FOREWARD

You who know me best, and my real friends, will read these pages with due
regard and consideration for a shade of egotism which I know to be a part of my
makeup, as well as a limited tendency to exaggerate for the sake of emphasis on
occasion.

I am telling my own story and shall not attempt to minimize my fine points
or to depreciate my few achievements, and so I beg of the reader to peruse these
pages with charity and patience.

My good name, transmitted to me through a long line of sturdy, honest and

industrious ancestors, has, at the present writing, always remained untarnished,
notwithstanding my human frailty and the weaknesses common to mankind, and
it is my supreme desire to transmit that name to my children and their posterity,
clean and unsullied.

This will be my most valuable bequest and their most treasured inheri-
tance.

Charles W. Dunn, Sept. 4th, A.D., 1935

 I AM BORN

I first saw the light of day, or to be more concise, the blackness of the night,
for I was born between the vivid flashes of lightning and the crashing thunders
of a terrifying night tempest on April 16th, 1885, at Brigham City, Utah.

My memory fails me when I try to recall the fear blanched faces of the
watchers surrounding the birthcouch on that black night, but my uncle John
tells me how he urged the spirited horses and the Ludlow along the muddy road,
through the thick darkness and the awful flashes of light, in quest of the faithful
midwife who performed the offices incident to my earthly advent.

Perhaps this my first experience, on such a night, accounts for a morbid

fear I had during childhood for lightning and thunder and the inky rolling clouds
which presage the summer thunderstorm.

I was born in the home of my maternal grandparents, of whom I shall say

more later, where they lived with their two sons John and Will and a bachelor,
John Miles, as much a part of the family as any of the children, and the friend
of the kids of every generation of the clan, until his death. How old John Miles
must have stewed and sputtered and stomped around in the agony of that wait-
ing night.

My mother had been educated as a teacher, and had a natural gift for writ-
ing, and was the author of a number of very choice poems which she read to me
as a child.

Among all the friends of childhood, the teachers of my youth and the
counselors of my mature years, my mother stands first. She was the pal of my
boyhood, who made for me the first braided fishing line, and cut for me the first
straight birch pole. She knew the best fishing holes and taught me how to land
my first trout.

Patiently she taught me poems and stories which I retold in school and
primary and for the periodical celebrations of the rural communities where we
lived.

After all these years I can see her sitting with the old accordion upon her
lap, with a little boy who looked like me, and my tiny sister at her knee, listening
intently as she played the songs and hymns of Zion and told, as only she could
tell, the beautiful stories of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, and extolled their
heroes, and impressed us with their virtues, and stamped forever within our
hearts an undying faith and devotion in Jesus of Nazareth. Mine must have
been a favored star, and Providence was very kind to give me such a mother.

––
 It was my good fortune to always live near her from the time of my mar-
riage until her death, and when the children had croup, or other ailments inci-
dent to childhood, mother was always there with her simple effective remedies
and care, and her presence gave us a sense of security that nothing else could
give.

Every evening, after my days work was over, I would spend a pleasant half
hour sitting in her living room listening to her tell of her childhood days and the
memorable incidents of her life.

Those joyous hours I shall never forget. They are happy memories of ex-
periences I can never know again in this life. They seem to me, after all these
years, like a benediction.

MOTHER

In days primeval, when the earth was young,

A virgin world resplendent among the stars,

With oceans blue and mountain peaks and dales;

Ornate with flower and bird and humming bee,

And man in Eden stood, a haughty king;

God paused, and fashioned one of finer mould,

Of more exquisite form and loveliness,

To reign as Queen among the sons of men.

She taught the baby lips to lisp a prayer,

And guided faltering steps to surer paths,

And steered the craft of youth to ports serene,

And smoothed the thorns and briars from the way

And made life’s journey bright, secure and gay.

C . W. Dunn

––
 After the misty memories of childhood, my first clear recollection is of a
refreshing ride from Brigham City to Paradise in Cache Valley, in the old buck-
board of my grandfather John Welch, drawn by his sorrel mare, Sal, upon whose
back we rode two and three deep, many a day after.

We stopped upon the summit of Mount Pisgah and looked down into green,
beautiful Cache Valley, the gem of all the vales of the mountains. Grandfather
climbed down and tacked the sole of an old shoe on the brake, as an additional
precaution for safety in the steep descent.

We all, mother and I, my aunt Annie and her boy Vic, my cousin, and old
grandfather, landed safely in the new Welch home in Paradise about mid-after-
noon, and such a place, literally a palace for those early days, a long log house
of many rooms, upstairs and down, with porches and recesses and fireplaces, a
veritable hall of romance to us kids.

And the old orchard, apples in variety, currents, gooseberries and scads
of red plums, hollyhocks lining the paths, and the deep well lined with cobbles
from which we wound up on the wheel drum, the coolest, clearest water in the
world. How wonderful to a boy appeared the woodhouse, the musty cellars and
the smokehouse, where the hams were cured, and the cider mill that made no
discrimination between apples and peeling and cores and worms.

But let me tell you about the barn: Of all the awe-inspiring places I knew
as a boy, that old barn of grandfather’s stands first. There were corn shellers and
grain grinders and stalls of cattle and horses, and a darkened room which we
held in awesome fear, which housed the arch-necked stallion. There were hay-
lofts and corncribs and alcoves for hiding, and the high tower where we climbed
to view the whole countryside. There were pigeons and rabbits and chickens and
turkeys and a flock of long-wool sheep, lorded over by a ferocious buck with long
curling horns.

The basement was dark at first, as we came in out of the bright sunlight.
There were many stalls and pens for the sheep and hogs and the fowls, and a
black, black room off in the farthest corner, in which hung a creaking clammy
skeleton which rattled gruesomely as the wind whistled through the cracks
where the chinking had fallen away.

How we doted as children upon the occasional visits to Grandfather’s farm,

and Grandma was such a good cook too, always mint spears in herpotatoes, and
chicken with lots of gravy every Sunday. You bet she could cook, and no one
could ever approach her cooking, except my mother, and possibly my wife, if you
listen to the opinions of her own boys and girls.

––
 My father, a pioneer boy of Utah’s early days, grew up among the rugged
mountains and the yielding valley fields of the Beehive state. He gave much of
service and labor to his church, and the communities where he lived. By precept
and example, he instilled into our young minds the truths and ideals common to
those early Mormon villages. He told us to be clean and honest and industrious
and to love our homes, our kinfolks and our country’s flag. He always paid his
debts and discharged his obligations and fought for the underdog. He was typical
product of the rugged life of the pioneer.

In my boyhood, as young men came to man’s estate, and married, they

invariably moved out beyond the frontiers, to new homes upon the homesteads
granted by the Government, and in a few years they grew independent and
wealthy. The boys of today have no such luck. For them there is no frontier, no
new land to be had for the taking, no new country along great rivers; they must
fight it out among the masses of men, with labor ever decreasing and machines
crowding men out of employment. I pity the young men of today. There are
chances for the keenest and brightest and strongest, but what will become of
the weaklings in these days when unemployment grows and chances to succeed
become increasingly less?

––
 MY FOREBEARS

The Dunn tribe came from the Scotch Highlands and some of the most te-
nacious of them still retain a trace of Scotch, at least in so far as their liberality,
and their taste for good whisky, is concerned.

I was about to say they first came over in the Mayflower, but upon second
thought I know that the old boat is already crowded with reputed passengers
until she is about to sink, so I will forego the pleasure of such distinguished com-
pany, and will say that the Dunns came to New England in the very early part of
the Seventeenth Century, and made their homes in Massachusetts and Vermont,
finally moving with the restless flow of that day into western New York and to
the State of Michigan .

Several generations in the land of the free and the home of the brave trans-
formed the Dunn side of the family tree into typical blue-bellied Yankees, with
something of the strictness and intolerance of the Puritan as well.

My great-grandfather, Simeon Adams Dunn, marched away to the war

of 1812 and never came back, and my grandfather of the same name, tells of a
childish memory of his father stepping out of the line of marching soldiers to hug
his little son and kiss him a last good-bye.

With their New England brothers, a number of the Dunns fought against
King George in the War of Independence, and gave their lives in the great cause
of liberty.

It was in the State of Michigan that my grandfather, Simeon Adams Dunn,

first heard the Message of Truth and Salvation. To him the glad tidings came as
a familiar spirit. His heart responded to the call and he went down into the wa-
ters of Baptism and came forth in a newness of faith.

He could not rest or find contentment until he gathered with the Saints to
Nauvoo, Illinois, where he served in various offices in both Church and civic ca-
pacity. The dark days of the Martyrdom of the Prophet and Patriarch found him
back in his home state of Michigan proclaiming the Young Prophet as an ideal
candidate for the Presidency of the United States.

Downcast and sorrowful, with his grief-stricken brethren and sisters he

departed from his home in Nauvoo, the Beautiful City of the Saints, and marched
into the West, to Winter Quarters and Florence, Nebraska, and then on into the
unknown prairie, then up through the canyon defiles and over the high ridges of
the Rockies to the Great Valley beside the salty sea of the Great Basin, and finally
to Brigham City at the foot of the Wasatch Range, where he lived and worked and
died, happy to be at peace in Zion.

––
 The year 1850 found him far in the South Pacific, where he assisted James
Brown in opening up the Mission of the South Seas. Only seven years ago I met
a missionary, recently returned from the Society Islands, who on learning my
name inquired if I was a descendant of Simeon A. Dunn, whose name, he said,
was still revered in tradition by some of the oldest native saints. He told me that
on a great birch tree, in the island forest, he found the name of Simeon A. Dunn
cut deep into the bark and that the letters were still legible.

My father tells of the move South in 1857 when the Saints left their homes
in the fertile northern valleys upon the coming of Johnson’s Army. His father
and young family had reached Provo when one of the children died and grand-
father turned back alone through the lonesome settlements, back to Brigham
City to bury the precious burden in the graveyard of the forsaken town. Alone
and unaided he dug the tiny grave, beside another little mound, and filled in the
stones and the soil and smoothed the sod, and then turned sorrowfully back to
the old home, lonesome and deserted, and slept in the manger with the patient
oxen, so that he might escape the awful lonesomeness and have a little company.

My father’s mother, Harriet Atwood Silver, died when he was a babe and he
was left to the care of others, especially to the care of his older sister who did her
best to take the place of a mother in the little lad’s life.

He grew to manhood in Brigham City, moving to Cache Valley as a young

man, where he occupied various church positions, culminating as the Bishop of
College Ward where he served more than twenty-one years, and to which office I
succeeded him.

In his later life he moved to Logan, where much of his time was spent la-
boring in the Temple. During his entire mature life he has worked diligently in
the temples of the Lord for the salvation of thousands of waiting men, who will
meet him and hail him as a friend and benefactor, when in the life to come he
shall stand upon Mount Zion.

Aunt Letitia was my father’s first wife, and was second only to our own
mother in our love and reverence. She was kind and helpful to my mother’s chil-
dren and loved them as her own. She left us many years ago and went to join my
own mother in that better, happier land where I know we shall meet them and
enjoy their companionship in Eternity.

My mother was Martha Jane Welch, daughter of John Welch and Eliza Bil-
lington Welch. She was born in Centerville, Utah, in the very early days of the
pioneer settlement, February 24, 1859.

––
 My grandfather, John Welch, was of Irish extraction, coming from a fam-
ily of Nobility, if that means anything, and I am quite sure it is no recommenda-
tion in this age of the common people. In his youth he was signed out as an ap-
prentice to learn the cutlery business in trade and manufacture, in the city of
Sheffield, England. When within a few months of finishing his apprenticeship, he
heard, shall we say by chance, the testimony of two young Mormon missionaries.
He was of the blood of Israel and he knew his Master’s voice and recognized the
call of the Good Shepherd. He was baptized and became a member of the unpopu-
lar sect, which to join was to be hated and persecuted and ostracized.

Leaving his employer and his native land, he sailed in a sailing vessel for
the New World, to gather with the Saints in the States, where the Constitution
guaranteed to all men the right to worship as conscience might dictate without
interference.

On the ship he met Eliza Billington, a charming young English girl, who
like himself had heard and found the Truth and cast her lot with the Lord’s
people. Their love was mutual and they were married and came on together
hopefully and prayerfully, to seek their home and fortune in a strange land and
among a strange people, a people gathered from every land and clime into the
great melting pot, the crucible of the Master of Nazareth.

