Chapter One, Origins

For several years I have thought that I ought to follow the example of my father and write an autobiography.  After a very successful life as a highway engineer, a church leader, and a business executive, he retired in his middle seventies.  Although he had already written two books--a history of his business corporation (the Utah Sand and Gravel Company), and a history of the Utah Highway Commission in Utah--he enrolled in a creative writing course at the University of Utah.  Upon graduation, he proceeded to write three more books, including a two-volume autobiography and a history of the Utah Knowltons.  I have always regretted that he did not write more about the social history of Utah.  Few men were as knowledgeable about political, economic, religious, or social trends in Utah from the 1920s to the 1960s.

I shall begin by discussing my own origins.  My parents came from quite different Mormon environments.  My father grew up in the mature, thriving, agricultural community of Farmington, Utah.  The inhabitants--virtually all Mormon at the time--participated fully in Mormon culture.  The children attended excellent schools, enjoyed the extensive cultural and religious life of Farmington, and were in constant contact with Salt Lake City.  Standards of living were quite high.  The hardships of the pioneer period had receded into a partially mythological past.

Ezra T. Clark, my father's maternal grandfather, came to Farmington from Nauvoo in the early Mormon migration with a young family.  Prospering in farming, he helped organize the first bank in Davis County, Utah.  Although serving on several missions for the Church, he managed to avoid the traumatic experience of continual pioneering.  When called upon to participate in new colonization projects in Idaho, he sent sons to represent the family.  Two of three wives lived across the street from each other in unusual harmony.  Ezra T. Clark was a fortunate man.  He became a widely respected local business and Church leader in Farmington.  His two polygamous families got along very well.  A close family unity developed that has persevered over the generations.  Except for a six month term in the Utah State Penitentiary for polygamy during the Federal Polygamy prosecutions, he managed to avoid involvement in most of the political and religious controversies of late 19th century Utah.

His second wife, my great grandmother Susan Leggett Clark, was converted along with other members of her family to the Church in Lowestoff, England, where her father worked as a gardener.  Among the missionaries to visit her was her future husband, Ezra T. Clark.  Migrating to Utah at the age of 22 in 1862, she came to prepare the way for her parents.  Ezra T. Clark, hearing of her arrival in Salt Lake City, went down to the city to find and to marry her.  They were married and she became the mother of ten children.  A quiet, refined English woman, she was trained as a seamstress. Loving music, she was active in local Church circles.  My father's paternal grandfather, Benjamin F. Knowlton, came out of a quite different Mormon subculture.  Coming west from Nauvoo as a young boy with his parents, he spent most of his adolescent years and manhood in the saddle as Mormon scout, frontiersman, guerrilla fighter in the Utah war, and ranchman. He married Rhoda Ann Richards on October 30, 1863, and reared his family in an isolated frontier outpost in Skull Valley, Utah remote from the centers of Mormon culture.  His children grew up on the western frontier with few amenities and even fewer opportunities for religious, cultural, or educational development.  His ranching operations prospered for many years.  But drought, blizzards, over-grazing of the open range as other livestock outfits penetrated Skull Valley, and perhaps unwise investment in pure-blooded English livestock diminished his holdings.  In search of better educational opportunities for his children and because of the poor health of his wife, he moved his family to a purchased farm in Farmington in 1880.  Shortly after his arrival, his wife Rhoda Ann died at the age of 39, leaving a brood of six children.  Soon after he married two women in polygamy, Minerva Edmeresa Richards, half sister to his first wife, and Catherine Hinman, the two wives reared his motherless children.

My great-great-grandmother, Rhoda Ann Jennetta Richards Knowlton, was born to Willard and Jennetta Richards on September 15, 1843.  Willard Richards first met his wife as a missionary in England.  Converted to the church, she was baptized against the wishes of her parents.  Her father, John Edwards Richards, was a Protestant minister at Walkerford, England, a small village near Preston.  In 1841 Willard returned to the United States with his wife and settled in Nauvoo, Illinois.

