Father:
John Clark (1788-1860) [3] |
Mother:
Mary Unwin (1790-1860) [3] |
Margaretta Unwin Clark
Born: 26 May 1828 in Nottinham, Nottingham, England [3,4]
Married: 7 Feb 1857 in Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, United States
Died: 27 Dec 1908 in Bountiful, Davis, Utah, United States [3,4]
Spouse: Anson Call (1810-1890) [1,2,4,5,6]
Children with Spouse 3:
1. Mary Call (1858-1915) [5]
2. Cylista Call (1860-1907)
3. Samantha Evoline Call (1861-1948) [6]
4. Cynthia Call (1864-1946) [2]
5. Willard Call (1866-1945)
6. Aaron Call (1868-1954) [1]
Married: 7 Feb 1857 in Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, United States
Died: 27 Dec 1908 in Bountiful, Davis, Utah, United States [3,4]
Spouse: Anson Call (1810-1890) [1,2,4,5,6]
Children with Spouse 3:
1. Mary Call (1858-1915) [5]
2. Cylista Call (1860-1907)
3. Samantha Evoline Call (1861-1948) [6]
4. Cynthia Call (1864-1946) [2]
5. Willard Call (1866-1945)
6. Aaron Call (1868-1954) [1]
Source Documents
Biography
by her son, Willard Call
circa 1860
In 1847, while Mormonism was very young in England, Margaretta Unwin Clark, a girl of about 18 years, returning from her work in a factory in the big stocking and lace city of Nottingham, was attracted by a street meeting. The singing, not at all like the chanting in the churches, the hymns so entirely different, the preacher dressed more like a laborer in his best, his manner different, the subject matter different—all had a magnetic power entirely unexplainable to the open mind and unburdened soul of this care-free girl. It fitted in so naturally with her unspoiled self, that she did not even notice the newness of his logic, but just hugged to her heart the newfound truth, and with impetuousness and impatience she tried to make her parents and family understand the message bubbling over in her young heart. In this she had better success than many another has experienced; for her mother, her sisters Ann, Mary Ann, and Eliza each espoused the revealed religion of the Latter-day Saints, and through their lives remained true to their newfound faith.
My dear mother was one of the earliest to receive the gospel in Nottingham, being baptized on the 8th day of September, 1848, by Elder Lees. She was hardly a full-fledged member of the church until the idea forced itself upon her that she should gather with the body of the church. Daily growing within her was the desire to enjoy the advantages of a close association with the church and the prophets of the Lord in Zion. Quite early, this girl of tender years (and still more tender home training) discovered that to emigrate to America would mean a separation for the rest of her mortal life from affectionate parents, loving brothers and sisters, her home and all that nature had endeared to her young heart.
Paraphrasing the poet, “Ah could not woman’s duty be less hardly reconciled, between ties of nature and the future of her child?” Then followed eight years of struggle from within and without, anticipated joys reaching into eternity, daily remorse as she contemplated her seemingly imperative filial failure; eight years in which she could not cover from those she loved, her consuming wish to go to a foreign country, even though she knew that she must go
alone; eight years of constant training under the elders of the church, doing all that a girl could do to advance the work of the church; eight years of almost penurious saving to accumulate money for passage over the Atlantic Ocean, for railroad fare to Iowa City, Iowa, which was as far west as the rails were laid in 1856 and for the expenses of a thirteen hundred mile walk out into the almost unknown west.In her eight years of financial struggle we are now willing to overlook her error in preparing to look nice when she should arrive in this wilderness waste. We can afford to take into account the shock which Mother’s sensitive nature received, as piece-by-piece her hope chest and her wardrobe, probably quite ample, and of course entirely suitable to the requirements of an attractive handsome girl in an English city of five thousand, were left by the roadside to lighten the load.