Their ship landed in New Orleans and they came by river boat on up the
Mississippi and joined the body of the Saints at Nauvoo. Here they first met the
Latter-Day Prophet, and I have heard them tell how they were thrilled and in-
spired by this youthful champion of Righteousness.

They cast their lot with the harassed saints, who had but lately been driv-
en from Missouri across the river to the temporary haven in Illinois. Here they
received their first disillusionment. Where was the boasted liberty to worship
God without fear or molestation? Where was the heralded power of this Consti-
tutional Government that guaranteed safety and life and the right to hold and
own property? What had become of the Bill of Rights and all the guarantees of a
Constitution which they had been taught was heaven inspired?”

Lo, the Statue of Liberty hung her head in shame while an unleashed mob
harassed and murdered a peace loving and loyal people in the boasted land
of Freedom. In the high places of Government were seated a group of craven
cowards, afraid to enforce the law and protect unoffending citizens. When ap-
pealed to for protection, these makeshift, misfit, unmanly executives cravenly
answered, “Your cause is just but we can do nothing for you,” and so thousands of
citizens were dispossessed of their homes and farms and factories and properties
and driven from one state to another in quest of friendship, shelter and protec-
tion.

––
 Out of Missouri they came at the point of the Bayonet, leaving blood-
stained tracks upon the snow, and smoldering fires that were once happy homes,
and settled upon the east bank of the Great Father of waters. Here they made an
unhealthy swamp into a beautiful populous city, the largest and most beautiful in
the state of Illinois.

Here, under these conditions, my grandfather and his young bride found
them, and pledged with them loyalty and fidelity to the mighty Cause of Truth
and its inspired leaders.

Then came the expulsion from Illinois and the trek into the desert, day
after day out over the rolling prairie, at night gathered in a circle surrounding
a central campfire, praying and singing in the midst of tribulation, “All is Well,
All is Well.” Up over the mountains they came to the valleys, but I am telling the
story of a people instead of giving the account of my own kin and relatives.

For some years after landing in Nauvoo, my grandfather worked on a flat-

boat on the Mississippi, between St. Louis and New Orleans. He had brought with
him from Old England a little orphan boy, John Miles, no relation of his, but his
ward for life. He also had his widowed mother to care for and support.

Upon the Plains a little girl was born to them and she still lives, although
mostly in the past, at Brigham City, Utah. She recalls the memorable incidents
of her pioneer childhood even though her failing memory fails to respond to the
happenings of today.

To Salt Lake, then on to Centerville they came, where my mother was born
and spent her early childhood. Here grandfather made knives and scissors and
razors and a little good moonshine whisky. But the whisky making was of short
duration, for Brother Brigham heard of it and then all at once John Welch and
the old still parted company forever. An elder in Israel could not make grog and
be in good fellowship at the same time.

In the sixties the family moved to a new home three miles south of
Brigham City, the northern terminal of the new railroad being built up through
the valley of Utah, the little narrow gauge, Utah Northern. Here grandfather
served as Bishop and ran a farm, a fine model farm and drove the finest team of
blooded horses to be found for miles around.

From Three Mile Creek to Brigham City came the old Pioneer, where he
was again a ward bishop, and where to his home, on that gusty terrifying night, I
first looked with blinking eyes and unknowing countenance upon my relations.

––
 THE MORMON RAID

One of the most hateful memories of childhood is the unjustified, relent-

less, venomous persecution of good men and women by a gang of Mormon haters
and agents of Satan, known as the Deputy Marshals, the underlings of a group of
clap-trap judges and carpet bagging federal bureaucrats. With tireless and un-
ceasing vindictiveness they hounded the leaders of Mormon people from pillar
to post, burdening the Courts with “cohab cases” and filling the prisons with the
best men in the land.

Because the Church believed in the principle of Plural Marriage, which is

a just, righteous and exalted principle, and because these loyal people practiced
this divine law, they were hounded and driven and imprisoned by the enemies of
the Church.

Finally the Supreme Court of the United States held the Edmunds-Tucker
law valid, and the State of Utah, upon admission to the Union, provided in its
Constitution that the practice of this principle should be abolished and prohib-
ited. Then by Manifesto, the leaders and the people of the Church decided, and
voted, to refrain and stop the practice of this most divine and just social relation-
ship, and it was properly and finally suspended and has never been approved,
sanctioned or practiced by the Church since said time. True, there have been
violations of the law, and indulgence in the practice, by apostates and dissenters,
and by those who have refused to take the counsel of the leaders of the Church,
but the Church is not responsible for the sins of these malefactors in any way.

Among the men who had two wives was my father, and he came in for his
full share of the torment inflicted by the Deps. My mother, at that time, had two
little children, myself and my oldest sister, and we knew the curse of these hell-
hounds to the fullest extent.

When I was only four we went to live with my uncle Allen Hunsaker, out
on the lonely Malad River in the sagebrush, where there was no other house or
building for many miles on either side. Uncle Al also had two wives and was on
the proscribed list. Always he kept one of his big boys up on the shed with spy-
glass to watch for the Deps, and give him time to scadoo out into the sagebrush
wilds, where he had a special hole to crawl into, and which hole he would pull in
after him so that the officers could never find it. One day Cousin Abe came run-
ning to the house, from his perch on the shed, bellowing the warning, “the deps
are coming”. He had been a little late in giving this warning and we saw the
officers, Steele and Whetstone, coming at a gallop in their black top, and almost
upon us. Uncle Al ran like a scared antelope, jumped in the Malad River and
swan through the mush ice to the farther shore. Out through the sage he gal-
loped, amid the shouts of the deps, to “stop or we’ll shoot”, and shoot they did,
over his head to scare him, but he didn’t scare worth a darn and was soon secure
in his vanished hole in the prairie.

––
 All afternoon he hid there in his wet clothes with the marshals stomping
around him, sometimes so close he could have almost touched them. Then at
nightfall his family, fearful lest he should freeze in the extreme cold, and in his
wet clothes, went to find him, and so the officers toted him away to serve it out
with his fellows in the bullpen.

Whetstone, McClellan, Steele and Goodwin came to be family names, spo-

ken with a hiss in Cache Valley in those hectic times, looked upon and esteemed
in about the same way, and with the same affection as Satan and his imps are
adored today by all good people. Then there were the despicable stool pigeons in
almost every community, who like Judas Iscariot betrayed their brethren and
delivered them up for pieces of silver. I will not name their names here because
they have children and descendants, some of whom seem to be respectable to a
degree, and they should not be handicapped with the infamy of their loathsome
ancestors.

From Millville to western Boxelder, and from there to Hyde Park, and then
to Smithfield, and then another move to Logan, then to Hyrum then to Paradise
and back to Millville, then down to College Ward, up to Clarkston, over to Weston,
Idaho, and back again to College Ward, helter-skelter, pell-mell, here and there,
to escape the human wolves. No peace or safety or security anywhere. It was a
nightmare of a time and one that will never be forgotten by our people who were
old enough to remember.

It was during these days of fright and exile that my mother taught us the
beautiful things of life, the stirring, impressive stories of the Bible, the fascinat-
ing accounts of the Nephites and their wanderings, for they too were exiles, and
we learned to love Lehi and Nephi, Helaman and the heroes of Ancient America.
As night came on we would huddle together around the fire, with the glowing log
all ablaze, and listen with open mouths to this fine teacher of our childhood, and
what a teacher she was, the first, the truest, and the best of all the good teachers
I ever had. How she would make the old accordion hum as we sang, “Old Black
Joe,” “Home Sweet Home,” “Yankee Doodle,” “O, Say What is Truth,” “In Our Love-
ly Deseret,” and “Come, Come, Ye Saints”.

Occasionally father came to see us and then we were supremely happy. I

shall never forget the afternoon while we lived in a hut at Smithfield, when it
gradually grew dark and darker, and we huddled together in the corner scarcely
daring to breathe, for we never had seen a total eclipse of the sun before.

–10–
 Then there was the night in Paradise. We lived in the old James home, about
the oldest house in the town. Near midnight we were awakened by a loud pounding
upon the door and the drunken clamor of the Deputies. “Who is there ?” inquired
mother. “The Deputies, and we want Mr. Dunn,“ shouted Coldsberry, the spotter.
“Open this door mighty quick or we’ll break it down,“ bawled the demons wearing
the badge of government. Mother hastily drew on part of her clothes and opened
the door and in came the mob, hell bent. They tore up the rag carpet and part of
the floor, and ripped the wainscot off the ceiling, and scattered the furniture about
in confusion, while we shrunk in mortal fear in the corner. How my blood boiled,
O to be a man! So that I could lay these fiends out and protect my poor mother. Not
finding the object of their search, they finally left the place in terrible confusion,
only to repeat the same antics and depredations at the home of my father in Mill-
ville, but father was far away trapping beaver on the head waters of Bear River and
their drunken zeal went unrewarded, at least for the time.

If you wished to find wisdom in the mouths of babes in those trying days,
just ask some little lad where his father was to be found. Talk about evasion and
white fibs, these boys of the ‘80’s could take the prize. It was a time when a friend
was a friend and an enemy lined up with Satan. It was persecution for righteous-
ness sake if there ever was such persecution in the world’s history.

When I was six we went to live in the old log “Jim Bishop place” in Millville.
My father lived a mile away across the river, and every morning it was my job to
take the cow down to the pasture, a pasture of endless acres covered with willows
and brush, interspersed with high meadow grass and gay wild flowers. It was here
and now that a boyhood rich in flowers, and birds and brooks and sun browned
fields began. Here was the river full of trout, and how they would bite for a worm
on a pin hook, tied to a homemade line attached to a straight willow pole. Every
boy catches his first fish, and I caught mine, my mother baiting the hook and tak-
ing off the trout and showing me the fine points of the game.

In those early days the Red-men were not all good Indians. The days of their
worst depredations were past and we were quite secure, but I have seen some pret-
ty wild bucks try to scare my mother into giving them all the food in the house, but
they only got a part of it.

One late afternoon, when I was returning with the cow, I was stopped by a
couple of burly bucks just as I crossed the river bridge, I carried a red bottle in my
hands with a supply of coal-oil for the lamp, and the Indians got the notion that the
bottle contained milk. “Papoose givem milk” demanded the buck and snatched the
bottle and began drinking the contents. How he fumed and spit and raged when he
got a good swallow of the coal-oil. They took me up the river some distance to their
camp, and had a lot of fun at my expense, and how the squat squaws and their fat
consorts laughed at my fright. I was pretty glad to get away and scurry home to
the protecting arms of mother, and many a night afterward an Indian nightmare
disturbed my dreams.

–11–
 SCHOOL DAYS

Six years old and the long dreamed of day dawns and I go to school, not a
little red school house but an old squatty rock school house of the Pioneer days of
Utah, a replica of which stood in nearly every community in the Wasatch valley.

THE OLD ROCK SCHOOL HOUSE.

From the album of my childhood,

A picture I recall,
‘Tis the schoolhouse of my boyhood,
‘Tis proud learning’s somber hall.
Its four rock walls, all gray and stern,
With steep-pitched roof of thatch,
And hanging out to welcome me,
The long latch string, and latch
Four rows of rough-hewn benches scarred,
By jackknife, spur and slate,
And glowing red and cheerily,
The round iron stove and grate.
A friendly form, a kindly face,
Is majesty enthroned;
Behind the book-piled teacher’s desk,
An air of wisdom loaned.
A motley crowd of lads and maids,
From six to twenty-one;
All drinking at the font of Truth,
Ere life’s great quest begun.
The Chart Class marches to the front,
To drone their letters o’er,
And next the part First-Reader kids,
All primed with myth and lore.
Each group in proud succession stomped,
Up to the testing row;
For readin’, ‘ritin’, ‘rithmetic,
With faces all aglow.
And almost any time of day,
Upon the corner stool,
A gawky dunce with paper cap,
Sat looking like a fool.
But noon and recess was the time,
When cares were cast away;
And youngsters laughed, and skipped and ran,
In childhood’s romping play.
–12–
 Most every day some burly pair,
Of bullies staged a fight;
To break the grim monotony,
And make our tasks seem light.

The spelling match, the guessing bee,

The joyous country dance;
Gave sweet diversion to our days,
Oft ending in romance.

Of all fond scenes from childhood’s scroll,

Which I in dreamland see;
This rock-bound schoolhouse on the green,
Stands first in memory.

