|
|
38
|
|
happy, so at meetings everyone noticed him. I often wondered how he could be when we buried our little Elinor not long before with such heartache. Before this we had moved over East of the river near Benjamin & Alice, Moroni's sisters Ruth & John Sherwood, also Susie & Arthur Tenney, lived just over the hill from us & a deep wash was between us & Ben's. His sister Scharlotte & William Sherwood lived 3 miles up the valley. We had our S.School & meetings & were a branch of the St.Johns Ward. We often had visitors from St.Johns to our meetings & felt the Spirit of the Lord was with us. While Elinor was sick, Brother C.P. Anderson was a visitor he sent back medicine for her but it was too late. Moroni's sisters & husbands moved away as drought came but we stayed. Our springs helped us to raise gardens but not much crops, but they made early pasture for our horses & cows & a meadow to cut hay. Ben & Moroni made ditches 2 miles east, where the Coyote wash came into the river through Ben's land. The bottom land along the river was rich but the Coyote wash came meny miles from the Escadilla Mountain & often brought floods. Moroni would try to get his wheat in on the river bottom land in time to ripen, cut & hauled off the land before the rains brought
|
|
|
|
| 39
floods. Three different years the rains came early & washed our wheat away when it was ready to cut or when it was in the Shocks. We could hear the floods roar through a canyon 3 miles away & would go out to see the flood. One time we saw the water slowly go through the wheat as it stood ripe almost ready to cut. It stood with the flood running through it until it got up to the heads then it all swept down at once & was covered with mud & trash the flood brought. We had hard struggles some years to get along but whenever Moroni raised a good crop of wheat he kept enough to last 2 years. Our crops were so uncertain, some times the corn was flooded & washed down, other years we had good crops. Our baby John Montgomery was born 21 June 1897 at Richville, while we were preparing to move to St.Johns for his birth. Sister Ruth was very helpful & all went well for 7 days then I took such a terrible pain in my left side. It gradually went into my heart & felt like a bolt was being driven into my heart with every heart beat. Ben rushed to St.Johns with a team, our only way then, & brought back Dr. Will Platt (Alices brother). By then the pain was going into my head. The morphine eased that & all night I saw the light of the other world.
|
|
20