the ground a large limb shot straight
out, making a good gallows on which to hang beeves, and father used it
for that purpose. The first ox that he slaughtered he hung the hide,
flesh side out, on that limb; and it attracted dogs from the Fort, and
wolves from the mountain. Father set two steel traps at the root of the
tree, and during the first night caught a large grey wolf in one trap,
and Ira Eldredge's spotted mastiff in the other.
About midnight we heard their terrible fighting; but in the morning
the wolf was gone. He had chewed his own leg off below the knee. After
liberating the mastiff, I went to the fort, and got Ham Crow to come
with his dogs and run the wolf down. We caught the ugly brute in the
mouth of Red Butte Canyon; and Brother Crow added the carcass to his
scant store of provisions, and grateful for it.
By the time the grass began to grow the famine had waxed sore. For
several months we had no bread. Beef, milk, pig-weeds, segoes, and
thistles formed our diet. I was the herd boy, and while out watching
the stock, I used to eat thistle stalks until my stomach would be as
full as a cow's. At last the hunger was so sharp that father took down
the old bird-pecked ox-hide from the limb; and it was converted into
most delicious soup, and enjoyed by the family as a rich treat.
As the summer crept on, and the scant harvest drew nigh, the fight with
the crickets commenced. Oh, how we fought and prayed, and prayed and
fought the myriads of black, loathsome insects that flowed down like a
flood of filthy water from the mountainside. And we should surely have
been inundated, and swept into oblivion, save for the merciful Father's
sending of the blessed sea gulls to our deliverance.
The first I knew of the gulls, I heard their sharp cry. Upon looking
up, I beheld what appeared like a vast flock of pigeons coming from
the northwest. It was about three o'clock in the afternoon. My brother
Franklin and I were trying to save an acre of wheat of father's,
growing not far from where the Salt Lake Theatre now stands. The
wheat was just beginning to turn yellow. The crickets would climb the
stalk, cut off the head, then come down and eat it. To prevent this,
my brother and I each took an end of a long rope, stretched it full
length, then walked through the grain holding the rope so as to hit the
heads, and thus knock the crickets off. From sunrise till sunset we
kept at this labor; for as darkness came the crickets sought shelter,
but with the rising of the sun they commenced their ravages again.
I have been asked "how numerous were the gulls."
There must have been thousands of them. Their coming was like a great
cloud; and when they passed between us and the sun, a shadow covered
the field. I could see the gulls settling for more than a mile around
us. They were very tame, coming within four or five rods of us.
At first we thought that they, also, were after the wheat, and this
thought added to our terror: but we soon discovered that they devoured
only the crickets. Needless to say, we quit drawing the rope, and gave
our gentle visitors the possession of the field. As I remember it, the
gulls came every morning for about three weeks, when their mission was
apparently ended, and they ceased coming. The precious crops were saved.
I have met those who were skeptical about the gulls' being sent by
divine Providence, for the salvation of our people, but I believe it
most firmly; as witness the preparedness of the Indians. They kept on
hand baskets purposely made to put in the creeks to catch the loathsome
insects as they floated down the streams, and they caught them by tons,
sun-dried them, then roasted them, and made them into a silage that
would keep for months. Their skill in this convinces me that the coming
of the crickets had been continuous for ages. Nor had the cricket crop
ever been interrupted before until our people came, and the coming of
the gulls checked the increase of the loathsome insects. The gulls were
sent by the same Power that sent the quails to feed the Israelites.
Do I love the sea gulls? I never hear their sharp, shrill cry but
my heart leaps with joy and gladness, for I know that they saved my
father's family and his people from a fearful death. Bless the gulls!
They and the lovely sego lilies should ever be remembered, protected,
and sacredly cherished by the children of the Latter-day Saints.