Heroines of Mormondom

About five years after their coming to Goulburn, Mary had another dream. A personage came to her and began talking to her of her affairs. This personage said to her among other things:

"You shall take a farm, on the opposite side of the road to where you now live. And, after, you shall prosper exceedingly. Then you shall take money, constantly, from this side of the road, and you shall be blessed, insomuch that you shall soon go to Zion thereafter." When she awoke, she told the dream to her husband. Shortly after this a rumor reached them that a certain man named Grimson was about to give up his farm, which he rented from a gentleman named Gibson. This surely must be the place of her dream, for was it not across the road from them? And so she talked to her husband about the matter. But he had no sympathy nor hope to give her on the subject.

"Mary how can you think of such a thing? What could I do with a farm? I haven't a tool nor an animal to use. It is impossible. So don't talk of it."

But Mary was far from satisfied. However, she knew her husband too well to urge the matter, when he spoke as he had done. And further, in a very short time after the farm was vacated, it was re-let to another person. Mary was thus forced to give it up. A month or so slipped by, and one night Mary dreamed the same dream, in relation to the farm across the road. She thought, however, she would not mention it to her husband. In a week or so, they again heard the farm was to let, as the family was dissatisfied. Then Mary made bold to tell her husband of the repetition of the dream, and beg him to try and take it.

"Why do you keep urging me about that farm, Mary? I have not one thing to do with. I tell you it is impossible."

And again disappointed, Mary thought she would say no more about the matter. That day she was going up to spend a week at Mrs. Day's assisting her in her housework and cleaning. After she arrived there, she prepared breakfast, and she and Mrs. Day sat down to eat. As they were talking, Mrs. Day said, "Why doesn't Mr. Chittenden take that farm of Gibson's? I hear it is again vacant. He is a good farmer, and could easily attend to that as well as look after mine."

"He would like to do so, no doubt, but he thinks he could not on account of having nothing to do with, no teams nor machines, nor in fact anything."

"Well, if that's where the trouble lies, I'll tell you what I'll do. He shall have the use of my horses and plows and all the farm machines for nothing, and I will furnish him seed grain for the first year, and he can let me have it back after he gets a start."

"Oh Mrs. Day, you are too good to us."

"Not a bit of it. I would do more than that to keep you in the country. You know that I could not possibly live without your help," replied the lady, laughingly.

Mary could hardly contain herself for joy. And when night came, she begged to be allowed to go home that night, as she could not wait a whole week before telling her husband the good news.

Accordingly she hurried home that night and told her husband what Mrs. Day had said.

"Mary," said William, "if Mrs. Day tells me the same as she tells you, I'll take Gibson's farm."

So early the next morning they started on their errand. The farm house opposite them was vacant, and as they passed Mary asked herself, tremblingly, if they should be sufficiently blessed to live there. Mrs. Day greeted them very kindly and told them they were just in time for breakfast.

"Thank you, Mrs. Day; but Mary has been telling me you spoke to her about our taking Gibson's farm."

"So I did, Chittenden; and I tell you if you'll take the farm, keeping mine too, mind, you shall have the use of my team, wagon and farm implements. Besides, I will lend you your seed grain for the first year, and you can return it afterwards."

"Well, Mrs. Day, if you are so kind as that, all I can do is to thank you and accept the offer. I will go right on to Mr. Gibson at once and make the bargain."

Mr. Gibson was quite pleased to have William take the farm. That same week the family moved across the road, and Mary felt like a new woman.

During all these fifteen years you may be sure Mary and William had often talked of the religion that was so dear to both. Their daughters, although they had, perforce, married those outside the Church, were staunch "Mormons," and are to this day.

One day William met Mr. Gibson who said, "I have been thinking, William, you can open a gate on the other side of the road, opposite your own door, and make a bit of a road to the woods, and you can take toll from the gate. You know you live on the public turnpike from Goulburn, and this toll road would be a good thing to the Goulburn people."

"How much could you allow me, sir?"

"Five shillings from every pound. Then your children could attend the gate."