The time of separation came and with a few girl acquaintances, who like her realized that their star led them west, Mother booked passage from Liverpool to New York, on the ship Huzon, on May 22. By the 25th their clearance papers were signed, and the day after she was twenty-eight years old she sailed down the Mercer River and for days and weeks they wandered on the waves. She was lashed to the rigging in the brow of the ship, which was driven and tossed by the wind, that she might receive the full dip and rise of the vessel and the quicker overcome the nausea of sea-sickness. Being trained as a nurse her services were needed by hundreds of Mormon emigrants which were with her headed for Salt Lake City, a mere village away out among the wild Indians, from which at that time there was no returning, except by foot, a feat which none but the elders going on missions could hope to attempt, and so our little heroine remained. Staunch as she was to be with Latter-day Saints, conditions were so entirely different that again we are going to forgive her if a few times she was found to be “sighing for the leeks and onions or the flesh pots of Egypt.”
In this age of swiftness, when the swallow’s flight is almost tedious and the wind of the dove is ridiculed by the achievements of men, that trip from New York to Iowa City is worth a mention, a distance of 1300 miles. It is true that they stopped to rest overnight at Chicago.
Delays unavoidable in Iowa, while handcarts were seasoning, being built and conditioned for that tedious thirteen hundred-mile trip across the plains, through the rivers and streams, over the snow-covered Rocky Mountains, made it so late that the Martin Company really should not have ventured on that all-but-fatal hazard until the springtime of another year. But the pleadings of more than six hundred emigrants, none of whom had ever seen a mountain or an Indian, nor who knew little of thirst, hunger or fatigue, outweighed the better judgment of those in charge. Those 622 foreign people would have taxed the ingenuity of anyone to have maintained them over winter, at this terminal frontier. They started from Iowa City on Saturday, July 26.
Their songs, their cheer, their courage, their prayers, supported them through the dreary dust and the rivers of the low country. They were terrorized by the Indians. At one time, they met 1100 of these warlike red men. Buffalo in herds that numbered thousands interfered with their march. They just waited until the way was clear and then marched on. Some days they suffered for water, and, of course, they were forced to wade through the rivers and then sleep in wet clothing. Mother seemed to stand these conditions better than many others, for she told us she crossed the North Platte many times to help those who were too weak to pull their own carts across. John Jacques verifies this statement, of course, without mentioning names and he says that the Platte River carried blocks of floating ice at the time.
By now they were hatless, shoeless and weary. Many of them were without courage, some had been overcome by the hardships, and their bones had been left to bleach upon the plains. They knew now that their food supply could not last them to the valley.
The heavy grade, the rough roads, the snow, shortened their daily marches; increased sickness and death among them became a daily occurrence. Their rations already insufficient were necessarily cut from day to day, and should an ox starve and fall in the road his carcass was carried into camp and ravenously devoured. These conditions together with their having to scrape away the snow, and make their beds upon the ground, and then often finding their beds covered with snow in the morning, all being entirely new to these pilgrims from foreign lands, completely undid them and the wonder is that any of the Martin Company survived that treacherous journey.
The prophet Brigham Young became aware of their extreme condition and urged volunteers to go speedily to their rescue. My father Anson Call was at that time filling a colonizing mission at Carson, Nevada, under the direction of Orson Hyde. He came to Great Salt Lake City with two teams about a month after the rescuers had gone to meet the emigrants, and he just continued right along the road, to carry supplies to these suffering brothers and sisters. But for the help, food, cheer, and hope of those who were ahead of him, these worthy ones would have all died in the snow, and because of the hungry howling wolves, Father’s only office would have been to gather up their bones and bury them.
Willie’s Company, some distance in advance of the Martin’s was met by the advance party at Devil’s Gate. They were helped, fed, and encouraged, but were surely in sore need when later they met Anson Call’s party, which now consisted of ten wagons. Some of the men from Utah felt as though this company’s need would tax their ability to relieve, but Anson Call, with his characteristic firmness said, “This company with a little help and a lot of encouragement will reach the valley, those following never can. We must push on. My teams start now.” The ravages of disease, starvation, cold and privations had reduced the number in Martin's Company from 622 to 473, and when Brigham Young’s party came upon them they were in deep snow, without hope, without food, almost without fires, careless as to their sick and too weak to bury their dead. They had struggled hard; though they felt that they were almost within calling distance of the Zion of their God, they knew that they had reached their limit of endurance. They had almost ceased to struggle.