C. W. Dunn
.

PLAY THE GAME

Little lad shoot ‘em square

When you play in the ring;
Give your playmate a chance,
Never cheat, that’s the thing;
Be a sport, play the game.

On the old college team,

Where you rank as a star;
Play the enemy fair,
Never cheat in the war;
Be a sport, play the game.

Then in manhood’s estate,

When you fight for a name,
Take no mean advantage,
To win plaudit or fame;
Be a sport, play the game.

Fight the battle of life,

Like a man, and you’ll win,
If you always shoot square;
Face the world with a grin;
Be a sport, play the game.

–13–
 Howthe world opened and expanded for me in those first school days. I can
still see the young teacher, Josephine Turner, with her cheery smile and her red
cheeks coming into the warm schoolhouse on the frosty mornings of December,
and I walk again with Mose Holt up through the willows across the river and
past the Co’op store each morning and back at night, and regard with admiration
the little girl, Lula Yeates, the best reader in the class, and wonder how it hap-
pened that Johnnie Wilcox had water on the brain.

In quick step I mastered the big Chart, and during the first year I was
promoted to the First Reader and then to the Second Reader, and no wonder, for I
had learned all the pages of the old books by rote, under the tutelage of my moth-
er, before I crossed the threshold of wisdom’s temple.

When I was seven we moved down to College Ward and I came into the
Third Reader class with John Schenk, Reuben Nuttall, Hansie Sorensen and
Mose Olsen. I wanted to make a profound impression on that first day in the new
school, and so participated in three fights; result: won 33 and 1/3 percent and
lost 66 and 2/3 percent, and after that the boys didn’t seem too much afraid of
me.

This was a typical old time mixed school, out in the open prairie, the stu-
dents ranging in age from six to twenty-three and what wisdom we smaller boys
absorbed from the big fellers, listening to their enlightened conversation behind
the schoolhouse, one can well imagine; perhaps not always the most select line of
knowledge for kids and the eager minds of youth.

I owe a debt of gratitude to these early teachers, Mercy Baker, Mary Whit-
ney, George S. Obray, and Joseph and Hyrum Campbell, which I can never repay,
for it was from them that I learned some of the very valuable lessons of life and
became acquainted just a little with the great world around me.

The most joyful event in those times of long ago was the annual Christmas
tree in the meeting house, when all the people of the ward assembled to listen
to the best talent entertain, and to watch for the appearance of Santa Claus
through the west door, with his pack of nuts and candy, and to wait breathlessly
while he stripped the big Christmas tree of its load of gifts, reading the name of
every man, woman and child, and bestowing the treasured Christmas tokens
amid joyous shouts of glee

–14–
 OLD TOM

When I was just a little lad,

Wadin’ the slough and mire
My dad he bought
A big bay colt,
Chuck full of life and fire.
Full many a hoss we had before,
A working’ from sun till sun,
But we never had
Such a gallant steed,
As Tom, the trusty one.
He lugged the plow from dawn till dusk,
And pulled the mower too
And jogged to town
With dad and maw,
To get the grist and stew.
Tom was a Ham-il-ton-ian,
A drivin’ hoss was he,
But in a pull,
He’d always take
The bloomin’ double-tree.
He sure was always on the job,
To harrow, seed or rake,
To sow the corn,
Or dig the spuds,
That old hoss was no fake.
More honest far, than many men,
Old Tom would see us through
He never shirked,
Or balked or kicked,
That Bay was good and true.
From boyhood days to man’s estate,
He was our trusty friend,
And understood
Our woes and joys,
And served until the end.
If we shall wake in brighter climes,
And wake again we will,
I’d like to drive
Old Tom again
To plow and sow and till.
And live again the happy hours,
Of boyhood’s fleeting day,
And know the friends,
I knew of yore,
With Tom, the trusty bay.

–15– C. W. Dunn, Jan. 1935

 THE THRESHOLD ** EIGHT YEARS OLD

For every Latter Day Saint child the eighth birthday ushers in the fruition
of his dreams. He has arrived at the age of discretion, the time to take the all-
important step, to be baptized and become a full-fledged Member of the Church.
Thereafter he is supposed to be able to recognize right and wrong, and to have
enough judgment and will power to choose for himself, enough of the makings of
a man, or a woman, to turn from the beaten, paved highway that leads down to
failure, sorrow and destruction, and to walk in the “straight and narrow way”
that leads to success, happiness and eternal progression.

My eighth birthday came on a cold, backward April morning, with a

breath of snow in the air, and the frosts of winter still doing their stuff. Early in
the morning my father, my brothers and I trailed about half a mile to the creek,
west of our house, for the ceremony. We broke the ice, about a quarter of an inch
thick, and waded into the cold stream.

Father held up my hands and invoked the Divine blessing and I was im-
mersed in the icy water and came forth into a newness of life. That noon, at the
Ward Fast Meeting, my old friend, John C Dowdle, my Father’s first counselor
in the Bishopric, confirmed me as a member of the Church, and the Sweet Spirit
came to abide with me, to witness unto me things past, things present and things
to come; to warn me of danger and evil, and to lead me into Eternal truth.

I spent that summer, with my mother and brother and sister, in the little
town of Weston, just over the state line in Idaho. We lived in an old log house,
roofed with rushes and dirt, which leaked when it rained, and dripped even
harder long after the shower had passed. It was a lonesome time, but we made
the best of it, even to the eight-inch lizards in the cellar under the floor, and the
impudent Indian bucks who used to intimidate my mother by demanding more
bread and meat than she could spare from her little family.

On the long summer days I wandered with several neighbor boys over
the sage brush hills and up the rolling washboards to the west of the town, and
down to cool Weston creek in the late afternoons for a swim. How our eyes used
to shine, and our hearts beat with joy, when we were lucky enough to get a few
apples or to have some nourishing beef steak for dinner. We always had enough
bread, but sometimes not very much else, and a little meat, or fruit, or hard tack
was a real treat.

One sultry afternoon my little brother accompanied me to the village store

to buy a ten cent sack of salt and two bits worth of sugar. He lingered after the
business was concluded and shyly asked the clerk, “Have you got any candy what
you give away for nothin’?” The sympathetic clerk brought an old candy bucket
with a quantity of broken hard tack sticking to the bottom, and we had the time
of our lives on the shady side of the store, with a hammer and two good appetites.

–16–
 Almost every evening, as twilight came on, my mother would seat us at her knee,
on three little stools, and play L.D.S. Hymns, accompanying us, as our voices raised in
“Come, Come, Ye Saints,” “Oh, My Father” “In Our Lovely Deseret”, and “Who’s On the
Lord’s Side, Who?”, then a story, so sweetly and understandingly told, of heroes from
history and from the scriptures. It was in those sadly sweet old days that we learned to
love Jesus, the Shepherd of Galilee, and the faithful Prophets of the Lord. Here we were
taught to prize the good and the true, and the worthwhile things of life, and to hate sin
and vice and evil.

In those old days I was mortally terrified of lightning and thunder and always
shivered at my mother’s knee until the frequent and violent showers had passed, and
I was equally scared and afraid of the boom of the cannon which was a part of the
celebrations on the Fourth and Twenty-fourth of July. When the town celebrated the
Fourth that summer, I ran away from the Square, away down across the creek, and up
over the sage brush prairie to the south, until I was out of hearing, three miles away,
where I contentedly spent most of the day with a farmer and his wife in their log cabin,
and enjoyed watching him mend his harness while his good wife prepared some lus-
cious ham and eggs for a hungry man and a little boy with a keen, sharp appetite.

Then there were the days in the good old summertime when we went fishing,
down to the big Springs and along the winding banks of Spring Creek. I forbear to tell
some of my favorite fish stories because every time I tell them, the fish increase and get
larger and so I shall express my passion for the best of outdoor sports in the poem:

THE OLD SUCKER HOLE

With the first warm days of springtime,

Armed with can of worms and pole;
I hike away across the meadows,
To the lazy sucker hole.
Buds are burstin’ in the tree-tops,
Honey bees are in the air;
Down the river bank we wander,
Just a care-free, jolly pair.
Johnny jump-ups are a springing’.
What a day to take a stroll,
And for us no school bells ringin’,
Way down by the sucker hole.
Jim and me just stick together,
Jim’s my dog if you must know;
How we watched with eager longin’,
For the goin’ of the snow.
Sure we liked to coast and snowball,
And loved the fireplace in our lair;
But we doted on the springtime,
With its nippy, bracin’ air.

–17–
 On a dry-goods box a-sittin’,
Jim curled sleepin’ at my feet;
There I sit and dream a-fishin’,
That’s a sport you’ll never beat.
And the sun so warm and glowin’,
Shinin’ down upon my back;
Waitin’ for the lazy suckers,
And a-eatin’ of my snack.
Sittin’ in the sun and dreamin’,
Rearin’ castles in the air;
Dopin’ out my future conquests,
Buildin’ mansions grand and fair.
Back to earth I come a jumpin’,
Sure as blazes it’s a bite,
An’ my line keeps on a-jerkin’,
While I grasp the fish-pole tight.
Now he’s on, the line’s a-runnin’,
He’s a pullin’ like a leach,
Then I heave; O, what a beauty,
Boy, that sucker was a peach!
Tired and hungry in the evenin’,
Back across the fields we tread;
Britches wet and twenty suckers,
Heavy as a hunk of lead.
How I love to turn life’s pages,
Back, as memories unroll;
To my boyhood’s happy springtime,
Dreamin’ by the sucker hole.
C. W. Dunn, Feb., 1933

I have always enjoyed supremely the fine sport of fishing and hunting, the
whir and hum of insects in the air, the bright sunshine, the meadows red and
white with clover, the tang of pine and the wild smell of sage-brush; just to be
alone with nature and try to comprehend her, away from the rush and bustle,
and the sham and pretense and hypocrisy of the life men lead in the crowded
places, and I was often happy on such occasions to have some fine friend and
companion along to share the fun and to lend sociability to the venture. At no
other place, and upon no other occasion can one become so well acquainted with
men or boys as in the woods and the canyons and upon the banks of the clear
mountain streams. Here there is no hypocrisy, pretense or sham, men are men
and act naturally and you see them and know them as they are.

–18–
 When only eight, I was ordained a deacon by old Brother C.C. Bindrup, and
served as secretary of the quorum and as counselor and then finally as president.
In those days the deacons cut the wood and made the fires for the meetings, and
kept the meeting house clean and warm. We looked upon our work as very impor-
tant and were not allowed to forget “that a good Deacon is better than a slothful
Apostle.”

When quite a young lad, perhaps about the time I was seven years old, my
father homesteaded a farm of dry land in Clarkston, a new district just opened up in
the north-western part of Cache Valley, and I often had experience driving five hors-
es on a sulky plow breaking up the sagebrush. It seemed a wild place in those early
days, as we trailed across the hills and over the sagebrush wastes of the adjoining
country, but it was good exercise and good training for a young boy, o, so much bet-
ter than hanging around crowded city streets.

Sometimes when we were not too busy at home we were permitted to hire out
to the other farmers. When I was eleven I got a job plowing wheat stubble at forty
cents a day. The day started at seven, with an hour for noon and the long afternoon
ended at seven P.M. when we unhitched and went home. I remember working for one
of the neighbors, hauling hay. It took two days to finish the job and then my employ-
er advised me that if I would come until noon the next day and work in his garden
he would give me a dollar for the two days and half, and I collected the dollar and
walked to Wellsville, five miles away to have the pleasure of spending it. I bought a
pair of suspenders and cloth for a Sunday shirt and had a dime left for candy and I
was very happy.

If I could grant real happiness for every boy and girl, I would wish that they
had a friend and visitor like old John Miles. John was my grandfather’s ward and
was never married. He was about the best friend a boy ever had. Nothing could set
my heart thumping for very joy like the sight of Old John coming down the road to
pay us a visit.

He always brought a pocketknife, or some present, for each of us and scat-

tered candy and nuts just to see us scramble. He was the kind of man who would
take a little lad by the hand and escort him through the County Fair, or upon a long
fishing trip, or across the meadows and down to the river. He had a clean mind, and
never in his life said or did anything shady in the presence of children. When I go
across the River, into that vague hereafter, which we all must enter sooner or later,
Old John is one of the first friends I will hunt up.