"Very well, I will do so, and am very grateful to you for the privilege."

"Well, mother," said William soon after, as he entered the house, "your money is coming from the other side of the road."

And when he had laughingly told her how, she said she felt more like crying than laughing, she was so grateful to God.

CHAPTER VI

The story of prosperity is so much easier to tell, and in truth is so much shorter than the tale of adversity and suffering, that we may well hasten over the remaining five years of their waiting in that far-distant land.

Everything prospered. But about the second year William's health commenced to break down. Gradually he became more and more incapable of work, until at last, one day, he came in and throwing himself down, he exclaimed, "Mary, I have done my last day's work." It was even so. But God did not fail them.

In 1875, two men came up to the door, and asked for food and shelter. When they announced themselves as Elders from Utah, Mary's hands were outstretched and her heart filled with great joy, even as her eyes ran over with happy tears.

The Elders were Jacob Miller of Farmington, and David Cluff of Provo, since dead. A month or two afterwards, Elder Charles Burton and John M. Young of Salt Lake City, also were warmly welcomed at the farm.

William's illness was Bright's disease of the kidneys, and he was slowly dying.

They left Sydney on the 7th of April, 1877, for Utah, six souls in all, William and Mary, their children Caroline, Louise and Hyrum, with the one grandchild, Lavinia.

On their arrival they went at once to Provo. William had much more to bear of poverty and suffering, than any one could have dreamed, even after their arrival here. Mary went out washing to eke out their store, (they had barely ten dollars left,) and the two girls got positions in the factory.

Within a year, Caroline married Eleazer Jones, and Louisa married Abraham Wild. The last named couple live near their mother now.

Caroline has moved with her husband to Arizona. Mary's eldest daughter, Mary Ann Mayberry, also came with her husband and family to Utah in 1879.

I would not linger if I could on the severe suffering, and painful death of William, just twelve months from the day they left home.

When the sad day came on which he left them all, in spite of his awful agony, he called his only boy Hyrum, who was then thirteen years old, and stretching out the thin, wasted hands he blessed him fervently, and said, "You are going to be a good boy to your mother, I think?"

"Yes, father, I will," answered the lad, manfully.

"My boy, I can do nothing, no work in the Temple for her, nor for myself; I have got to go."

"If you have got to go, father," tremblingly said the boy, "I will do all that lies in my power."

"Remember mother, Hyrum, she has been good to us, and worked hard for us all her days." Then again he blessed him, and soon the peaceful end came, and the poor aching frame was at rest.

A year or two of hard, constant work at the wash tub passed away, and one night the personage who had visited Mary before came to her in a dream and said:

"Mary, the time has now come for you to go and do the work for yourself and your husband. If you will go, you shall soon have a home afterwards."

Here was a command and a promise. Hyrum had shot up and was a tall, quiet-mannered young man, and had gone out on a surveying expedition, carrying chains for the men, to earn some money. His great ambition was to get a home for his mother.

On his return from the surveying expedition he put nearly $100.00 into his mother's hands. A day or two after he said, "Mother I would like to go down to St. George and do Father's work; you know I promised him to do it as soon as I could, and this is the first money I have ever had. I am sixteen years old, and if the Bishop thinks I am worthy, I would like to go."

Mary quickly told her dream, which she had hesitated mentioning, fearing he would not like it, but he believed it.

"Mother, I will go this very night," he said when she had concluded her story, "and see what the Bishop says."

So down he went, and Bishop Booth very willingly told him to go, and he felt pleased to give the necessary recommends.

They went and had a most glorious time, and on her return Mary went to washing again. But mark! In less than one year from that time they had bargained for a place, and got two little rooms built upon it.

If you come to Provo, go and see dear old Sister Chittenden; she is sixty-six years old, and quite a hearty, happy little woman yet.

She meditatively pushes aside her neat, black lace cap from her ear, with her finger, as I ask what to say to you in farewell, and with mild but tearful eyes, says:

"Tell them for me, always to be obedient to the counsel of those who are over them; and obey the whisperings of God, trusting to Him for the result! And then, God bless them all! Amen."