We leave you to picture for yourselves the joy of this dying band of loyal Latter-day Saints when Dan Jones and Abe Carr rode into their camp and lifted their hope out of its snowy grave with the glad shout that help was at hand, that strong men of courage with food and good teams were only thirty miles away, and that they should be fed and taken on in safety. Oh, how they fell on each other’s necks and wept; oh, what prayers of thanksgiving to the God of their deliverance. It is regrettable so little is written in the annals of history. Among all those who suffered to establish Zion upon the earth, whose children have greater reason to be proud of their mother than those to whom Margaretta Unwin Clark Call gave birth?
Anson Call, already the husband of two wives, was advised by Brigham Young that he should marry two of these handcart girls. Emma Summers, in the Willie Company, a sister of George Summers’ who drove one of Anson Call’s teams on this trip of rescue, was introduced by her brother, and about six months later became one of the two wives of whom Brigham Young had spoken.
When father met the Martin Company, Margaretta Clark became a passenger in his wagon, for many of the stronger ones were still walking, and the unromantic romance began which about four months later resulted in their marriage. This is how it started. While loads were being arranged our half-starved thinly-clad heroine waited in his wagon, gnawing at a frozen squash which he intended for his horses. When the driver saw the situation through the
back of his wagon, he knew that his passenger was freezing to death. In his rough vernacular, acquired in the west, he told her of her condition and she replied, “Oh, no, Sir. I have been quite cold, but I am comfortable now.” When he took her by the hand, she said, “’old on, Sir; my hand is a bit sore and you ‘urt it.” As she struggled, he said, “I calculate to hold on,” and she landed in the snow. With the help of another man, he ran her up and down in the snow to induce circulation, and so saved for himself a wife who later became the mother of six children. Father told us that he knew she had passed the suffering point in a freezing death, and if left to herself her mortal life would soon be a thing only of memory. But Mother always maintained that a gentleman from England would have been much more gentle, and not so very persistent.
There are still many who remember that Margaretta was an attractive, handsome young woman, but there is a question as to just how she appealed to this man of God, to whom the prophet had said, “Marry two of these emigrant girls.” For when he found her out in the snow she was snow blind and emaciated by cold and hunger. She had no rouge, no lipstick and probably no comb. She wore a bonnet which she had fashioned from her green apron and a pair of high top boots, which, by permission of his sister, she had taken from the feet of a dead man farther back on their journey.
Well, this thing called love is queer isn’t it? If you had heard her description of Anson Call with his bushy beard, his long coat and his slouch hat, you would wonder whether Cupid fired his first dart at the swain or the maiden. But successes in marriage were many in those pioneer days; we think they were even more common then than now—and this union surely one of them.
Arriving in Salt Lake City, Mother found a home with earlier arrivals from Nottingham. Brother Taylor kept a store and she made two men’s shirts each day, which were placed in stock. She thought she was paying her way, but the store-keeper soon began paying her compliments, and very soon asked for her hand in marriage. Her reply was that she would not consider a proposition of that kind from any man until she had been in Zion one year. Now Anson Call had trained twenty-five years as a “minute man”, and he never allowed himself to forget for a minute the injunction of the prophet. We believe that before he had carried her in his wagon to Salt Lake that he had seen her smile, and he knew that Margaretta had a heart. He didn’t lose sight of her; he liked the fit of those shirts which she was making for Brother Taylor and, very soon, he too was inviting her to his home and wishing that she would stay there. He pressed his suit with a little better success than Brother Taylor. On the 7th of February, 1857, Anson Call and Margaretta Unwin Clark were married by President Brigham Young in his office in Salt Lake City. Mary, Anson’s first wife, was a witness. The Endowment House was closed in February, so Mother did not get her endowments until the 8th of March, 1857.
Their wedding supper was a dish of cornmeal mush with plenty of good milk. All the hired help were invited, and life on the farm began in earnest, for her husband was a man of affairs, and one of the most successful farmers in the intermountain west. Mother had done not exactly as she had told Brother Taylor she intended to do, but she probably blamed her husband somewhat for that; at any rate, Father satisfied a board bill which Brother Taylor brought against her, for he didn’t want any man to hold a mortgage against his wife.
