From the Improvement Era, January 1957 –

Blue Plum Mornings

By Ilene Hanks Kingsbury

It all began the day Grandma and I were weeding a row of radishes; but I refer to it as my blue plum morning. Yes, I was quite grown up for twelve. I was overly old-fashioned as a teenager; in fact, I fancied I had cut my eyeteeth long since. However, I tired fast and on the next down row managed to slouch in the shade of a venerable blue plum tree. Its crusty bark caught my braids, and Grandma had to all but cut me loose. Right then, she too sat down nearby. Her back rested on the trunk of the next patriarchal fruit bearer.

And right then, also, began an adventure for me that has grown more exciting over a thirty-year period. Before I realized it, she was well into recalling a day sixty-two years before when with her firstborn infant balanced on her hip and the free hand steadying a blue plum cutting, she had aided her husband as he shoveled dirt around the tender roots. That day they gave to the red Iron County earth a row of shade-giving, fruit-bearing, garden-decorating trees. Eight other little ones blessed their union, and all received shade, fruit, and beauty as their legacy.

However, in my childhood the generously fruitful years had tapered off, the branches were thinning, and only a few freshly dried pounds of plums were put in flour sacks for the winter’s eating. The dignified limbs looked a little out of pocket, Grandma said. Younger hearts planned doing over, “Mother’s south walk, and let’s cut down those old plums.” Perhaps you have already guessed it! The threescore year’s memory of planting with a baby on one hip saved that row of gnarled nourishment — Grandma’s symbol of harvest.

In their shade, crunching a radish and loving the Welsh lilt of Grandma’s sentences, I was given a determination, almost sacred in its dedication, to hear all the pioneer story.

Since that blue plum morning I have visited, interviewed, and jotted notes on scores of that diminishing band of stalwarts. I can state without equivocation that no facet of their life has escaped me.

These valiant personages represent a distinguished historical host: They are survivors of the covered wagon era. They all came to the “Valley” the hard way — the ox team train mode of transportation. After 1869 it was the iron horse with chug, whistle, and cinder that brought the “believers.” But these original pioneers came far before that date. Of 86,000 who walked the Mormon trail from 1847 to 1869, a scant two dozen remain to say they crossed the plains by covered wagon. Men and women of such classic caliber are as beacon lights to future generations. They came as a valued part of a colonization program probably not equaled in history — more than 350 settlements in thirty years — think of it, one a month, year in, year out! It is difficult to estimate the organizational effort, by one united group, that went into such an ambitious project. These survivors of that era impress one with the fact that they were not daunted! Sincerity marked their brows. Nothing — depression, deprivation, death — could stir them to ignoble deeds or scathing denouncements of our day or age.

She said her father carried her across the plains on his shoulders. Others came in a covered wagon, pushed handcarts, or walked barefoot for a thousand miles; but Annie, at three, was hoisted to the broad shoulders of this parent who took care of her as both mother and father.

Laura confided to me that on her hundredth birthday, with attention heaped on her head by dignitaries representing church and state, nothing could make up for her disappoint- ing fifteenth birthday on the plains. Her father would not let her attend the party in her honor. It was improper for young girls to dance in the evening, said he.

The encircled wagons protectingly gave security from marauders, animal or human. The fiddle lifted weary heels in a jig or a round; and firelight half disclosed smiles, shawls, and sturdy silhouettes lightly moving to a folkway’s rhythm. But the teenager, forced by convention to almost cower in the wagon, said to herself, “If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget my party I couldn’t go to!”

And there was Ellen, withered body, white halo-coiled beauty above her brow, and gnarled fingers testifying to thousands of tub and board washings! One looked at those hands that had pitted barrels of dried fruit and pondered on service.

She said to me, “I never put on new shoes or stockings without remembering a grievous night in October 1856. The brethren came to our door asking for food and clothing to supply the tragically stranded handcart pioneers on the Mormon trail. And while my husband was saying we had nothing to give, I slipped off my only shoes and stockings and handed them over. Strangely, I did not notice the cold of the tramped dirt floor of our cabin. And in a few days I understood why, or how, a gift to the needy can warm oneself.

“We waited at the roadside to see the piteous victims of the early snows as they were escorted into the Salt Lake Valley. The first woman to alight was wearing my shoes and stockings! And when my eyes traveled up to a face that had seen death on the barren stretches, imagine my fulness of joy to recognize my girlhood friend from England whom I had not seen in twelve years. My feet were not cold then!”

And that same Annie of the patient, plodding parent who carried her on his shoulders had lived in every sort of abode devised by man — a dugout in a river bank, a willow-covered sort of cage, a log lean-to, an adobe, thick-walled, a frame cottage, and brick security from wind and rain. While she described her “shelters,” as she called them, I sensed an almost bragging attitude: She was proud of her frontier struggle to get a roof over her head.

This high-mettled lady of the mountain valleys was never afraid of anything. She passed that test, at three, lashed to the mast of a sailing vessel in the north Atlantic crossing. This saved her life so her father could say in later years that he carried her a thousand miles on his willing shoulders.