A HEROINE OF HAUN'S MILL MASSACRE

The name of Sister Amanda, or Mrs. Warren Smith, is well known to the Latter-day Saints. She has had a most eventful life, and the terrible tragedy of Haun's Mill, in Caldwell county, when her husband and son were killed, and another son wounded, have made her name familiar to all who have read the history of the mobbings and drivings in the State of Missouri. Mrs. Smith was born in Becket, Birkshire Co., Mass., Feb. 22, 1809. Her parents were Ezekiel and Fanny Barnes; she was one of a family of ten children. Her grandfather, on her mother's side, James Johnson, came from Scotland in an early day, and in the revolutionary war held the office of general; he was a great and brave man. Sister Smith says that her father left Massachusetts when she was quite young and went up to Ohio, and settled in Amherst, Lorain county, where the family endured all the privations and hardships incident to a new country. The following is her own narrative:

"At eighteen years of age I was married to Warren Smith; we had plenty of this world's goods and lived comfortable and happily together, nothing of particular interest transpiring until Sidney Rigdon and Orson Hyde came to our neighborhood preaching Campbellism. I was converted and baptized by Sidney Rigdon; my husband did not like it, yet gave his permission. I was at that time the mother of two children. Soon after my conversion to the Campbellite faith, Simeon D. Carter came preaching the everlasting gospel, and on the 1st day of April, 1831, he baptized me into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which I have ever since been a member. My husband was baptized shortly after and we were united in our faith.

"We sold out our property in Amherst and went to Kirtland, and bought a place west of the Temple, on the Chagrin river, where we enjoyed ourselves in the society of the Saints, but after the failure of the Kirtland bank and other troubles in that place, in consequence of our enemies, we lost all our property except enough to fit up teams, etc., to take us to Missouri. We started in the Spring of 1838, and bade farewell to the land of our fathers and our home to go and dwell with the Saints in what then seemed a far-off place.

"There were several families of us and we traveled on without much difficulty until we came to Caldwell county, Missouri. One day as we were going on as usual, minding our own business, we were stopped by a mob of armed men, who told us if we went another step they would kill us all. They commenced plundering, taking our guns from our wagons, which we had brought, as we were going into a new country, and after thus robbing us took us back five miles, placed a guard around us, and kept us there in that way three days, and then let us go. We journeyed on ten miles further, though our hearts were heavy and we knew not what might happen next. Then we arrived at a little town of about eight or ten houses, a grist and saw mill belonging to the Saints. We stopped there to camp for the night. A little before sunset a mob of three hundred armed men came upon us. Our brethren halloed for the women and children to run for the woods, while they (the men) ran into an old blacksmith shop.

"They feared, if men, women and children were in one place, the mob would rush upon them and kill them all together. The mob fired before the women had time to start from the camp. The men took off their hats and swung them and cried for quarter, until they were shot down; the mob paid no attention to their entreaties, but fired alternately. I took my little girls (my boys I could not find) and ran for the woods. The mob encircled us on all sides, excepting the bank of the creek, so I ran down the bank and crossed the mill pond on a plank, ran up the hill on the other side into the bushes; and the bullets whistled by me like hailstones, and cut down the bushes on all sides of me. One girl was wounded by my side, and she fell over a log; her clothes happened to hang over the log in sight of the mob, and they fired at them, supposing that it was her body, and after all was still our people cut out of that log twenty bullets.