There may be stranger things in life than transforming a factory girl into a farmer’s wife. I have never heard Father’s opinion on this matter, but we could never get Mother to agree that there could be a harder task. There were lots of disadvantages; you know the war between the United States and England had been fought only a little while before, and as her experiences were remembered from day to day, she began to wonder if the war was really over. We never appreciated this situation until we saw the humiliation of many of the German neighbors after the Great World War. She was thousands of miles away from all she had known of—faces, conditions and customs.If correspondence were prompt, it would be a year between letters. One little envelope carried the information that her mother was dead, that her brother-in-law and her niece, who was named after her, were dead. Add to these conditions the fact that, as a woman of thirty she began to learn to cook, to sew, to spin and a thousand other things just as new to her. He was a man of affairs and “other sheep” had he.
My dear mother was one of the earliest to receive the gospel in Nottingham, being baptized on the 8th day of September, 1848, by Elder Lees. She was hardly a full-fledged member of the church until the idea forced itself upon her that she should gather with the body of the church. Daily growing within her was the desire to enjoy the advantages of a close association with the church and the prophets of the Lord in Zion. Quite early, this girl of tender years (and still more tender home training) discovered that to emigrate to America would mean a separation for the rest of her mortal life from affectionate parents, loving brothers and sisters, her home and all that nature had endeared to her young heart.
Paraphrasing the poet, “Ah could not woman’s duty be less hardly reconciled, between ties of nature and the future of her child?” Then followed eight years of struggle from within and without, anticipated joys reaching into eternity, daily remorse as she contemplated her seemingly imperative filial failure; eight years in which she could not cover from those she loved, her consuming wish to go to a foreign country, even though she knew that she must go
alone; eight years of constant training under the elders of the church, doing all that a girl could do to advance the work of the church; eight years of almost penurious saving to accumulate money for passage over the Atlantic Ocean, for railroad fare to Iowa City, Iowa, which was as far west as the rails were laid in 1856 and for the expenses of a thirteen hundred mile walk out into the almost unknown west.In her eight years of financial struggle we are now willing to overlook her error in preparing to look nice when she should arrive in this wilderness waste. We can afford to take into account the shock which Mother’s sensitive nature received, as piece-by-piece her hope chest and her wardrobe, probably quite ample, and of course entirely suitable to the requirements of an attractive handsome girl in an English city of five thousand, were left by the roadside to lighten the load.
The time of separation came and with a few girl acquaintances, who like her realized that their star led them west, Mother booked passage from Liverpool to New York, on the ship Huzon, on May 22. By the 25th their clearance papers were signed, and the day after she was twenty-eight years old she sailed down the Mercer River and for days and weeks they wandered on the waves. She was lashed to the rigging in the brow of the ship, which was driven and tossed by the wind, that she might receive the full dip and rise of the vessel and the quicker overcome the nausea of sea-sickness. Being trained as a nurse her services were needed by hundreds of Mormon emigrants which were with her headed for Salt Lake City, a mere village away out among the wild Indians, from which at that time there was no returning, except by foot, a feat which none but the elders going on missions could hope to attempt, and so our little heroine remained. Staunch as she was to be with Latter-day Saints, conditions were so entirely different that again we are going to forgive her if a few times she was found to be “sighing for the leeks and onions or the flesh pots of Egypt.”
In this age of swiftness, when the swallow’s flight is almost tedious and the wind of the dove is ridiculed by the achievements of men, that trip from New York to Iowa City is worth a mention, a distance of 1300 miles. It is true that they stopped to rest overnight at Chicago.
Delays unavoidable in Iowa, while handcarts were seasoning, being built and conditioned for that tedious thirteen hundred-mile trip across the plains, through the rivers and streams, over the snow-covered Rocky Mountains, made it so late that the Martin Company really should not have ventured on that all-but-fatal hazard until the springtime of another year. But the pleadings of more than six hundred emigrants, none of whom had ever seen a mountain or an Indian, nor who knew little of thirst, hunger or fatigue, outweighed the better judgment of those in charge. Those 622 foreign people would have taxed the ingenuity of anyone to have maintained them over winter, at this terminal frontier. They started from Iowa City on Saturday, July 26.