Then there were the visits of my fine old Pioneer Grandfather with his long
white hair and a flowing beard nearly down to his waist. He used to say, “Come,
Charley, my lad, and sit down here by me and I will tell you all about my own scrapes
when I was a boy,” and how he could tell them! I don’t mean yarns, like you would
expect from some old sailor. These were all true stories and were plenty colorful
without artificial coloring or drafts upon the imagination.

–19–
 He would tell of his boyhood days in old England, how he heard the gospel
message and left his apprenticeship and slipped away for America to join the saints,
how he met my grandmother on the ship and came up the Mississippi River to Nau-
voo, the city of the saints; how he met the Boy Prophet and Patriarch and the de-
spised Mormons; of the trip across the plains in the covered wagon, and the pioneer
life in the valleys. And then he would bear his Testimony, “Never forget, my lad,
that I gave you my testimony that this is God’s Church and his work. It is all true.
Be loyal to the principles and ideals of this Church and hang to the Iron Rod and you
will be happy here and hereafter. This is the only church which has any authority
to act and minister in the name of God. Its principles are Eternal Truth. We cannot
be saved and exalted without them.”

More than forty years ago this old Grandfather, then about 80 years of age,
made his written Testimony regarding this great work and signed it and swore to
it before a Notary Public, and left it for his children and his descendants to the last
generation. It is as follows:

“DEPOSITION

I, John Welch, being of mature years, desire to leave to my friends and descen-
dants the following statement

I was born January 6th, 1823, at Derbyshire, England, and I served as an

apprentice at the cutler trade at Sheffield, until I reached the age of majority. I was
baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the year 1841;
emigrated to Nauvoo, Ill., in 1843 and to Salt Lake City in the year 1852. I was well
acquainted with the Prophet Joseph Smith and heard him speak both in public and
in private many times. I was present at the meeting in the grove at Nauvoo, August
8th, 1844, when Sidney Rigdon made the claim that it was his right to assume the
leadership and presidency of the church. I saw Brigham Young, then the president
of the Twelve Apostles, stand up to speak to the people and he spoke with the voice
of Joseph Smith; and I further declare and testify, that he, Brigham Young had the
appearance of the Prophet Joseph Smith while he, Young, was talking; that I was
convinced then, and have never doubted in all the intervening years from that time
up to the present, that Brigham Young was the right man and the man chosen of
God to lead the Church. And I further testify that all his successors down to Joseph
F. Smith, who at present stands at the head and presides over the Church, were
called, chosen and ordained of God so to do.

In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal at Logan City in the
County of Cache and State of Utah, this 5th day of July A.D. 1902.

(Signed) John Welch (SEAL)

Subscribed and sworn to before me this 5th day of July A.D. 1902.
(Seal)
(Signed)
County Clerk, Cache Co., Utah.

–20–
 THE BECKONING SUMMIT BEYOND.

Long ago, in the days of boyhood, before the automobile came to annihilate
distance and transcend time, I accompanied my father upon a long, tedious jour-
ney.

We rode in the old farm wagon, jogging along behind a team of tired, sweat-
ing horses. Our destination was over a long range of low hills and across the
mountains.

As we approached the long climb, the dusty road stretched away, like an
endless curling gray ribbon up the hillside. It was sultry and hot and our prog-
ress was slow and painful, and I longed eagerly for the summit and the chang-
ing scenes which my imagination pictured beyond, only to find upon reaching
the apparent top, another longer, steeper and dustier climb winding away in the
distance.

Thus we crawled laboriously up and on, over many sagebrush hillsides,

only to discover at each succeeding summit, a longer hill ahead, another dusty
road to travel.

Childlike, I became weary and asked, “When shall we ever reach the top.
When shall we come to the great divide?”

My father answered each anxious inquiry with the assurance that many
steep dugways lay ahead before the journey’s end.

At last, after what seemed an eternity, we came to the top of the range, our
temporary destination; but looking far to the northward I beheld the majestic
blue-rimmed ridge of a challenging mountain, its rugged peaks looking down in
silent contempt upon the poor hills and the pygmy summits we had conquered.

A higher, a more sublime range lay beyond, a wider, a grander horizon

stretched before. If we would gain its alluring summit a more arduous, difficult
and hazardous journey must be made.

And so it is with the endless journey of life, on through eternity; after each
hill a new summit looms ahead, after each tedious ascent appears a steeper hill-
side, a higher mountain beckoning us to climb, and ever the glowing appealing
range ahead calls us to new and unceasing exertion.

New horizons greet us at the top of each divide, and the blue rims of jagged
clifts and peaks yet unscaled challenge us ever up and on.

C.W. Dunn, May 17, 1932.

–21–
 THE PIONEER JUBILEE

July, 1897, just fifty years since the Latter-day Saints entered Salt Lake Valley,
first, the Vanguard of the Pioneers, then those others who came the first year, about two
thousand of them, in covered wagons, on foot and on horseback, and in endless caravans
of prairie schooners drawn by oxen, with a few horses, yoked up cows, when oxen were
scarce.

The people in the valleys were all agog and excited because of the Great Pioneer
semi-centennial Jubilee to start July 24th. Father rigged up the old surrey, one of the few
buggies in the locality, with our best team of trotters, and off we went on the hundred-mile
trip to the Great City of Salt Lake.

The first day found us in Brigham City, the peach town of North Utah, the second
night we slept in Bountiful and about eleven o’clock A.M. of the third day we walked down
the main street of the mighty city, craning our necks at the tops of the sky-scrapers of the
nineties, the highest four or five stories, but they seemed mighty and marvelous to two
kids who had never been to town before.

We put up at the site of the Hotel Utah, then the Tithing Barn, and with dozens like
us, green from the country, we slept peacefully on the tithing hay, with plenty of fresh air
and the smell of the mow in our nostrils.

On that first day at noon father took us to a restaurant, a brand new experience, and
we stuffed the three kinds of meat and the soup and the pie and other good things until we
suffered from indigestion, but it was worth the price.

How we admired the great new Temple, with its gleaming granite walls and its
towers and pinnacles and its all seeing-eye, and how we marveled at the great unsup-
ported dome of the Tabernacle, and no wonder, for it has been the admiration of countless
thousands every year until the present, as the endless groups of tourists are led around
the famed Tabernacle square, viewing the gorgeous grounds, and the monuments of the
Prophets, and the shaft in honor of the seagulls, because they saved the early pioneers
from starvation in the days of the crickets and grasshoppers. Not an automobile in sight,
just buggies and surreys and lumbering farm wagons and carts, but the people all seemed
to be busy and happy and without that hurried, worried, hunted look we see today in the
modern world.

At the corner of Main and First South a great crowd had gathered, something of
great interest was going on, and as we came nearer we heard the barker, yes, they had
barkers then too, even though there were no radios; he was shouting something wonder-
ful, “Come one, come all, step right up and see and hear the wonder of the age, a real talk-
ing machine. It talks like a man. Edison has made a machine into a human.” “We paid
our dime and stuck the tubes in our ears and from the depths of the little wonder box
with its spinning wheels came the itching, screeching, nasal words, “This is the Columbia
Phonograph Company of New York and Paris.” Then we held our breath while the thing
screeched forth Old Black Joe, Darling Nellie Grey and Yankee Doodle. Only a few favored
ones even knew of the miracle of the music box which could talk and sing, and we were
among the initiated.
–22–
 The great day had arrived, the twenty-fourth of July, Pioneer Day, not “Wild West
Day”, not “Covered Wagon Days”, not “Frontier Days”, but the 24th, Mormon pioneer
Day, a day loved and revered by all the oldsters of Utah.

To them the spirit of the West and of Utah was not personified or symbolized by
Jim Bridger, or Kit Carson, of any of the other fortune hunting, Indian killing squaw-
men of the time, but by Brigham Young and his band of one-hundred forty-five men,
three women and two children who came down into the sagebrush valley on July 24th,
1847, to make homes and to build an Empire; not to hunt gold or trap furs or to escape
the penalty of the law in their flight from their eastern homes. These Mormons are the
real Pioneers and builders of the Intermountain West.

I was perched high in a Box Elder tree at the south-east corner of the Temple
Square, almost against the great wall built during the first year in the valley. In the in-
tersection stood a great shaft, draped all in white, the Pioneer Monument, built to honor
the brave men and women who had made the desert bloom. Then as the air was rent
by the singing of thousands, and the blare of many bands, we all joined in the dear old
hymn, “Come, Come Ye Saints”, and the white drapery parted, and we saw the life-size
figure of the Beloved Pioneer and Leader, the Modern Moses, Brigham Young, and the
supporting forms of Indians and pioneer men and women, and a mighty shout of praise
ascended to the God of the Pioneer, a shout of adoration and thanksgiving, and every
heart tingled with pride and gratitude. They were our Pioneers, we were of them. They
were our fathers and our mothers.

Up the street came the wonderful, colorful parade, the mammoth pageant, a
great army, proudly marching, some with halting steps and bent shoulders, some lame
and stooping, but all with the fire of adventure and the pride of accomplishment beam-
ing from their eyes. A great army of pioneers, all that were left of the vanguard band,
and of the hundreds who came after in 1847. They marched past, an endless throng,
with sunburned faces and calloused hands, these men and women who came and toiled
and prayed and conquered. How we loved and honored them, who gave us our homes
and made a waste into a place of pastures and orchards and waving fields of grain.

Just two weeks ago I read in the morning paper that the last, solitary survivor
of all that revered army which I had seen march by, the last survivor of the 1847 pio-
neers, Sister Brockbank, had passed on, and it left me with a lonesome, sad heartache
when the last tie that binds us to those first pioneers was severed and the last of that
illustrious generation was only a memory.

I have always loved and honored and revered the Mormon Pioneers, for their
loyalty, and for their great faith in God and in themselves, and for their honesty and
integrity and their patience and perseverance and their courage and their conquering
spirits.

Then the Jubilee was all over and back we came to our little country village in
Cache Valley, but we were quite the heroes among the boys and girls, because we had
been to Salt Lake and had seen great things and were entirely sophisticated.
*************
–23–
 My school days were happy times and terminated all too soon, and then came the
dear old Brigham Young College at Logan, which I entered in 1899 and attended until I
graduated in June, 1905, with the exception of one year at the Agricultural College of
Utah.

The B.Y.C. was a grand school, with fine, high ideals, and a splendid faculty and a
wide-awake, sober and high-minded group of boys and girls, who have since played a very
important part as leaders in all the communities of the intermountain region.

There was old Jacob Miller, the walking history, with a hundred history texts piled
high upon his desk, which graciously obscured his view of the rowdy scamps who sat in
front. No student of those old times ever forgot Professor Miller, with his little duffey, and
his long stride up the steps to chapel. His fine character is stamped upon many leading
men and women in these mountains.

Mosiah Hall and D.C. Jensen and President Linford and Herschel Bullen and Dr.
Cowans and Willard Done all live in the hearts of the students of the old day, boys and girls
then, old men and women now.

For two years I rode a fiery roan pony, with a somewhat dilapidated saddle, to an
eight o’clock class, from our farm five miles away, after milking about five cows and feed-
ing a pen full of pigs. Through mud up to the pony’s knees, sometimes my long legs dan-
gling so that my feet almost trailed in the swamp, it seemed, in justice, that I should have
taken my turn carrying the little mare, but we always got through on time.

Then there were other years when my brother and I batched it in a small rented
room in town, subsisting on fried spuds and bottles of canned fruit and plenty of good
bread and butter. This batching business is no fun, and we envied the boys who had rich
fathers, who could pay the going price of three dollars a week for good room and board in
some family, but we had eleven in our tribe and the funds were limited.

In those youthful years my brother and I made many trips to the Canyons for wood
and slabs, to feed the family stove, sometimes away up Logan Canyon to the Beaver land-
ing, or to Montrose’s water setting, or to Crowther’s steam mill. The trips requiring three
days were long and tedious with cold damp nights, but we always had plenty of ruffed
mountain grouse and sage hens and mountain trout, to eat with our home-baked bread,
and home-churned butter and sliced fried potatoes. Have you ever eaten away up in the
canyon in the evening, or had breakfast on an early snappy morning just as the sun came
up? How good those meals tasted, with canyon sharpened appetites of two growing boys.

