Annie Wells Cannon (1859-1942) was one of those generation-after-the-pioneers women who seemingly did everything we admire about LDS women of that era: She wrote for and helped to edit the Woman’s Exponent (naturally – she was the daughter of its editor, Emmeline B. Wells); she was a president of Daughters of Utah Pioneers; she was a Red Cross worker during World War I, and was president of the War Mothers’ group, and helped to develop Salt Lake’s Memory Grove in honor of the soldiers; she fought for woman suffrage, and served in the Utah legislature for two non-consecutive terms; and she served on the General Board of the Relief Society, under her mother’s presidency.

It’s this last service – Relief Society – that is responsible for this story. In August 1907, she was assigned to represent the Relief Society at the dedication of the Uinta Stake Tabernacle in Vernal, Utah, and to conduct the Relief Society session of that stake’s conference. Because of the dedication, that stake conference was a major event in Church life that year.

Vernal is easy enough to reach these days, but in 1907 it was beyond the edge of beyond. Joseph F. Smith and other leaders who had private carriages made their own travels through the rough roads of the Uinta Mountains. Annie Wells Cannon and her three women companions, representing the auxiliaries, took public transportation. This meant that they took the Rio Grande railroad into Colorado, then transferred to a local, narrow-gauge railroad that brought them back into Utah to the little town of Daggett in the Uinta Mountains, where they spent the night. Then followed two days by stage – more like a horse-drawn bus with multiple rows of seats than the stage coach you might think of from Westerns. Annie doesn’t tell us how many people were in the stage, but she says it was crowded, and that all the passengers beyond her party of four ladies were men, and everybody sat three to a bench. Annie sat on the front seat between the driver and a male passenger; the other three ladies sat on the second seat.

Under those conditions, and for all those hours together, the passengers naturally got fairly well acquainted. Here is Annie’s recollection of her talk with the man who shared the front bench with her.

I do not recall the name of the man who sat by me in the stage, perhaps I never knew, but he very much surprised me after we told him of our mission, by remarking, “I know something about the Relief Society of the Mormon Church, and have a very high regard for your organization.”

“Indeed,” I answered, “how does that happen?”

“It touches one of the saddest but sweetest memories of my life, and though I seldom speak of it, I will tell you. I am connected with the Denver and Rio grande railroad company. It is in their interest I am taking this trip. When I first came West I was located at Provo. My young wife and little son, not quite three years old, came with me. We had never been in a Mormon community and had our prejudices, so we did not make friends.

“This little boy was his mother’s only companion during the hours I had to be at the office, and she idolized him; in a man’s way so did I. One day he became very sick and when the doctor came, to our horror, he pronounced the illness diphtheria. ((Diphtheria, now well controlled by the DPT vaccine, kills 5-10% of its victims, mostly small children, usually by obstructing the airway so that patients choke to death. Wikipedia tells me that there were 4,700 cases worldwide in 2013, down from 100,000 in 1980, with an estimated million cases per year before that. I don’t know what the prevalence was in 1907, but that is approximately the year when my own grandmother had it. The doctor gave her up for dead and said he would return in the morning to sign her death certificate. That night, the elders unexpectedly came to my family’s home in rural Alabama, and gave my little grandmother a blessing. The next morning, my mischievous great-grandmother sent my grandmother, fully recovered, to answer the door when the doctor knocked. )) My wife, young, inexperienced, alone, and frightened was in despair, when tow women came to the door. Even the step on the porch and knock at the door that broke the silence was a relief. Mary (my wife) told me, afterwards, that never had she heard such gentle voices, such welcome words as came from those two women.

“‘We were passing,’ said one of them, ‘on our way and we saw the doctor come out of your house. Knowing you were strangers, we thought we would come in and see if we could help you. Is it the little curly haired boy we have seen you playing with that is sick?’

“My wife answered, ‘Yes, it is our baby. he has diphtheria and my husband will have to stay from home, until someone comes to relieve him at the office. Perhaps you know some nurse you could send me?’

“Just then, the little fellow cried out and the mother rushed in to him. One of these women followed her to his room, telling the other one to go on, and she would see what she could do to help. She proved a wonderful comfort and knew everything to do, at least it seemed so to us. She stayed with us during that week and when the baby died she prepared him for burial. When we offered to remunerate her, she told us that she was a Relief Society teacher and it was her mission to comfort and help wherever she could, but she hoped we would always have a good word for her people.

“We could never forget such kindness. It was more Christ-like than anything I ever knew. After we took our precious baby home to bury him, we were stationed in Salt Lake, but such kindness made my wife and this good lady lasting friends and, of course, changed our attitude towards the Mormon people altogether.”

It would be a major research project to identify this railroad man and his family, but I think it could be done. Barring a journal entry or a family story, though, I don’t know how we could ever identify the Relief Society teacher with “her mission to comfort and help wherever she could.”