Their songs, their cheer, their courage, their prayers, supported them through the dreary dust and the rivers of the low country. They were terrorized by the Indians. At one time, they met 1100 of these warlike red men. Buffalo in herds that numbered thousands interfered with their march. They just waited until the way was clear and then marched on. Some days they suffered for water, and, of course, they were forced to wade through the rivers and then sleep in wet clothing. Mother seemed to stand these conditions better than many others, for she told us she crossed the North Platte many times to help those who were too weak to pull their own carts across. John Jacques verifies this statement, of course, without mentioning names and he says that the Platte River carried blocks of floating ice at the time.
By now they were hatless, shoeless and weary. Many of them were without courage, some had been overcome by the hardships, and their bones had been left to bleach upon the plains. They knew now that their food supply could not last them to the valley.
The heavy grade, the rough roads, the snow, shortened their daily marches; increased sickness and death among them became a daily occurrence. Their rations already insufficient were necessarily cut from day to day, and should an ox starve and fall in the road his carcass was carried into camp and ravenously devoured. These conditions together with their having to scrape away the snow, and make their beds upon the ground, and then often finding their beds covered with snow in the morning, all being entirely new to these pilgrims from foreign lands, completely undid them and the wonder is that any of the Martin Company survived that treacherous journey.
The prophet Brigham Young became aware of their extreme condition and urged volunteers to go speedily to their rescue. My father Anson Call was at that time filling a colonizing mission at Carson, Nevada, under the direction of Orson Hyde. He came to Great Salt Lake City with two teams about a month after the rescuers had gone to meet the emigrants, and he just continued right along the road, to carry supplies to these suffering brothers and sisters. But for the help, food, cheer, and hope of those who were ahead of him, these worthy ones would have all died in the snow, and because of the hungry howling wolves, Father’s only office would have been to gather up their bones and bury them.
Willie’s Company, some distance in advance of the Martin’s was met by the advance party at Devil’s Gate. They were helped, fed, and encouraged, but were surely in sore need when later they met Anson Call’s party, which now consisted of ten wagons. Some of the men from Utah felt as though this company’s need would tax their ability to relieve, but Anson Call, with his characteristic firmness said, “This company with a little help and a lot of encouragement will reach the valley, those following never can. We must push on. My teams start now.” The ravages of disease, starvation, cold and privations had reduced the number in Martin's Company from 622 to 473, and when Brigham Young’s party came upon them they were in deep snow, without hope, without food, almost without fires, careless as to their sick and too weak to bury their dead. They had struggled hard; though they felt that they were almost within calling distance of the Zion of their God, they knew that they had reached their limit of endurance. They had almost ceased to struggle.
We leave you to picture for yourselves the joy of this dying band of loyal Latter-day Saints when Dan Jones and Abe Carr rode into their camp and lifted their hope out of its snowy grave with the glad shout that help was at hand, that strong men of courage with food and good teams were only thirty miles away, and that they should be fed and taken on in safety. Oh, how they fell on each other’s necks and wept; oh, what prayers of thanksgiving to the God of their deliverance. It is regrettable so little is written in the annals of history. Among all those who suffered to establish Zion upon the earth, whose children have greater reason to be proud of their mother than those to whom Margaretta Unwin Clark Call gave birth?
Anson Call, already the husband of two wives, was advised by Brigham Young that he should marry two of these handcart girls. Emma Summers, in the Willie Company, a sister of George Summers’ who drove one of Anson Call’s teams on this trip of rescue, was introduced by her brother, and about six months later became one of the two wives of whom Brigham Young had spoken.
When father met the Martin Company, Margaretta Clark became a passenger in his wagon, for many of the stronger ones were still walking, and the unromantic romance began which about four months later resulted in their marriage. This is how it started. While loads were being arranged our half-starved thinly-clad heroine waited in his wagon, gnawing at a frozen squash which he intended for his horses. When the driver saw the situation through the
back of his wagon, he knew that his passenger was freezing to death. In his rough vernacular, acquired in the west, he told her of her condition and she replied, “Oh, no, Sir. I have been quite cold, but I am comfortable now.” When he took her by the hand, she said, “’old on, Sir; my hand is a bit sore and you ‘urt it.” As she struggled, he said, “I calculate to hold on,” and she landed in the snow. With the help of another man, he ran her up and down in the snow to induce circulation, and so saved for himself a wife who later became the mother of six children. Father told us that he knew she had passed the suffering point in a freezing death, and if left to herself her mortal life would soon be a thing only of memory. But Mother always maintained that a gentleman from England would have been much more gentle, and not so very persistent.