One night we camped with our load of slabs at the old meadow ground near the
Hardware ranch in Blacksmith Fork Canyon. We made our bed some distance from the
loaded wagon, and placed the boxes of food nearby, and soon were in dreamland. Oh, how
one could sleep in the cool, airy canyon, pungent with the smell of pines and running
water and sagebrush. Sometime in the night we were awakened by the grunting growl of
a bear, so we thought, with our heads tucked under the quilts. We could hear the intruder
rummaging in our grub boxes and tipping them upside down, but we steadfastly kept un-
der cover and made not a sound. When the supposed Bruin had finished our supplies to the
–24–
last morsel, he slumped away into the brush and we ventured our first look, and to our
astonishment and mortification we beheld a big red pig grunting contentedly with his
belly full of our eats, and so it was that we came back home nearly starved, after a fast
of two days.

I belonged to the famous B.Y.C. class of 1905, the largest class of graduates up
to that time, and the most important class the College ever had, to hear the men and
women who were lucky enough to be members. When we left the old halls we vowed to
come back after thirty years and report at a great class reunion, and back we all came
after the thirty years had slipped by, to the old stomping ground. Lucky for us the east
building of the Campus was still there as of yore, though cracked up by the earthquake
and with a few seams and wrinkles, like the boys and girls who came in from their
wanderings.

Each alumnus gave an account of his labors and accomplishments; some were
very modest, some spread it on, and left nothing to be imagined as to their greatness
and fame, but it was interesting, and brought back the happy memories of a day that
can never come again. They were a fine bunch of Doctors, Lawyers, Professors, Scien-
tists, Businessmen, Bishops, Presidents of Stakes, Mayors and housewives and moth-
ers. I am glad to belong to such a jolly clan and I shall be there when we answer the
fifty year roll call as well as the roll call up yonder.

Graduation day at last came around, in June, 1905, a day full of sunshine and
supreme joy, a life landmark, never to be forgotten. Proudly we stood up in front of our
parents and our friends and our girls, yes we had girls; I think they were proud, too,
of our accomplishment, although most of them have since ceased to look up to us to
any great extent. We received our sheepskins tied with crimson ribbons. Then it was
finished. We had conquered. Now we could conquer the world. We could solve its prob-
lems and show the generations of the past how to live and fight and win. Nothing could
daunt us. We even felt a sense of compassion and condescending kindness for our poor
parents, who had never had our chances in life; and so out we went into the cold world,
wise and all-important in our own estimation, but soon to be brutally and cruelly disil-
lusioned. Happy and joyous is Graduation Day, an event in the life of growing young
manhood and one of three supreme days in the life of the sweet girl graduate.

Nearly all the graduates in the old days made their first wages in the school-
room, and like the rest I sent out my applications modestly crying my wares, and pro-
claiming my great qualifications as a guide for youth. I had two or three nibbles and
finally a real bite, and so I packed off to Cache Junction to meet the trustees and clinch
the contract.

They sat around an old scarred table, three rusty old farmers who had come up
through first-hand contact with life and had graduated in the School of Experience.
The chairman was a hardboiled, bald-headed sponsor of the old District school, with no
frills or flourishes. Readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic was his forte, and he knew what he
wanted in a teacher. Proudly I unrolled my Diploma and laid the red ribbon along the
table, looking sidewise, meanwhile, to see what impression I was making.

–25–
 “You see I am a Graduate and this is my Diploma.” It seemed they were not so
profoundly impressed as I had hoped. The old Chairman looked doubtful and a little
disgusted, and delivered himself thusly; “We don’t want any more damn graduates. We
had one last year and he nearly ruined our kids. What we want is a schoolteacher.”

With a shamed face and a red countenance I wrapped up the prized diploma and
wound the red ribbon around it, and with an air of apology I tucked it away, and have
never exhibited it since. I found that it takes men, not graduates; fighters, not doctors
of science; plodders and workers, not academic blisters to come through in life’s battle.
But the education helps just the same and is never to be discounted if accompanied
with plenty of good horse sense, and a few degrees are no handicap, tucked away where
the graduate can look at them sometimes, and turn his memories back again to the old
school days.

Well, I got the school in spite of the Diploma, and taught the nine grades with
twenty pupils in all that first winter. I got $50.00 a month as teacher and $5.00 more
for sweeping the floor and dusting the benches; not so much, but it was real money, not
taxed to a shred and clipped off and depreciated by the foolish antics of any New Deal.

I used to walk the sixteen miles from Cache Junction to Logan about twice a
week, after taking an ice water bath in the old pump-house, under the direction of Irish
Murphy, the O.S.L. pump man. It was good exercise and I think I was in the best physi-
cal condition of my life during that winter so long ago.

For three years more I imposed myself as a teacher upon the young and rising
generation, and then concluded that it was best for them, and best for me, to get out of
a profession in which I perhaps should never have excelled. I finally got tired of telling
how much I loved teaching, and learned that I could not tell the fib with such convinc-
ing conviction as many of my contemporaries. And so I looked to politics, and landed a
small-fry political job as Deputy County Clerk and Clerk of the Juvenile Court, part of
my work being to act as Clerk of the District Court.

It was here that I determined to study law, and enter the legal profession if I
could qualify and ever attain the coveted admission to the Bar, and so I began, a long,
hard, laborious grind, day after day, week after week, year after year I kept at it, de-
termined to come through. I could not attend a law university because I had a growing
family to support and so I had to work it out alone.

Every case that was tried in the Court during the time I was Clerk was carefully
studied, and I delved into the books each time to hunt out the law applicable, and then
watched and listened as the trial progressed, and by the time the Jury had rendered
the verdict, or the Judge had delivered his opinion I had gleaned something from the
experience. I acquired some of the law by a process of osmosis. It sunk in from daily
contact with attorneys and judges, and with the Courts. Then, too, I finished three
non-resident courses and finally after six long years I went to Salt Lake City to take the
dreaded Bar Examination. I dreamed about it at night, and thought of nothing else by
day, until the fatal day arrived. It was another milestone in my life.

–26–
 Three and a half long days and it was all over, and I went home hoping and praying
that I had made the grade.

Then came a telephone from the Clerk of the Supreme Court. I had passed. I was to
be admitted to the Bar. My life’s dream and ambition were realized. I was walking on air. I
was supremely happy, and there is nothing like the happiness of accomplishment. I had at
last, after the long, hard grind, and the longing of years, reached the goal.

And so on March 25th, 1916, I stood up with the other successful men and raised my
hand and took the oath of office as an Attorney and Counsellor at Law. Perhaps it didn’t
mean very much to anyone else, but it meant worlds to me.

When a boy of twenty-six years, I was called to be Bishop of the College Ward, where
my father had presided for more than twenty-one years. As I look back now, I am not sur-
prised at my rather cool reception and I do not blame the natives for feeling somewhat
disappointed and a little dissatisfied to have a stripling so young placed to preside over
them. I had made a strenuous effort to obtain an education, under difficulties, with many
of my rural neighbors sneering all the while at my determination, and proclaiming in their
smug self-sufficiency that, “an education was not necessary. We didn’t get one and we know
enough”, Well, where ignorance is bliss, it sure is folly to be wise.

But all the while I had one neighbor, the old Pioneer, John C. Dowdle, who gave en-
couragement. “Keep at it, my boy”, he used to say. “Don’t mind the jibes of the herd. Go
right a long, plan your course and your journey and then keep plodding till you get there.”
And when the day of graduation came, he was on hand to show appreciation and give fur-
ther encouragement.

But back to my call to be the Bishop. Young Patriarch Hyrum G. Smith was charged
with the duty of releasing my father and installing me. It was his first call to perform such
a duty, he having been but recently chosen as Presiding Patriarch to the Church. He was as
diffident and scared as I was myself, but finally my father was out and I was in.

All the folks didn’t vote to sustain me. Quite a few let their hands rest idly in their
laps and looked a little disgusted to have the young smart-aleck school teacher thrust upon
them,. Old Anton Koller, a mulish Dutchman, just returned from a misspent mission to the
old Fatherland, trotted down to the door, and turning round, shouted at the top of his bro-
ken German, “Dat is ahell uf a Bishop”, then bounded out of the door and off for home, and
I imagined his sentiments echoed in the crestfallen hearts of quite a few in the audience,
without the brass and courage of old Koller. Sometime later this paragon missionary went
back to his native land and married the girl he had disgraced while on his mission and died
out of the church.

Another old German, disgruntled like his countryman, delivered himself of the ef-
fusion after the meeting was over, “Vell de young man has sheated the old man out of his
yob”.

But I determined to do my duty, notwithstanding that down in my soul I agreed

with Koller. I made friends with the boys and the girls and with the oldsters, and after
awhile I had scads of friends and got along fairly well until I moved away to Logan. At the
–27–
reorganization, upon my release, the ward folks gave vent to their pent-up emotions
by singing with much feeling, “LONG HAVE WE BEEN LED IN DARKNESS” and “THE
REIGN OF SATAN NOW IS O’ER”. (Take this last with a pinch of salt.)

But my experience was a blessing to me. It served to strengthen my testi-

mony of the Truth and Divinity of the Everlasting Gospel, and intensified my love for
my fellowmen.

Due to my confining hours in the schoolroom, when a physical giant like me

should have toiled in the open air, I came to have ulcers of the stomach and was in
frail health for a number of years.

In November of 1913, after attending a Republican rally at Mendon with my

good friend Horace Nebeker, I attacked my supper, ravenous as a bear, eating, as I
remember, some fine mutton chops and fried potatoes, and topping off with two tart
pearmain apples. Then I went to visit my mother as usual, for a quiet chat in her
warm parlor, a happy experience of mine until her death some twenty years ago,
and I have never quite outlived the impulse, as evening comes, to go to her quiet
home and get new inspiration for the battles of life. But since her departing it is her
spirit that speaks to me, not her kindly audible voice, although at times it seems
almost as real as were her spoken words.

As I left her home that evening I experienced great pain and upon reach-
ing my own home, I began to vomit blood, which continued for about an hour, leav-
ing me weak and distressed. The Doctor put me to bed and prescribed a total fast
for twenty-one days and I carried out his prescription. For three long weeks I had
neither food nor water, and suffered indescribable agony. For the first four days
the hunger was intense and almost unbearable, then gradually the craving for food
was gone and in its place there came an unquenchable thirst, so much more agoniz-
ing that the hunger was entirely forgotten. Every night I dreamed the same cruel
dream. I would always be bending over the cold mountain spring at Leatham’s bend
in Wellsville canyon drinking, drinking, drinking, lapping up the cold water, but no
matter how many gallons I drank, the torturing thirst was still there, and then I
would awake, with tongue lolling out and with panting breath and the same terrible
longing for water. Then back to sleep again, and the same ravaging dream until the
dawn.

I gradually grew weaker and thinner until just bones and taut skin remained
of my great hulk of two hundred sixty-five pounds. Then at last the fast was over
and I was given a little buttermilk and then a little more, and after a few days some
real milk, and then a cup of broth and in a few days some more soups, until after
a month I was having a little solid food again. I had to learn to walk all over and
after being confined to my bed for six months I came out into the sunlight of the new
spring. How wonderful and fresh and bright it all seemed after the dreary winter of
torture. But strenuous as was the cure my life was saved, and in a few years I re-
gained something of my former vigor and strength.

–28–
 Mormon boys live the life of the great, pure outdoors, and grow up clean and
fresh and undefiled as the clear mountain streams and the unpolluted air of the
valleys; and so do Mormon girls. They are taught to be chaste and pure, and so with
very few exceptions they come to maturity. My mother taught that a boy had bet-
ter lose his right arm or even his life than to be defiled by committing the great sin
which Jesus said was next to murder in its gravity and baneful results.

I have recounted heretofore my journey with my father and brother to Great

Salt Lake City when just a boy to attend the Pioneer Jubilee. One day, while in the
great city Father led us down Commercial Street, the red light district of sin, with
the scarlet women lurking in the dark doorways, luring men, and sometimes boys,
to destruction. How vile and dissipated and unkempt and brazen and forsaken they
looked, these denizens of the vile segregated street, these poor stricken outcasts in
human form, whom Satan had lured down the crimson trail to their undoing.