Willard, called to be secretary and confidant of the prophet Joseph Smith, became so deeply involved in the affairs of the persecuted church and its leader that his young wife may well have suffered neglect.  Willard was with Joseph and Hyrum Smith when they were murdered in Carthage Jail.  Jennetta died on June 22, 1845, shortly after the birth of her second child and was buried close to the family home in Nauvoo.  Her two children, Heber John and Rhoda Ann, came west with the other families of Willard Richards.  Heber John worked on the Knowlton ranch in Skull Valley and introduced Rhoda Ann and Benjamin F. Knowlton to each other.  She spent most of her married life in charge of a large ranch house under frontier conditions.  My father comments that, "Benjamin and Rhoda and their older children were subjected to more strenuous living conditions, accompanied by fewer opportunities for cultural development, than any of the generations of my family."

In Utah, Willard Richards, until the time of his death, played an important intellectual and religious role in early Utah history.  As a member of the First Presidency, his duties were onerous.  He was never able to devote much attention to his personal and financial affairs.  Besides filling the office of historian and recorder of the church, he was elected secretary of the provisional state of Utah and labored in other political positions.  He found time to serve as early editor of the Deseret News and as postmaster of Utah.

My paternal grandfather, Benjamin Franklin, Jr., grew up in the pioneer environment of Skull Valley.  He worked closely with his father in the arduous tasks of caring for large herds of livestock in a region still inhabited by semi-hostile Indians, resentful of white encroachment.  Associating with frontiersmen, cowboys, shepherds, and other types of men found in a remote frontier environment, he had little contact with the church.  It was perhaps inevitable that he would develop habits of behavior and ways of thought alien to the more orthodox population of Farmington.

In spite of limited educational opportunities, he did manage to attend both the University of Utah and Brigham Young University for several quarters.  At the latter school he courted and won Sarah Lavina Clark, daughter of Ezra T. and Susan Leggett Clark.  A lovely, strong-willed girl, she is reported to have said that she hoped to reform my grandfather and change his behavior patterns.  They were married in the Logan Temple on April 14, 1886.  She was nineteen and he twenty.  The marriage, although fruitful, was not a happy one.  Sarah, her family, and his family were never able to accept his lack of interest in the church that had meant so much to them and his chronic violation of the Word of Wisdom.

Unable to support his wife and large family through day labor and farming and perhaps to escape the censure of family and community, he borrowed money and migrated to the Philippine Islands in 1900 to work as a practical civil engineer on the railroads.  For two years he remitted money back to his Farmington family, but then the money ceased to come.  Six years after he left he unexpectedly returned, fathered another child and, unable to control his drinking, left permanently.  His life was in many respects a tragic one.  His childhood was spent in rough pioneer conditions.  Losing his mother at an early age, he was reared by stepmothers who may not have been able to meet his emotional needs.  Unable to secure an adequate education, he never acquired the skills needed to make his way in a changing world.  Maladjusted in Farmington, he never quite found himself.  Towards the end of his life in California, he overcame his alcoholism and married again.  His second marriage seems to have been a good one.  I have no memories of him.

In his absence, his abandoned family found to very hard to survive.  The struggle, a grim and harsh one, permanently affected my father's personality.  Having to become a major breadwinner at the age of eight, he was denied a childhood and an adolescence.  He often mentioned how at this age he drove four horse team wagons loaded with hay to Salt Lake City.  During the summer he worked on the farms of his relatives, some of whom treated him more like a hired hand then a family member.  He had few opportunities to play or to enjoy a normal social life.  Handicapped by poverty, he struggled hard to secure an education.  Graduating from the L.D.S. high school in Salt Lake City, he enrolled at the University of Utah.  For lack of funds he was forced to attend school a year and then work a year until he graduated in 1915 with a degree in civil engineering.  He thought about graduate school, but was forced to find immediate employment to aid his mother and brothers and sisters.

My father, an intensely ambitious, hard-working man, was shy, lonely, emotionally inhibited and insecure, who found it difficult to express emotions.  Easily hurt, he never learned to enjoy social life, music, or the arts.  A very kindhearted man, he never knowingly hurt another human being and throughout his life he quietly aided many people.  Deeply loyal to his mother and his brothers and sisters, he gave the same loyalty to his church and to his employers.  Having played on the first University of Utah basketball team, he maintained a life-long interest in athletics and carried out an extensive regimen of physical activities.