There are still many who remember that Margaretta was an attractive, handsome young woman, but there is a question as to just how she appealed to this man of God, to whom the prophet had said, “Marry two of these emigrant girls.” For when he found her out in the snow she was snow blind and emaciated by cold and hunger. She had no rouge, no lipstick and probably no comb. She wore a bonnet which she had fashioned from her green apron and a pair of high top boots, which, by permission of his sister, she had taken from the feet of a dead man farther back on their journey.
Well, this thing called love is queer isn’t it? If you had heard her description of Anson Call with his bushy beard, his long coat and his slouch hat, you would wonder whether Cupid fired his first dart at the swain or the maiden. But successes in marriage were many in those pioneer days; we think they were even more common then than now—and this union surely one of them.
Arriving in Salt Lake City, Mother found a home with earlier arrivals from Nottingham. Brother Taylor kept a store and she made two men’s shirts each day, which were placed in stock. She thought she was paying her way, but the store-keeper soon began paying her compliments, and very soon asked for her hand in marriage. Her reply was that she would not consider a proposition of that kind from any man until she had been in Zion one year. Now Anson Call had trained twenty-five years as a “minute man”, and he never allowed himself to forget for a minute the injunction of the prophet. We believe that before he had carried her in his wagon to Salt Lake that he had seen her smile, and he knew that Margaretta had a heart. He didn’t lose sight of her; he liked the fit of those shirts which she was making for Brother Taylor and, very soon, he too was inviting her to his home and wishing that she would stay there. He pressed his suit with a little better success than Brother Taylor. On the 7th of February, 1857, Anson Call and Margaretta Unwin Clark were married by President Brigham Young in his office in Salt Lake City. Mary, Anson’s first wife, was a witness. The Endowment House was closed in February, so Mother did not get her endowments until the 8th of March, 1857.
Their wedding supper was a dish of cornmeal mush with plenty of good milk. All the hired help were invited, and life on the farm began in earnest, for her husband was a man of affairs, and one of the most successful farmers in the intermountain west. Mother had done not exactly as she had told Brother Taylor she intended to do, but she probably blamed her husband somewhat for that; at any rate, Father satisfied a board bill which Brother Taylor brought against her, for he didn’t want any man to hold a mortgage against his wife.
There may be stranger things in life than transforming a factory girl into a farmer’s wife. I have never heard Father’s opinion on this matter, but we could never get Mother to agree that there could be a harder task. There were lots of disadvantages; you know the war between the United States and England had been fought only a little while before, and as her experiences were remembered from day to day, she began to wonder if the war was really over. We never appreciated this situation until we saw the humiliation of many of the German neighbors after the Great World War. She was thousands of miles away from all she had known of—faces, conditions and customs.If correspondence were prompt, it would be a year between letters. One little envelope carried the information that her mother was dead, that her brother-in-law and her niece, who was named after her, were dead. Add to these conditions the fact that, as a woman of thirty she began to learn to cook, to sew, to spin and a thousand other things just as new to her. He was a man of affairs and “other sheep” had he.
circa 1890
When she had lived six months as a farmer’s wife, under conditions of which the above paragraph gives only a hint, the time came when the Latter-day Saints had lived measurably at peace in Utah ten years, and Brigham and his people were staging a great celebration in Cottonwood Canyon. As Mother told it to us, in the midst of their band music, their singing and their speaking, two men rode into camp. These two messengers from the east were A.O. Smoot and Judson Stoddard. They were disheveled, road-stained and noticeably under great tension. After a short conference with Brigham and others, that “Lion of the Lord” told the people that the flower of the United States Army had been sent against Utah and the Mormons, and that at that moment they were at our borders. “We are mistakenly supposed to be in rebellion,” said he, “but, brethren, there is no time for argument; we will place ourselves on the defensive. If those soldiers come into these valleys with hostile intent, they will find us as we found them. Every house shall be burned, for the fruits of our ten years of hard labor the enemy shall not enjoy.” Right then and there, the whole community decided to put each other’s houses in condition to be instantly burned, and his property completely destroyed should such extreme measures become necessary.