“In every large city you will find these protected Dens of Vice and degrada-
tion, these slimy cribs and hangouts of Satan’s creatures,” said my father. “Keep
clean, my boys, stay away from temptation, never cross company with harlots and
pimps. Always keep the lure of vice at arm’s length. Temptations will surely come
to you, but be strong and always say NO”. These lessons made an indelible impres-
sion upon my life, and without any attitude of boasting, I say to my own children
and to my grandchildren, I HAVE KEPT MORALLY AND SEXUALLY CLEAN. I AM
NOT ASHAMED OF ANY DEED OF MINE. I have weaknesses and faults, it is true,
but I have never been guilty of the vile sin forbidden by God when he gave Moses the
tables of stone and wrote thereon, with his own finger, the Seventh Commandment.

I was not a ladies man, or a girls boy, but I had my romances just the same. I
used to hitch up my driving horse to my new buggy, long before the advent of the gas
wagon, and go for an evening drive with a fine sweet girl, whom I imagined every
other fellow admired and envied me of my good fortune. No thought ever entered
my mind, on those happy occasions, to steal her virtue or defile her purity. I knew it
was my responsibility to defend and uphold her unspoiled chastity against all men,
myself included.

I know of nothing sweeter or nobler than a beautiful, pure girl who has come
up to womanhood unspoiled and unsoiled, ready to meet her mate, who is also clean
and manly and unsmirched. How noble is such a young man. Together they enter
life’s battle unhandicapped, and they, together, will solve life’s problems and suc-
cessfully do life’s work, and they will win, and nothing can defeat them.

How well I remember one night, in the chilly fall, after the wheat was cut and
threshed and the sugar beets were harvested, the night of the Harvest Ball. Off I
trudged through the fields, a mile and a half to get my girl. I was all decked out with
a new suit and new patent leather shoes, and all that goes with them, in the way of a
red tie and silk handkerchief and gaudy tie pin, and my breath strong with sen-sen.

–29–
 It was a dark night and little cloudy and misty, and so it was that I ran into a
deep quagmire of black, slimy, thin mud, about the consistency of cream, clear up
to my shoulders, new togs and all. I floundered out as best I could and washed the
oozy mud away and scraped the clinging mire from my shoes. I must have been a
sight, but undaunted still, I completed the journey and confronted my girl on the
front doorstep. How she laughed and screamed with mirth. I could not see the joke
as I had not yet been near a mirror, but when I did get a good look, I joined her in the
mirth of her whole family, and then after a little cleaning off we went, happy as ever
to the dance, where I am sure I was a sorry spectacle and cut but little ice with any-
one else but my loyal consort.

When I was half past twenty-one I asked her father for his daughter, his only
housekeeper, as he was a widower; quite a request for one asking, and I remember
how the little girl urged me along as I doubtfully hesitated to face the issue. Her
father impressed me with her great worth and his supreme sacrifice in parting with
his jewel, and ended with his blessing, as fathers are wont to do. I know because I
have done the same many times, and I know too that my father-in-law to be must
have felt a lump in his throat and brushed away a stray tear after I had departed
from the interview.

When the happy day arrived, we left the dear old home, with my mother
standing tearfully at the front gate, and boarded the train for the city by the Salty
Lake once more, to be tied up for life, not only for life, but for all time and eternity,
like other boys and girls, who are worthy of the boon, and who have grown to ma-
turity in Mormon homes, under the watchful eyes of fathers and mothers, who are
themselves Latter Day Saints.

I had taught school for a year before I married, and had purchased the old
frame school house in College Ward, and with my own hands had remade it into a
home. I placed new doors and windows and partitions and walls in the old building,
and even hung the wall paper myself, and pulled down and chopped up eighty large
shade trees, leaving only enough for a home instead of for a school lot, and we had a
pile of good stove wood as high as the house, and a new family orchard and garden,
all the work of my own hands. O how proud I was of the little home, so comfortable
and homey, and so neat and warm and inviting inside after my wife had arranged
the furniture we had purchased and hung the scrim curtains she made, and the
family pictures along the walls, including enlargements of my father and mother
and myself and of my wife’s father so as not to show partiality. It was a HOME more
than a house and orchard and garden; there was love there, and mutual respect and
loyalty.

How proudly I used to drive my new buggy along the highway with my young
wife, all spruced up, at my side. Such days are happy days, their supreme joys are,
however, fleeting, and they come not again. Have you ever come home, night af-
ter night, from teaching school, to be met at the door by a smiling young wife who
kissed away the worries and annoyances of the day, and made a Paradise for you,
and caused the world to smile again and beckon you on to new days of conquest.

–30–
 Then there came a little rascal, who looked like me, and answered to my
name; such a little fellow, but he seemed to add something to the home love, which
we thought before was complete. How I watched, in breathless fear and hope, on that
night of pain and waiting, until it dragged into two days of uncertainty. Would the
littler lad never arrive, and the patient sufferings of his mother never cease? At last
it was over, and I held the little squalling red specimen of humanity in my arms. I
was a father, need I say the proudest father in the world. How I planned and prayed
and worked for this mite of a boy. He was to grow up clean and manly and splendid,
unmarked by sin and unspoiled by flattery and deceit. He surely would be a paragon
among men. I would train him myself, and always live a life that he could follow. I
wanted him to be like me and to add honor to my good name after I myself should go
on ahead. I hoped I should be proud in my old age, when men should say, “He is the
son of Charles W. Dunn”.

Then they came, one by one, boys and girls that looked like their father and
mother, all of the ten with the mark and brand of their father, with two webbed toes,
and each time a grandchild comes in these days, when I seem to be growing old, I
look for the same mark of identification, and find, without exception, that the little
squallers have webbed toes transmitted to them by my sons and daughters. They
have the Dunn mark. I sincerely trust that they will all reverence the Dunn name
and add luster and fame to an already honored reputation.

Ten boys and girls, ranging in age now from thirty-six to fourteen. The baby
is taller than her mother and in high school, but babies still cry and laugh and stomp
around in our home because the grandchildren like to come to see Grandpa and
Grandma, and the little chips seem just like our own, and there is the added advan-
tage of seeing them go back to their own homes and leave us in quiet peace as we
begin the descent down life’s hill, and it seems now that peace and quiet and reflec-
tion are to be desired almost more than any other boon. It seems so good to sit in my
big chair at home, in peace and repose, while the world outside raves and fights and
snarls, as the second world war decimates the earth, and with all is commotion, and
deceit and selfishness and bloodshed and tyranny and destruction.

No one but fathers and mothers know the yearning of a mother’s heart, as she
sits by the bedside of her sick child, with the father hovering near, watching breath-
lessly for a sign of improvement in the baby. No one but a Latter Day Saint father
and mother know the exultant joy that surges through parent’s soul when the little
sufferer comes back to health and life under the administration of the father, who
holds the Priesthood, or of the neighboring elders who are called in to minister in
the extremity.

And so life goes on, and the little boys and girls go out onto the world to school,
their first real venture, from the sheltering arms of their parents and the protection
of the home. Now they meet other boys and girls and new teachers, and are subject-
ed to new and different influences, some good and wholesome, and some not so good.
New and different environment is shaping their lives and carving their destiny.

–31–
 And then they come to the days of youth, and new sensations and urges
and temptations and allurements confront them, urging them to leave the
straight and narrow way, and to walk in the by-paths and the detours of life, and
happy is the boy and girl who has been fortified and taught by wise parents, and
prepared in a measure to meet and cope with the powers of evil, and turn from
evil and vile companions and pernicious debasing books to find noble friends and
to good, elevating soul-stimulating literature and amusements.

How little the growing boy and girl appreciate or realize the night of
watchful worry, and the sleepless hours through which tired parents pass, in
fear lest their sons and daughters consort with low companions and that they
may perchance be weaklings in the hour of temptation. But in such hours they
must trust to God, and to the manhood and womanhood of their children, and
must hope that the teachings and good example of doting fathers and mothers,
and a conscience, awakened under the guidance of fine teachers, will stand the
test, and that the son and daughter will come through undefiled and sweet and
clean and strong.

And then the time comes when the children answer the call of life, and
one by one they depart from the old homestead, and go their several roads, and
father’s and mother’s hearts go with them, happy and joyous if the boys and girls
can stand alone and walk unafraid along life’s highway.

When the children have all departed, the old home seems almost forsaken,
and again the father and mother sit alone, except for memories and their hopes
for a glorious future, and so they sit in the quiet evenings, so very quiet now, and
recount the events of life and the joys and sorrows and disappointments they
have met along the way. It is a sweet, sad time, this sunset, after the storms and
tempests and sunshine of life’s morning, and noon, and midday.

–32–
 MY FAMILY ... 1943..

My wife, Lula M. Schenk Dunn, was born at Providence, Cache County, Utah,
on November 25th, 1886, the daughter of John Schenk and Elizabeth Ashbaker,
both of whom emigrated to the United States and to Cache Valley from Canton Bern,
Switzerland in the eighteen-seventies. Their ancestors had lived in the same old
homestead in the landof clear water and rugged mountains for more than eight hun-
dred years. My life’s companion was small in stature but big of heart and wise in
judgment, and has been an ideal mother to her ten children, four boys and six girls,
and a devoted helpmeet to me.

Charles Oscar is our eldest son, now thirty-six years of age, married to a
splendid young lady, Gretta Haslam, and they have two boys and two girls, LaRae,
Barbara, Charles Richard and George Ronald, who all like to eat turkey and squash
pie with Grandpa and Grandma every Thanksgiving.

Meryl is thirty-four, her husband Robert E. Jones, a keen young lawyer in the
F.B.I. service of his country. They have two beautiful little girls, Pauline and Jerri-
lyn, who dance and shout when Grandpa comes to visit them unexpectedly in their
far off home in Las Vegas, Nevada.

John Eldon, thirty-two, married Edith Green, a good team-mate, and little
Cheryl, red-headed and demonstrative, is their little girl. Eldon also is in the F.B.I.

Next comes Lula Martha, twenty-nine, and her husband, Ezra Carr, a good
missionary, of sturdy Danish stock, and their baby, Kathie, who can sing and act
with the best of them. They live in Salt Lake City, where Ezra is employed.

Vera, twenty-seven, is home with us, with her little girl, Karen, while Rex Tol-
man, her husband, does his bit in the Navy, as an Ensign, to help keep the world safe
for a republican form of government.

Edith, twenty-five, is in the government service, trying to lay up a little nest

egg for a home when her splendid missionary husband comes back from the war. He
is in the thick of things up at the front in Italy.

Conway Welch Dunn, twenty-three, is just finishing a splendid mission in the

Eastern States. He hopes that he will be given about a week after he gets home to
visit his parents before shouldering his gun, likewise to keep the world safe for de-
cent people to live in.

Irving Schenk Dunn, twenty, is finishing his training in the Flying Service of
his country, as an expert Meteorologist. All of his school work has been outstand-
ing.

Mariam, eighteen, and Helen fifteen, are in high school, big girls now taller
than their mother.

–33–
 One-half of the crew have finished fine missions for the Church. All of the
ten are splendid loyal industrious citizens and true Latter Day Saints, and the
best and most devoted children in the world, if I do say so, as I shouldn’t. my
heart is filled with pride for their goodness and achievements and as I grow old,
my anticipations and ambitions and hopes are for, and with them, my children.

MY FRIENDS …

How fortunate is the man who is blessed through life with true, loyal
friends. I have an abundance. Playmates and pals galore in my childhood and
youth, and most of them have been clean, manly fellows and an inspiration to me
through life.

I have seven splendid brothers, Yankee republicans, and believe it or not,

Latter Day Saints as well – Levi, just a year and a half my senior; Oscar, residing
at Salt Lake City; John William, a postal clerk of Logan, Utah; Simeon Adams, a
high school teacher; Samuel Atwood, a farmer; Lester W., a salesman; and Leslie
Smith, a trucker.

My three kind sisters, like their mothers, are Eliza Jane Israelsen, and
Harriet Letitia Allen, of Hyrum, Utah, and Eva Snow, the wife of the Bishop of
Nibley.

My true and best friends are the teachers I have annoyed, and the Bish-
ops and church leaders I have somewhat disappointed, and the teammates with
whom I have worked. They are the men and women who have charity for my
weaknesses, and sympathy for my shortcomings and helpful understanding of
my mistakes, the men and the women who still tolerate me in spite of my blun-
ders and who are made happy when I achieve some little success, and with whom
I hope to spend Eternity. My friends are legion, but I shall not name them here
for fear of unintentionally leaving some off the list. They have my eternal grati-
tude and my everlasting friendship.