My mother, Mary Albrea Shumway Knowlton, originated in still another different Mormon cultural environment.  Her parents and grandparents, the Shumways and Johnsons, participated in the exploration and settlement of northern and southern Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, and Nevada.  Possessing the specialized pioneer skills of bringing new land under cultivation, of constructing irrigation systems, grist and saw mills, and organizing new communities, they were constantly called by the church leaders to abandon what they had accumulated to pioneer in new regions of the Rocky Mountains.

My mother's paternal grandfather, Charles Shumway, and his wife, Julia Ann Hooker Shumway, joined the church in Wisconsin.  After their baptism they migrated to Nauvoo, Illinois.  Here Charles Shumway became one of Joseph Smith's bodyguards and earned his living as a skilled craftsman.  A close, trusted friend to Brigham Young, Charles Shumway was among the first to leave Nauvoo for Winter Quarters.  In the difficult winter days that followed, he lost his wife and baby daughter.  Selected by President Young to take charge of a wagon train, he and his 14 year old son were among the first Mormons to arrive in Salt Lake City.  Shortly within his arrival he was called to settle in Sanpete County.  Here he developed a flourishing farm and a grist and saw mill.  Elected by his neighbors to represent them in the Utah Territorial Legislation, he met and married my great-great-grandmother, Henrietta Bird.  Brigham Young suggested that he return to Salt Lake City.  This he did, settling near the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, farming and operating a grist mill.  Within several years, he was called by Brigham to aid in the settlement of Cache Valley.  He removed his polygamous families there, again developing farms and building mills.  Elected a leader of the local military forces, he first resided in Wellsville, later removing to Mendon.  Here he lived for 14 years.  Much to the regret of many of his children, he was once again called in his late middle age to join the Mormon colonization effort along the Little Colorado River in northern Arizona.  Settling the small village Shumway, he died there on May 21, 1898, the father of twenty-three children, among them my grandfather, Hyrum S. Shumway.

Charles Bird, my mother's great-grandfather on her father’s side, grew up on a farm near Palmyra, New York.  Converted to the church in August, 1836, Charles and his family moved to Kirtland, Ohio and then on to Nauvoo.  Here he became a member of Joseph Smith's bodyguards and a close friend of Charles Shumway.  In February, 1847, he brought his family across the Mississippi River, intending to migrate to Salt Lake City.  But Brigham Young selected him along with others to settle at Council Bluffs, Iowa, to plant grain and to stockpile supplies for wagon trains crossing the plains.  Released from his mission in the spring of 1850, he reached Salt Lake City on August 3, 1850, settling a few days later in Springville, Utah County.  Leaving his father there, he moved to the Big Cottonwood settlement close to Charles Shumway.  The two families went together to settle Cache Valley.  He built his home at Mendon, where he remained the rest of his life.

His daughter, Henrietta Bird, was born on June 7 around 1833 in Newton, New York.  Baptized with the rest of her family, she shared their experiences in Kirtland, Ohio, Nauvoo, Illinois, and the Western migration.  Growing up in the Big Cottonwood community, she came to know Charles Shumway and married him on January 31, 1857.  Unfortunately, little is known about her life.

Joel Hills Johnson, my mother's maternal grandfather, poet and writer of church hymns, was found by the missionaries in Amherst, Ohio.  Baptized on June 1, 1831, he moved his family to Kirtland, Ohio, witnessing the dedication of the Kirtland Temple.  Forced to leave Kirtland, he finally settled in a small rural village close to Nauvoo.  He erected a sawmill and farmed.  Forced out by mobs in the spring of 1848, he came west, settling at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.  He was elected a member of the first state legislature of Utah and served as bishop of the Mill Creek Ward.  In 1850 he was called by church leaders to settle in Payson, Utah.  A popular man, he was elected to the city council.  Although always maintaining a home near Parowan, he moved some of his polygamous family to Cedar City.  He was asked by Brigham Young in 1856 to travel across the plains to assist in the investigation of the death of his brother-in-law, Almon W. Babbit, the territorial representative to Congress, who was killed by Cheyenne Indians.  He was directed to remain in eastern Iowa to assist the Mormon migration.  Here he built a mill and helped his brothers, William and Joseph, operate a store, a ferry and a mill.  Released, he returned to Utah, finally settling in Johnson near Kanab with branches of his family established in other communities in southern Utah.