Industriously knitting for a great-grandchild was Aunt Margaret. When I asked her how she met Uncle Rob, she raised an eyebrow and clicked her tongue and almost laughed out loud. “Well, I had just finished washing the dishes. I opened the back door, grabbed the dishpan, and made for the step. Why, I almost threw the dishwater in a young man’s face! He fell in love with me at that moment, and soon we were married.”

Behind Clarissa trudged more than 5,000 men, women, and children, plain companies of 1864. Now she sat, ripe in years, sole survivor of those companions of the endless prairie dust and bleeding feet on sagebrush slopes. At first she shrugged, saying, “Nothing ever happened to me.”

So I talked on about pioneer housekeeping. Whereupon she volunteered, “I had a new broom every day. Sagebrush.” When I wondered whether cedar logs kept out gusts of mountain sleet, she remembered tearfully, “Oh my, yes, they were warm, especially if you kept the hearth glowing and wore enough petticoats. But the chinks had to be filled with sod, three-cornered slabs of saw logs or grass or rags. I can just see my whitewashed cabin, the first fancy decoration in our settlement. How clean they looked, those rough walls, and how proud I felt! And the first summer rain leaked through the roof of boards, thatch, and mud. Red streaks of Iron County soil tinted the whitewash with vermillion. That day I knew my efforts to put on airs had been of no avail.”

Give these pioneers an inch, and they’ll take a mile, I thought. I tried to change the trend. “Tell me what you did in camp at night,” I asked. And then followed her most exciting story of all.

“Well,” she brightened, “I was at the running-about stage, forever darting under wagon boxes, falling over wagon tongues, dashing too close to boiling camp kettles, or scattering buffalo chips so carefully gathered during the day’s march. No one could keep up with me, so mother tethered me out the minute the wagons halted. The leather strap, one end looped to the wagon wheel and the other slipped around my waist as one would lasso a calf, was a real trial to me. But I dared not unloose myself. And as mother slipped the halter over the same part of the wheel at each campsite, it became the only leather-polished spoke west of the Mississippi.”

I thought this was all Clarissa had to say, but this “tying” episode set her off to what I call a story within a story. It so happened that a few months before this little pioneer was born a mob drove her parents from their home. The only consideration before burning the log shelter was to lift out a bed, upon which the sick mother lay, and place it at some distance, down by the river.

As the crazed men turned to throw firebrands on the cabin roof, they noticed a small toddler crying in the doorway. A man darted for the child, tucked her under his arm, and ran to the mother’s cot near the water. Then, tearing off a bed cover, he ripped it in sash-like pieces, made a long rope of it, and hastily tied the youngster to the foot of the bed. With a curse he was gone, eager to view the blazing home!

Night mercifully sheltered the sick mother and frightened child. They both lived to remember that night of terror. And the mother learned that one way to save a child from wandering in harm’s way is to put it on a leash.

I met Emily when she was one hundred and one. Her alert memory recalled covered wagon days in the late eighteen fifties. At sixteen she and her brother had emigrated from England. At first they hid from their wrathful father in the hold of a sailing vessel until he was forced to give up and let them sail. The youngsters guarded their mother’s inheritance of several thousand pounds, outfitted five needy families for the Great Plains, and came on in style.

When they were delayed in Echo Canyon by an approaching army sent to quell a non-existent rebellion in Utah Territory, Emily was sudden- ly confronted with an unasked for duty. Not a man or boy in camp — they had been recruited for guard service; besides, they wouldn’t have been of any use in this age-old situation. And the fluttering hands of the frightened women bespoke their indecision. It remained for Emily to offer stoutly to deliver the waiting mother of her now persistent, ready-to-be-born child. A yellow bar of soap, two Irish linen tablecloths, and covered wagon comfort! Those were the tools and the pioneer hospital. The setting, a western canyon under siege!

At sixteen Emily performed as a veteran midwife. The lusty wails of protestation to earth life echoed through the camp; the mother nestled her child to her trembling body. Her eighth had arrived safely!

When over a century old, Emily told me the postlude to her midwifery. She waited seventy years for a thank you! But it was nice at eighty-six to look at a man of God, recently become a great-grandfather, who reported a goodly life because she delivered him from his mother in Echo.

“And the streams you crossed, Grandma?”

“Mostly I think of the waterless days but for really being bothered by water, I think it was that last three miles of Last Creek. You know, we call it Emigration Canyon now. Well, eighteen times we crossed that really miserable little trickle. Jolt, lurch, crack the bullwhip, scream to little brother to walk not so close to the wheels, duck your head to keep willows from snatching off your bon- net . . . your fifteenth crossing. Get back into the wagon to rest your feet, oxen almost bolt, don’t fall out . . . the sixteenth water-pebbled spot is finished! Comfort Grandma, sick in the canvas shades of the bows, fluff her pillow, say the valley is near. (She may not live to see that barren place — some trappers at Fort Bridger said even the Indians didn’t want it.) Why did a hard journey break the spirit so? . . . the seventeenth is made! Feet are rested, back is breaking, stomach is emptier than at the third fording of this winding water, pocket of corn grits is munched away, no buffalo chips on this day’s march to fuel a flame . . . number eighteen is safely accomplished!

“But where is the valley? Never mind the several hills closing off the valley view, — or have we over-imagined this haven?

“Perhaps that is the way it will always be — my secure place, my rest for the weary, my end of the trail — tomorrow?”