FRIENDSHIP

Friendship is golden, but it has its cheap counterparts of brass

and tinsel and alloy. There is the assumed, business getting friend,
with artificial smile and affected good will. He cares not a fig wheth-
er you succeed or fail or whether you live or die. He bids only for
your lucre.
Then there is the fair weather friend, who almost seems genu-
ine so long as prosperity smiles and you come through liberally for

–34–
 him, but who fades away and shrivels up and shrinks from you with
the first frosts of adversity, and leaves you stranded and alone in the
winter of defeat.
Who has not known the political friend, who flatters your
vanity and tickles your bump of conceit, who kisses your baby, and
dislocates your elbow with gusto before election and then passes you
up like the leprosy after the votes are counted.
Then there is the milk and water friend, who lacks the indi-
vidual strength and emotional power to inspire true friendship. He
is often cold and indifferent, sometimes gushing. But his friendship
will not withstand the test of time, and he is soon forgotten.
There is the pretended friend, who is in fact your greatest en-
emy. He would lure you into dangerous by-paths, out of the straight
and narrow road, and down the crimson highway of destruction.
There are the Quislings and Iscariots, who, masked in friend-
ship’s smile, would stick the traitor’s dagger into your back.
But, thank God for the true, loyal, genuine, friends, enduring
like blue steel; who make life worth the living. They never fail you
and they never desert. They stand by you, and with you, through
thick and thin, and in sunshine and shadow. To them you turn
instinctively in deep sorrow and in ecstatic joy. Their spirits are
congenial, and the harmony of their souls rings true. They give
real consolation and sustaining comfort in your hour of bereave-
ment. They share and glory in your success and your triumphs, and
in your trouble they carry your cross, and at life’s crossroads they
guide you into sure, safe paths. They are pearls of great price.
Such a friend is generally your mother, and is often your fa-
ther, your wife, or husband, your child, or your sister or brother, or
it may be just your friend. It does not matter. You are blessed and
your life is rich if you have such a friend to walk by your side up
life’s steep highway.
C. W. Dunn

It will be noted that I have rather pronounced political convictions,

and perhaps a little intolerance for political codes counter to my
own, but I respect, and would ever defend the right of every sincere
man and woman to his own brand of politics, however mistaken I
might judge him to be, and I count many people who cannot brook
my brand of politics, among my truest and best friends.

–35–
 SERVICE..

Bread cast upon the waters will return after many days, and the service of men
and women in this great Church of ours, service in God’s Eternal Plan of Salvation,
blesses the life of the servant, even more, perhaps than the lives of others, for whom
the service is given. Thus it has been with me and mine. It has been my happy oppor-
tunity to labor in many capacities and offices, more I am sure to my own blessing and
advancement than to the benefit of others.

As a little lad I was called, first as Secretary of the Deacons Quorum when I was
eight years old, then I was counsellor and finally president, and in each of the Aaronic
Priesthood Quorums I served in like capacities, as well as secretary and teacher and
then superintendent of the Religion Class, then as secretary and assistant superinten-
dent of the Sunday School andlike offices in the Ward Mutual. I have been president
of M.I.A. organizations in two wards and superintendent of two ward Sabbath schools,
and have served as a ward teacher for twenty years. Then, as mentioned before, I was
called to the office of Bishop, where I served for a short time before coming to Logan.
In later years I have been Stake Superintendent of the M.I. A. and a Stake High Coun-
selor for ten years. Then there came a call to serve as second counselor in the Stake
Presidency of Logan Stake, following which I was first counselor in the same Presiden-
cy, and finally I was set apart to be Stake President in which office I am still serving.

And so it has been my privilege to gain experience in many offices in this won-
derful church. I have tried to do my best, in humility and sincerity, because I love
the Lord and His children, and His Divine plan of life, and I hope to be engaged in His
service both here and hereafter, forever. All this service has brought unbounded joy
to my soul, for service to one’s fellows brings life’s greatest happiness.

It has been my privilege to send three daughters and two sons upon missions for
the church. My son Eldon labored in the German mission for three and a half years,
and my daughters Meryl, Vera and Edith have all served in the Eastern States mis-
sion, each following in the same districts, and laboring among the same peoples, as
her sister who preceeded her, and they have all labored well and faithfully, and my son
Conway is now in the same mission, which has brought joy to my heart and a lifelong
blessing to each of them.

For many years I labored as an Abstractor of titles, this while preparing for the
Bar, and since I have prepared more than six thousand abstracts of title, and have ex-
amined and rendered opinions upon many times that number. For more than 28 years
I have been associated with the Utah Mortgage Loan Corporation in the mortgage loan
business, my work being principally with real estate titles and as their attorney.

My vocations have been, first farmer and student, then school teacher, then
clerk of court and probation officer, then in real estate, and abstractor of titles, and
finally the law, my practice being extensive in northern Utah and southern Idaho, and
my experience being varied, covering all branches of the law.

–36–
 In the year 1931 I was admitted as an Attorney and Counsellor in the Su-
preme Court of the United States, the experience before that august body being
unique and long to be remembered

Our five oldest children have married, and gone away to make homes of
their own, and to live their own lives, but still they are our children, and we
have the same interest in them and the same anxiety for their welfare as before.
They will always be our own, here and hereafter, and their eternal welfare will
be our glory and our hope.

THE POWER OF FAITH AND PRAYER

The ancient gifts and blessings of former dispensations live again, and op-
erate in the lives of the Lord’s people in this great Last Dispensation. The prayer
and administration of the priesthood, in behalf of the sick and afflicted, whose
hearts are filled with faith, still calls down the Divine boon of healing.

One summer evening twelve years ago, my son Conway, a lad of eleven
years, and his siter Edith, two years older, were run over by an automobile,
driven by a drunken sot, on the streets of Logan, Utah. The girl was terribly
bruised and battered, but it was the little boy who suffered the gravest injuries,
injuries which appeared to be mortal. His little body, entwined with his bicycle,
was rolled over and over under the wheels of the great car and was left mashed
and mangled and broken. His shoulder and his arm were battered and his chest
was crushed. The broken bones crunched together when the Doctor pressed
his hands over the heart and lungs. Blood oozed from his mouth and nose, and
gurgled and rattled when he drew his labored breath, and his face was discol-
ored. He was too mangled and broken to be X-rayed that night, and the attend-
ing physicians held no hope for his recovery.

I held his white hand, and he whispered brokenly, “Papa, administer to

me”. I was assisted by President Joseph Quinney Jr., who seemed to have the gift
of healing to a marked degree. Immediately the flow of bloods stopped and his
breathing became easy and regular, and he fell asleep. All night long I strove
and pleaded with the Lord for his life and his restoration to health. Anxiously
we watched the next morning as he was carefully examined under the X-ray,
and our hearts beat with unspeakable joy and thanksgiving when we heard
the verdict from the astonished doctors. All the broken bones, and the crushed
splinters in his caved in chest, had all come together in the night, every bone to
its place, and already they were all knitting together naturally without even set-
ting, and his terrible bruises and hurts, and his mangled body were healed, and
he came home well and strong and with a great testimony in his young heart of
the goodness and power of God, the Great Healer and the all-wise Physician.

–37–
 In after years, in College, he played football and starred in basketball for
his “M” Men’s team, and ran on the track team in inter-college meets. He is now,
in September of 1945, finishing a mission for the Church in the Eastern States.
His healing was a miracle, striking and wonderful like the miraculous healings
recounted in the New Testament.

oooo

One night there came to our Stake President’s meeting in the Logan Stake
House, Elder ElRay Robinson, a member of the High Council. He was completely
discouraged and in deep despair. Just under his eye was a malignant cancer
eating away in its deadly course, and Brother Robinson had given up after seek-
ing advice and help from the best medical clinics and specialists in the country.
Their verdict was that he had only a few months to live and they could do noth-
ing to help him. Bowed down with the weight of his affliction he asked for a bless-
ing.

We all knelt in earnest prayer and then came the sacred ordinance of
administration. He was instantly healed and the cancer broke out no more. He
is well and whole today and that was more than ten years ago. He praises his
Heavenly Father continuously for this special manifestation.

oooo

I shall never forget a little lad by the name of Gerry who was stricken with
a sever case of sleeping sickness about nine years ago. He had been totally un-
conscious for a number of days. Responding to the request of his mother I took
President A. E. Anderson with me to the hospital to perform the sacred ordi-
nance of administration, in the hope that the little chap might be healed and
given back to his sorrowing parents. The physician in charge of the case had
given up all hope and the father and mother were distracted with grief.

Immediately upon taking our hands from his head he opened his eyes and
spoke to us, and that same day he was taken to his home in Smithfield well and
thankful. He is now in the armed forces of his country.

oooo

One cold, bleak night in midwinter I was called by President Anderson to

his home to administer to his son LeRoy, who was greviously stricken with pneu-
monia. I found him gasping for breath, his face discolored, andit appeared that
he was fast passing from life. He was in great agony.

We besought our Heavenly Father humbly and pleadingly for the boy’s life.
We exercised all the faith we could muster in his behalf, and in the authority of
the Priesthood we blessed him. He was relaxed at once and slept, and finally
completely recovered. He later served in the High Council of the Logan Stake.

–38–
 I shall never forget one of my very early experiences in answering the call
of the sick and afflicted in behalf of a baby boy, a few moths old. It was on a very
cold, inclement winter day, and there was much pneumonia in our neighborhood.
I had but recently been called to be the Bishop of the little ward where I lived,
and I was very humble, for I was only twenty-seven years of age.

I found the babe in his mother’s arms, his face black, almost dead from the
ravages of the dread disease. I anointed and blessed him and the change was
instant. He became easy and relaxed and was restored to health. Today he is a
physical specimen of good health, a strong man in his thirties.

These are but a few of many striking experiences which I have witnessed.
The answer and blessings came, not because of my goodness or my power, but
through the mercy and power of the Lord, in recognition of his Priesthood. He
made good His promise and the signs followed those that believed.

But the sick are not always healed. There are cases in my memory where
we exercised all the faith we could muster, and prayed with humility, and plead-
ed with fervor for the lives of our friends and loved ones, and even so to the Lord
took them Home. At such times we had the confirmed assurance that such were
called to another mission, where their services were in urgent demand, and that
they were appointed unto death. It was the will of the merciful and wise Master,
and we were reconciled.

There is great power and efficacy in humble, earnest prayer and the Lord
hears and answers his children with blessings upon their heads, if it be for their
good and in accordance with His Divine Providence.

“Call in the Elders of the Church and anoint the sick with oil and bless
them, and if they are not appointed unto death they shall recover, and the prayer
of the faith shall heal the sick.” This is the scriptural promise and it is verily ful-
filled upon the Lord’s believing children.

Pray not as the Hypocrite, to be seen and heard of men, but go into thy
closet and kneel down in humility and talk to the Lord from a broken heart and a
contrite spirit, and seek what you need and deeply desire. The Master will hear
you, as a kind and understanding father, and will come to your aid.

Happy is the man who knows where he is going and the road he must
travel to get there.

–39–
 THE MYSTERIES OF ETERNITY ….

The mysteries of life, the whence and whither of Eternity,

Are like the unknown depths of Nature’s gorge,
The deep, unfathomed canyon of the Grand;
Where men approach the dizzy edge and stand transfixed
In wonder and amazement and in fear.
Some overcome with deep emotion shout or sing,
And some are volable and glibly tell
Of nature’s hidden secrets deride and scoff,
In contemplation of the Infinite;
Still others silent stand and gaze in awe.
Attempting not to fathom the sheer deeps,
Or to explore the devious, winding paths
That lead far down the dread declivity.
But happy is the man, who when he comes,
Perforce unto the trembling, awesome brink,
Seeks out a chartered pilot who will guide
The pilgrims faltering steps adown the path,
Past rock and cleft and crag and precipice,
And over river and across the gulf
Unto the farther shore, and up and on,
Into the painted desert of the dawn.

C. W. Dunn, March 1- 1932.

REMINISCENCES OF A SLOW RACE FOR CONGRESS.

Only twice in my life has the political bee buzzed in my ears so persistently and
loudly as to drown my better judgment and distort my sense of the eternal fitness of
things, and overturn my normal balance and proportion to such an extent that I have
offered myself as a victim for the good of the party.