This extremity was not required, but the whole community prepared for it. The northern Utah settlements were all abandoned. Our folks spent the winter and spring on the Provo bottoms, and that bride of a little over a year gave birth to her first child, Mary, who lived to be the mother of ten children. All told, Margaretta had six children, four girls and two boys, all of whom survived her. On the anniversary of her one hundredth birthday, 26th of May, 1928, she had seventy-one grandchildren, two hundred twenty-eight great grandchildren and eighty-four great-great grandchildren.How great are the possibilities of a people who live close to nature and God, and have a high regard for His revealed word. Would any one of her posterity like to speculate as to the number of her descendants after the expiration of another hundred years? Do any of you suppose that Elder Lees, when he baptized that little Clark girl one hundred years ago, could have even imagined the number that would be added to the Mormon church because of the ordinance of baptism which he performed? Of this great number of descendants, the great majority are now alive and living honorable and useful lives.
This extremity was not required, but the whole community prepared for it. The northern Utah settlements were all abandoned. Our folks spent the winter and spring on the Provo bottoms, and that bride of a little over a year gave birth to her first child, Mary, who lived to be the mother of ten children. All told, Margaretta had six children, four girls and two boys, all of whom survived her. On the anniversary of her one hundredth birthday, 26th of May, 1928, she had seventy-one grandchildren, two hundred twenty-eight great grandchildren and eighty-four great-great grandchildren.How great are the possibilities of a people who live close to nature and God, and have a high regard for His revealed word. Would any one of her posterity like to speculate as to the number of her descendants after the expiration of another hundred years? Do any of you suppose that Elder Lees, when he baptized that little Clark girl one hundred years ago, could have even imagined the number that would be added to the Mormon church because of the ordinance of baptism which he performed? Of this great number of descendants, the great majority are now alive and living honorable and useful lives.
circa 1900
This little hazel-eyed, brown-haired girl was about five feet tall and lived single until she was twenty-nine years old. She was born in Nottingham, England, and she never left Nottingham until she left for these western “wilds”. She came to Bountiful, Utah, and during her fifty-three years of residence here was never
out of the State of Utah.
Mother was a natural nurse; she had had eight years of hospital training, so that her services were often needed; scores of mothers were grateful because of her skill and tender care. She was sympathetic in the extreme, and her loyal friends extend as far as her acquaintance. She was more generous than she could afford to be, particularly with her own children, and with the elders who first brought her the gospel.
It was easy for Mother to forgive, and her life was long, helpful, useful, and full of faith, hope, and charity. She died the 12th of December, 1908.
She had some success as a Primary Officer, and diligently served as a Relief Society teacher. Father said she always found someone who needed a piece of ham or something to add to their comfort. She was one of the many grandmothers who always had a cookie can, and it was seldom found empty. There was one kind of cookie which her grandchildren say no one but she ever learned to make, and even now they are spoken of as Grandma cookies. Regardless of the time of day, this “wonderful mother of mine” seemed to think that all callers were hungry, and ten o’clock lunches and four o’clock lunches always seemed to give her much pleasure. Preparation for a lunch which would tempt one who was not hungry usually took her about half as long as it did other women.
She sailed on Sunday; she arrived in Salt Lake City on Sunday, seven months and five
days later. They were five weeks and three days being blown across the Atlantic Ocean, six days by rail and they went into camp on Iowa Hill three and one-half miles north of Iowa City on July 8. On the 10th or 12th of July, Willie’s Handcart Company left this same camp for Salt Lake City via Council Bluffs, so that Emma Summers, a member of that company, and our Margaretta, who both later married Anson Call, may have had their first meeting on Iowa Hill.