Nephi Johnson, his son and my great-grandfather, was born on December 12, 1833, at Kirtland, Ohio, and came to Utah with his family in 1848.  He lived at Cedar City from 1851 to 1853.  Then he was called on a mission to the Indian tribes in southern Utah and in Nevada, learning their languages.  He soon became an important Mormon interpreter, frontiersman, and scout.  He assisted the Saints to settle in the valleys of the Rio Virgin and Muddy River, discovering the scenic wonders of Zion's National Park in the process.  As a Mormon scout with considerable influence among the Indians, he was called by local Mormon leaders to Mountain Meadow, where he witnessed the massacre.  Although not directly involved in the killing, the massacre shadowed much of his later life.  He moved to Kanab in 1871, holding many city and county offices.  He was often called to conduct Mormon immigrant trains across the plains.  On one of these trips he met a young Danish convert girl, Conradina A. Mariager, marrying her shortly after his arrival in Salt Lake City in 1860.  He spent his last years in Mesquite, Nevada, dying there in 1894.

Conradina Mariager, my mother's maternal grandmother, was born at Vennebjerg, Denmark, the daughter of a talented and educated school teacher and school chaplain, Jorgen Sorenson Mariager, and Else Madsen Mariager.  Mormon missionaries visited her home in 1856, converting the wife and children but not the husband.  Dissension over religion developed in the home and the couple were divorced, the younger children going with the father and the older with the mother.  The oldest daughter, Anne Helen, migrated to Utah in 1859.  A year later the mother secured permission of her husband to take the children to visit relatives.  Once she had her family together she took them incognito through Copenhagen to Liverpool, where they took a ship to New York City.  Reaching the port city, they continued on to Florence, Nebraska.  Here the mother purchased an outfit and joined a wagon train, traveling to Salt Lake City under the care of Nephi Johnson.  Several days out of Florence, the mother died suddenly.  Nephi Johnson took the orphaned family under his wing and brought them safely to their sister's home in Salt Lake City.  He married Conradina as his second wife and brought her and the younger brother and sister to his home in Virgin City.  The second child of the marriage, Anna Pixley Johnson (my grandmother) was born there.  Conradina and her growing family settled at Johnson just outside of Kanab.

Anna, at the age of sixteen, met her husband, Hyrum S. Shumway, my maternal grandfather, in Kanab, Utah and they married on October 1, 1878.  Hyrum was employed by the Powell Expedition and explored with them the Colorado River as a scout and guide.  He later operated a sawmill in the mountains near Hillsdale.  Then in 1899 Hyrum sold his sawmill and moved his family, including my mother, to Colonia Juarez, Mexico.  He had been induced by the Mormon speculator, John D. Young, to come to Mexico to manage a non-existent commissary for the building of a non-existent railroad.  When the bubble of speculation broke, Hyrum returned to Utah to earn money to bring his family back.  Six months later they returned to Johnson by covered wagon.  In 1897 the family moved to Kanab.  He constructed a sawmill at Jacob's Lake close to the Grand Canyon.  And, finally, in 1901 he was called by the church to help colonize the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming, one of the last frontiers in the United States.  His family traveled by covered wagon to Greybull, Wyoming, settling on a large farm near Byron, Wyoming.

My mother enthralled my boyhood with her tales of the frontier West.  She told many stories about her family's experiences with wild animals, wild Americans, and Indians on the way to Mexico and back to Kanab, and then in Wyoming, where she grew up.  As a little girl in Wyoming she was called by her father one day to come to the house to be examined by a traveling dentist.  Observing the anguish of those enduring the dentist's administrations, she climbed unobserved to the top of a tall conifer by the house and remained there impervious to parental calls until the dentist had gone.  Another time she and her brothers and sisters were tormenting a newly-purchased bull confined in a corral near the house with rotten eggs.  When their father came up, the children scattered.  Unaware of what had happened, her father entered the barn and opened the door to the corral.  The tormented bull charged.  Her father saved himself by seizing the top of the barn door and pulling himself up as the bull charged beneath him and then dropping down to the ground to close the door.