"When the mob had done firing they began to howl, and one would have thought a horde of demons had escaped from the lower regions. They plundered our goods, what we had left, they took possession of our horses and wagons, and drove away, howling like so many demons. After they had gone I came down to behold the awful scene of slaughter, and, oh! what a horrible sight! My husband and one of my sons, ten years old, lay lifeless upon the ground, and another son, six years old, wounded and bleeding, his hip all shot to pieces; and the ground all around was covered with the dead and dying. Three little boys had crept under the blacksmith's bellows; one of them received three wounds; he lived three weeks, suffering all the time incessantly, and at last died. He was not mine, the other two were mine. One of whom had his brains all shot out, the other his hip shot to pieces." This last was Alma Smith, who lives at Coalville, and who still carries the bullets of the mob in his body, but was healed by the power of God through the careful nursing and earnest faith of his mother. "My husband was nearly stripped of his clothes before he was quite dead; he had on a new pair of calf-skin boots, and they were taken off him by one whom they designated as Bill Mann, who afterward made his brags that he 'pulled a d – d Mormon's boots off his feet while he was kicking.' It was at sunset when the mob left and we crawled back to see and comprehend the extent of our misery. The very dogs seemed filled with rage, howling over their dead masters, and the cattle caught the scent of innocent blood, and bellowed. A dozen helpless widows grieving for the loss of their husbands, and thirty or forty orphaned or fatherless children were screaming and crying for their fathers, who lay cold and insensible around them. The groans of the wounded and dying rent the air. All this combined was enough to melt the heart of anything but a Missouri mobocrat. There were fifteen killed and ten wounded, two of whom died the next day."

"As I returned from the woods, where I had fled for safety, to the scene of slaughter, I found the sister who started with me lying in a pool of blood. She had fainted, but was only shot through the hand. Further on was Father McBride, an aged, white-haired revolutionary soldier; his murderer had literally cut him to pieces with an old corn-cutter. His hands had been split down when he raised them in supplication for mercy. Then one of the mob cleft open his head with the same weapon, and the veteran who had fought for the freedom of his country in the glorious days of the past, was numbered with the martyrs. My eldest son, Willard, took my wounded boy upon his back and bore him to our tent. The entire hip bone, joint and all were shot away. We laid little Alma upon our bed and examined the wound. I was among the dead and dying: I knew not what to do. I was there all that long dreadful night with my dead and my wounded, and none but God as physician and help. I knew not but at any moment the mob might return to complete their dreadful work. In the extremity of my agony I cried unto the Lord, 'O, Thou who hearest the prayers of the widow and fatherless, what shall I do? Thou knowest my inexperience, Thou seest my poor, wounded boy, what shall I do? Heavenly Father, direct me!' And I was directed as if by a voice speaking to me. Our fire was smouldering; we had been burning the shaggy bark of hickory logs. The voice told me to take those ashes and make a solution, then saturate a cloth with it and put it right into the wound. It was painful, but my little boy was too near dead to heed the pain much. Again and again I saturated the cloth and put it into the hole from which the hip joint had been plowed out, and each time mashed flesh and splinters of bone came away with the cloth, and the wound became white and clean. I had obeyed the voice that directed me, and having done this, prayed again to the Lord to be instructed further; and was answered as distinctly as though a physician had been standing by speaking to me. A slippery elm tree was near by, and I was told to make a poultice of the roots of the slippery elm and fill the wound with it. My boy Willard procured the slippery elm from the roots of the tree; I made the poultice and applied it. The wound was so large it took a quarter of a yard of linen to cover it. After I had properly dressed the wound, I found vent to my feelings in tears for the first time, and resigned myself to the anguish of the hour. All through the night I heard the groans of the sufferers, and once in the dark we groped our way over the heap of dead in the blacksmith shop, to try to soothe the wants of those who had been mortally wounded, and who lay so helpless among the slain.

"Next morning Brother Joseph Young came to the scene of bloodshed and massacre. 'What shall be done with the dead?' he asked. There was no time to bury them, the mob was coming on us; there were no men left to dig the graves. 'Do anything, Brother Joseph,' I said, 'except to leave their bodies to the fiends who have killed them.' Close by was a deep, dry well. Into this the bodies were hurried, sixteen or seventeen in number. No burial service, no customary rites could be performed. All were thrown into the well except my murdered boy, Sardius. When Brother Young was assisting to carry him on a board to the well, he laid down the corpse and declared he could not throw that boy into the horrible, dark, cold grave. He could not perform the last office for one so young and interesting, who had been so foully murdered, and so my martyred son was left unburied. 'Oh, they have left my Sardius unburied in the sun,' I cried, and ran and covered his body with a sheet. He lay there until the next day, and then I, his own mother, horrible to relate, assisted by his elder brother, Willard, went back and threw him into this rude vault with the others, and covered them as well as we could with straw and earth.