They loaded their carts and on July 25th, they started their westward journey. They reached Council Bluffs the 21st of August, and were ferried across the river on August 22nd, and remained in camp close to the famous Winter Quarters near Florence, Nebraska, for three
days. On Monday, August 25th, they traveled three miles and crossed the Elkhorn August 29th. They were at Fort Kearney Monday, September 15th, and Fort Laramie October 9th. From Florence each cart carried one-hundred pounds of flour with tent and baggage for those allotted to that cart. There were 146 carts, seven wagons, six mules, fifty cows and beef cattle. At Laramie, their rations were cut from one pound of flour to three-quarters pound.
The North Platte River, waist deep, 100 to 150 yards wide, with a stony bottom and full of mush ice was crossed Sunday, October 19th. The next four days it snowed and blew without stopping and was zero weather. They were thirty miles from Devil’s Gate, where food and supplies had come to meet them.
Well, they were too weak and worn to go that thirty miles, and after they had lain nine days in the snow almost without food or fire, the rescuing party found them on Grease Wood Creek, on the last day of October. They were given food and some clothing, and on November 1st, through ten inches of snow they were encouraged to make one supreme effort to reach Devil’s Gate. Robert T. Burton’s camp journal says that on Sunday, November 16th, they met Brother Call’s company of ten wagons, and camped in a little cottonwood grove on Rocky Ridge with good food and water.
out of the State of Utah.
Mother was a natural nurse; she had had eight years of hospital training, so that her services were often needed; scores of mothers were grateful because of her skill and tender care. She was sympathetic in the extreme, and her loyal friends extend as far as her acquaintance. She was more generous than she could afford to be, particularly with her own children, and with the elders who first brought her the gospel.
It was easy for Mother to forgive, and her life was long, helpful, useful, and full of faith, hope, and charity. She died the 12th of December, 1908.
She had some success as a Primary Officer, and diligently served as a Relief Society teacher. Father said she always found someone who needed a piece of ham or something to add to their comfort. She was one of the many grandmothers who always had a cookie can, and it was seldom found empty. There was one kind of cookie which her grandchildren say no one but she ever learned to make, and even now they are spoken of as Grandma cookies. Regardless of the time of day, this “wonderful mother of mine” seemed to think that all callers were hungry, and ten o’clock lunches and four o’clock lunches always seemed to give her much pleasure. Preparation for a lunch which would tempt one who was not hungry usually took her about half as long as it did other women.
She sailed on Sunday; she arrived in Salt Lake City on Sunday, seven months and five
days later. They were five weeks and three days being blown across the Atlantic Ocean, six days by rail and they went into camp on Iowa Hill three and one-half miles north of Iowa City on July 8. On the 10th or 12th of July, Willie’s Handcart Company left this same camp for Salt Lake City via Council Bluffs, so that Emma Summers, a member of that company, and our Margaretta, who both later married Anson Call, may have had their first meeting on Iowa Hill.
They loaded their carts and on July 25th, they started their westward journey. They reached Council Bluffs the 21st of August, and were ferried across the river on August 22nd, and remained in camp close to the famous Winter Quarters near Florence, Nebraska, for three
days. On Monday, August 25th, they traveled three miles and crossed the Elkhorn August 29th. They were at Fort Kearney Monday, September 15th, and Fort Laramie October 9th. From Florence each cart carried one-hundred pounds of flour with tent and baggage for those allotted to that cart. There were 146 carts, seven wagons, six mules, fifty cows and beef cattle. At Laramie, their rations were cut from one pound of flour to three-quarters pound.
The North Platte River, waist deep, 100 to 150 yards wide, with a stony bottom and full of mush ice was crossed Sunday, October 19th. The next four days it snowed and blew without stopping and was zero weather. They were thirty miles from Devil’s Gate, where food and supplies had come to meet them.
Well, they were too weak and worn to go that thirty miles, and after they had lain nine days in the snow almost without food or fire, the rescuing party found them on Grease Wood Creek, on the last day of October. They were given food and some clothing, and on November 1st, through ten inches of snow they were encouraged to make one supreme effort to reach Devil’s Gate. Robert T. Burton’s camp journal says that on Sunday, November 16th, they met Brother Call’s company of ten wagons, and camped in a little cottonwood grove on Rocky Ridge with good food and water.