One beautiful day she and her friends were out riding horses through the countryside.  Spying a log cabin, they approached and peered through the window.  Much to their surprise they saw four dead men seated around a table covered with cards.  They later learned that the men had killed each other during a card game.

In her late teens she was employed by wealthy Eastern family to nurse a sick woman who had come West for her health.  The family had just sat down to an evening meal when they heard a number of men galloping down the street, firing as they came.  A bullet came through the window.  The family hastened to put out the lamps and listened to the fusillade of shots in the center of town, followed by the sound of galloping horses receding into the distance.  In the morning they learned that a group of cowboys and gunmen had assaulted the county jail, killed a jailer, and tried to release a group of prisoners.  Unknowingly, they had become participants in the Johnson County War.

Although pioneering seemed very glamorous to me, my mother mentioned the high price paid by the children in hard work and in the lack of adequate medical, cultural, social and educational opportunities.  Many pioneers and their families had their lives shortened through overwork, primitive living conditions, and lack of medical care.  Fortunately, my mother's parents enjoyed books and music.  Their daughters were permitted to come down to Salt Lake City to enter nurses training.  On the other hand, the sons, for the most part, secured little education as their labor was needed on the pioneer farm.

I have been told that my mother grew up to become a very beautiful, talented, and much sought-after young lady in a land where young women were scarce.  Even though she could have married any number of aspirants to her hand, she chose to come down to Salt Lake City in 1903 to enter nurses training.  Graduating in 1913 with a nurses' certificate,  She joined the American Red Cross and was in training, in New York City, to go overseas during World War I when she met my father.

My father, as has been mentioned, had to seek employment from the fledgling Utah State Road Commission.  In 1917 he borrowed money from an uncle, Amasa Clark, and was called to the Eastern States Mission laboring in and around New York City.  As president of the Brooklyn conference, he was active in gathering funds and assisted in the construction of the Brooklyn Chapel, the first Church chapel in New York City.  During his missionary labors he met, courted, and won the hand of my mother with the consent of a most understanding mission president.  Most of his courtship was conducted by letters as he struggled successfully to uphold mission rules.  Shortly after his release from his mission he married my mother on March 26, 1919, in the Salt Lake Temple, and immediately returned to work for the Road Commission.

My parents did not begin their married life under the most auspicious circumstances.  They had lived many years as independent, self-sustaining professionals before they met.  They also met each other under somewhat artificial conditions.  Marked personality differences existed.  My mother was a warm, outgoing, talented, artistic, and intellectually-inclined young lady.  My father, on the other hand, was a shy, inhibited, hard-working man uninterested in music, not knowledgeable about the arts, and little-exposed to literature.  He had been the major support of a strong-willed, imperious mother who was not willing to let him go.  My mother, an equally strong-willed woman, demanded full commitment from my father.  My father, caught in the middle, was never able to resolve the conflict in his loyalties.  As a result, my mother developed very strong resentments toward her in-laws and never permitted her children to visit them.  The situation was worsened by the sudden death of my mother's parents who, in coming to Salt Lake City to do temple work, were killed in a trolley-car accident at the intersection of Main Street and 21st South on August 12, 1921.

Since reaching adulthood, I have often reflected upon the varied experiences of my immediate ancestors.  All of them were caught up in and transfigured by conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  With few exceptions, they were willing to pay any price, to go anywhere, and to do anything that they were called upon to do by the leaders of their church.  Mormonism was the burning experience that gave their lives meaning and made them part of one of the most significant movements of 19th century American history.  Long before I developed my own religious convictions and faith in the church, I remained a firm member because I felt that for me to turn my back on the church that was so fundamental in their lives would be to betray all that they sacrificed and struggled for.