"After disposing of the dead the best that we could, we commended their bodies to God and felt that He would take care of them, and of those whose lives were spared. I had plenty to do to take care of my little orphaned children, and could not stop to think or dwell upon the awful occurrence. My poor, wounded boy demanded constant care, and for three months I never left him night or day. The next day the mob came back and told us we must leave the State, or they would kill us all. It was cold weather; they had taken away our horses and robbed us of our clothing; the men who had survived the massacre were wounded; our people in other parts of the State were passing through similar persecutions, and we knew not what to do.

"I told them they might kill me and my children in welcome. They sent to us messages from time to time, that if we did not leave the State they would come and make a breakfast of us. We sisters used to have little prayer meetings, and we had mighty faith; the power of God was manifested in the healing of the sick and wounded. The mob told us we must stop these meetings, if we did not they would kill every man, woman and child. We were quiet and did not trouble anyone. We got our own wood, we did our own milling, but in spite of all our efforts to be at peace, they would not allow us to remain in the State of Missouri. I arranged everything, fixed up my poor, wounded boy, and on the first day of February started, without any money, on my journey towards the State of Illinois; I drove my own team and slept out of doors. I had four small children, and we suffered much from cold, hunger and fatigue.

"I once asked one of the mob what they intended when they came upon our camp; he answered they intended to 'kill everything that breathed.' I felt the loss of my husband greatly, but rejoiced that he died a martyr to the cause of truth. He went full of faith and in hope of a glorious resurrection. As for myself I had unshaken confidence in God through it all.

"In the year 1839 I married again, to a man bearing the same name as my deceased husband (Warren Smith), though they were not in the least related. He was also a blacksmith and our circumstances were prosperous. By this marriage I had three children. Amanda Malvina, who died in Nauvoo; also Warren Barnes and Sarah Marinda, who are still living, the former at American Fork and is counselor to the Bishop, the latter at Hyde Park.

"I enjoyed the privilege of seeing the Temple finished, and of receiving therein the blessing of holy ordinances. Willard, my first-born son, also had his endowments in that Temple, and came out among the first who left there; was one of the Mormon Battalion, who were called to go to Mexico while we were en route to find a resting place for the Saints. Willard is now, and has been for several years past, President of Morgan Stake."

During the time they lived in Nauvoo, President Joseph organized a Relief Society. Sister Smith became a member of its first organization and greatly rejoiced in the benevolent work; much good was accomplished by it.

In July, 1847, they started from Nauvoo intending to go with the Saints to the Rocky Mountains, but for the want of sufficient means for so long a journey they were compelled to stop in Iowa. They remained until the year 1850, when they took up their line of march for Salt Lake City, arriving on the 18th of September, safe and well. Shortly after arriving in this city, her husband, who had been for some time dilatory in his duties, apostatized from the faith, and they separated. She took the children with her and provided for herself.

On the 24th of January, 1854, a number of ladies met together to consider the importance of organizing a society for the purpose of making clothes for the Indians and other charitable work, which was properly organized Feb. 9th. Sister Smith was one of the officers of the society, which resulted in much temporal good being accomplished.

In consequence of the many hardships she endured through the persecutions in Missouri which were heaped upon her and her family by a relentless mob, her health was undermined, and as years increased, infirmities settled upon her which rendered her unable to retain the position she had held in the Relief Society. She was honorably released and will ever be remembered by the Bishop and his counselors and the members of the Ward for her benevolence and self-denial in ministering to the unfortunate.

Sister Smith has much to rejoice over even in her present affliction, for she has raised her family in the principles of the gospel of Christ and the fear of God, and they remain true and steadfast to the faith of the latter-day work. A good woman, who has reared to manhood and womanhood a large family almost without a father's help, is certainly worthy of commendation and must have great satisfaction in her life and labor. She has been for more than fifty years a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.