In the year 1912, when the Republicans had been winning so long and consis-
tently that a nomination to office on that popular ticket was tantamount to election, I
submitted to the urgent demands and pleadings of MY MANY FRIENDS, and became a
sacrifice in the Wilson landslide. You see I had never kept anybody out of war, but af-
ter the clouds of the political fight had cleared, I, then and there, highly resolved never
again to enter the arena of politics, and for twenty-four long years I stuck by my good
resolutions.

But in the good year of 1936, after four long years of something like a pain in
the neck, my friends again cried out for a Champion of the people, and in response I
came out of obscurity and took up the battle ax against greed, oppression and incom-
petence.

–40–
 How I ever got the nomination for Congress at the crowded arena of the State
Convention, I have never been able to fathom, unless it was because of a dearth of suit-
able material, or perhaps a universal undercurrent that a Republican stood about the
same chance in the election as the proverbial snowball in hell. Perhaps I owe my nomi-
nation to the very clever speech and a statewide pull of the man who placed my name
in nomination. He began by extolling the pure white snows that top the rugged peaks
surrounding the peaceful, verdant valley of Cache, He warbled in flowing accents of
the clear gurgling mountain streams running down into the productive GRANERY OF
UTAH and painted glowing word pictures of the renowned Colleges and Educational
Institutions, the model farms and modern homes and the cud-chewing herds of white
and black Holsteins and the cream giving Jerseys of our superb valley. Then he waxed
eloquent over the proverbial heroism of our early day Pioneers, the unrivaled beauty of
our women, and the chivalry and brawn of our men, without ever mentioning me at all,
and it was just as well, because it would have been just too bad to spoil and mar such
brilliant landscape sunsets by interjecting anything so mediocre and commonplace.

Yes, I think it was the oratory that turned the trick, and almost before I real-
ized what had happened they were all calling me Congressman, until I really imagined
myself already back in Washington engaging my apartments at the Shoreham Hotel.
There is no question, I was sure Congressman for one day.

In the campaign that followed, I steered rather clear of my own Cache Valley, be-
cause a Prophet is never without honor save in his own country, and I thought it better
political strategy to sneak up on my neighbors and bag their votes without making too
much stir.

I delivered my maiden political speech in Ogden, when of course, I should have

begun away out in the sticks, where the natives could be pacified with mediocre fare
without saladsor desserts. The effort seemed to fall flat and the audience agreed to
a man that it was a very tame affair. The hard boiled Republicans complained that I
failed to adequately pan the Administration, and the lukewarm found fault because
I said bad things about the Government, and the few whitewashed new dealers who
had been enticed into the parlor, advocated my confinement in the political stockade
for disloyalty to Jim Farley and Ma Perkins, and so my first speech was somewhat of a
washout.

I next took a spin around the state, starting with astreet meeting away in Vernal
in the Uintah Basin. It was there I met the Republican sound wagon from Chicago all
equipped with megaphones and amplifiers and radio. I stood in the middle of the street
feeling somewhat like the Mormon missionary with no friends or sympathizers, trying
to hold an outdoor meeting in the stronghold of the Gentiles. I proceeded to berate the
rubber stamp congress, and the raw communism of Tugwell and Frankfurter, and the
wastefulness of Hopkins and Wallace, and tried to tickle the folks about our cherished
American Institutions and our proverbial patriotism, and even appealed to them in
ardent words in behalf of the flag of our fathers, but those hardheaded sheep men and
cattle punchers just patted the new deal checks reposing in their well filled pockets and
walked away mumbling something about sticking by Roosevelt.

–41–
 The sum total efforts perhaps resulted in increased votes for my opponent, who had
so recently given them new paved highways and got them a tip top price for the herds of
hogs they had never raised.

Down over the deserts of western Utah we swung, through Eureka and the mining
district, and through the railroad towns of Delta and Milford, stirring them up to remem-
ber Washington and Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, but those stolid miners and union rail-
road men just stood and gazed at me with open mouths, amazed at my audacity and even
questioning the sanity of a man who could criticize a beneficient Administration which
allowed them to sit down on strike and called their hated employers “economic Royalists”.

After delivering myself of what I considered a masterpiece in one of the rallies in an

outlying southern town, an old wheat raiser, who was farming new deal fashion by letting
his acres lie fallow and pulling down good tax dollars for the wheat he never planted, ap-
proached me and asked “Will you standbehind Roosevelt?” Imagine after all my ranting
and oratory, such a question; I told him of course not. He replied, “I was beginning to think
you were a pretty good fellow but if that’s where you stand, I’ll vote to send you to the Na-
tional Museum, but never to the National Congress.”

And so the war went merrily on, every morning on arising I was greeted by the glar-
ing figures of the Tribune poll showing that I was receiving about one vote out of ten, and
thus I was encouraged daily to keep up the good fight. One day we careened, caravan fash-
ion around Cache Valley, meeting the men on their own dunghills and the women in their
pink teas. It was a great day, Ray Dillman, whom we all called Governor, me the Congress-
man, the District Judge and about ten county candidates, and a fire eater from the National
Committee down east thrown in for good measure. The entire thirteen of us campaigned
the three Party voters who came out in the Millville precinct to our meeting, and I feel
reasonably sure that we converted at least one out of the three, or so the election returns
indicated.

Dillman and I entered a solemn agreement that he would kiss all the girls and the
married women up to a certain age if I would kiss the dirty nosed babies, but luckily I went
through the entire campaign without kissing a single baby, but in the ordeal of handshak-
ing I became a real adept, and even yet I haven’t entirely overcome the habit. I can prove
that the biceps of my right arm is three inches larger than the left. You should have seen
Ray andme and the other ten candidates climbing down into the muddy trench to shake
hands with the W.P.A. men in Nibley precinct. Boy, it was muddy and wet, but we climbed
down like men and made friends with all the new deal crew, only to learn later, that after
we left, every man gave us the horse laugh and then went straightway to the polls and
voted for their jobs. This experience was our nearest approach to mud in all the campaign.

Well, election day finally came round, a wet day in more ways than one. It all hap-
pened before the people came to, and we took it on the chin and lost like men. We were not
even good competition and the fears and apprehensions of Roosevelt and Blood and Mur-
dock proved to be unfounded. You may as well have asked the folks to vote against Santa
Claus two days after Christmas. They swallowed it again, hook, bait, line and sinker and
they still look for King Midas and Aladdin to rub the magic lamp andextract money out of
thin air to fill their stockings.
–42–
 The Tribune called me up about eleven o’clock on Election night, after I had
listened to plenty of election returns, and asked me for an expression of joy. I
told them the best man won and that I bowed meekly and gracefully to the sover-
eign will of the people. In a few days my pulse came down to normal and I began
to again see the morning sunlight and admire the red sunsets and to realize that
it is a pretty good old world after all, anyway it is the best one we have.

I have only seen two real honest to goodness Republicans since election
and they are keeping quiet and off main street, until the feeling dies down. they
caught the one over in Mendon and the sheriff says he has a clue as to the where-
abouts of the two who voted our ticket over in Newton.

I hope I shall live long enough to see the people wipe the mists from their
beclouded eyes, come out of the political trance and plant their misguided feet
again upon the solid earth.

–43–
 TWO WORLD WARS

My generation has had the unusual experience of living through two devastat-
ing and destructive World wars. Teutonic Mittel Europe led by Germany, steeped in the
fallacious doctrine that its sons were a race of Super men, endowed with such superior
powers and wisdom, that they were entitled to subject the world to serfdom, and rule
the races of men as driving slavemasters, embarked upon world conquest resulting in a
haulocaust that engulfed all the nations of the earth, either directly or indirectly.

The earth was decimated and bankrupt, and millions upon millions of the flower
of youth, the world’s young manhood, were slain, while other hundreds of millions were
crippled and left shattered by disease and epidemic which followed in the wake of the
war. The whole earth suffered like a drunken man, and because of the terrific destruc-
tion of life and property there followed twelve years of panic and depression, the like of
which the world had never before seen.

Woodrow Wilson, an apostle of many of the isms and revolutionary doctrines

of decadent Europe, a well-meaning man with a thirst for power, was President of the
United States during this first world war, and immediately upon the signing of the
Armistice he hied away to old Europe to be wined and dined and entertained by the
royal Courts of Kings and Emperors, and to have medals galore pinned to his lapel with
decorations and insignia covering his clothes, while he was Duked and Lorded and
Knighted until his head was almost turned, and he was no match for the victorious old
world powers, who gobbled up the colonies and the spoils of war and sowed the seeds for
the second global war to come.

Following the war, and during the scorching depression, the pernicious doctrines
of Karl Marx and Neitschie spread over Europe and oozed into America, resulting in
Fascism and Communism and Nazism. Ambitious, bloodthirsty dictators embraced the
opportunity to grab the weakened governments with an iron hand, and dismiss their
legislative bodies and terrify the judiciary until the dictators were absolute, Hitler in
Germany, Stalin in Russia and Mussolini in Italy.

The old Superman fallacy was born again in them, and Germany and Italy
ganged together with Japan to conquer the entire world and enslave its people. From
these seats of learning and art and culture sprang crime and cruelty and depravity
such as the world had never before beheld. Japan overran eastern China and adjoin-
ing islands, and finally the East Indies, and for the time being, became master of all the
islands of the Pacific, even bombing Hawaii and threatening the west coast of America,
boasting that they would overrun the United States and all the Americas and dictate
the peace, making all of the peoples servile slaves to their yellow conquerors, in the
halls of the Capitol and the White House at Washington.

Italy conquered Northern Africa and called the Mediterranean the Roman Lake.
Germany under Hitler conquered and burned andpillaged and sacked Hungary, Aus-
tria, Czechoslovakia, Jugo-Slavia, Poland, the Low Countries and Scandanavia, until
Europe was called Hitler’s fort. All of continental Europe was his, and its peoples were
murdered, pillaged and driven and reduced to a pitiful state of slavery and conquered
pionage.
–44–
 Meanwhile there had sprung up to power in America a scion of a family of aris-
tocrats which had emigrated from Holland in the early days of the settlement of New
Amsterdam. They probably transmitted in their blood many of the fallacies of Old
Europe, diametrically counter and opposed to the ideals and standards of American-
ism for which the patriot fathers fought and died, and which they, in blood and tears
and travail had established in the New World. He inherited from his fathers the urge to
rule and dictate, and an ambition for public office. The great depression gave him, and
a group of ambitious revolutionary theorists, by whom he was surrounded, the oppor-
tunity they were looking for, and they were catapulted into authority under fawning
and false promises to cure panic and restore order and prosperity.

Under the encroaching influence of the brain-trusters, who infested the White
House, the Congress was reduced to a pitiful chamber of rubber stamps, initiating little
real legislation of their own, but passing the MUST laws which were handed to them
from White House Alley in resigned abandon. They delegated their powers and re-
sponsibilities to the executive, and blindly did his bidding, afraid, even if they desired,
to speak their mind or to express an opinion. The Judiciary was snubbed and driven
from judicial benches, and became subservient to the will of the Executive. Taxes grew
and grew and the national debt piled up and mounted as the assets and public moneys
were thrown hither and thither to purchase political power and perpetuity in office.

Good, old fashioned honesty and integrity and thrift and industry were discour-
aged, and were supplanted by subsidies and handouts, andpolitical boondoggling, and
all the time Germany and Russia and Italy and Japan were building fleets and armies
and tanks, and planes and making munitions of war, making ready to destroy the
world.

Old England lay asleep just across the Channel, unmindful and unaware of the
gigantic preparations of the Axis to engulf them, conscious only, and caring only for
their perpetual right to rule their subjected colonies upon which the sun never sets.
And here in America the orgy went merrily on. Those charged with our safety and
welfare and protection were either grossly negligent or woefully dumb and ignorant.
Our navy degenerated and our armies loafed, in blissful ignorance of the terrible days
to come.

Then all at once the storm broke with unleashed fury, and we floundered in
dismay and disorder in our lame effort to stem the blast. Came the terrifying defeat of
Pearl Harbor, with the loss of four thousand men and the cream of our navy, and then
panic struck home to the mainland.

But happily the common folks, not the politicians, recovered their poise and went
to work, saving, sacrificing and building and arming. In spite of politics and political
intrigue the plain people builded and replaced the Navy and gathered together a great
army, and the home front hummed with industry and energy and accomplishment, and
now at last we are beginning to stem the Axis tide, and new hope is being born again
into the hearts of men. In spite of incompetence and doles and impractical star hunt-
ing, the Spirit which is America will prevail, and Government of , by and for the people
shall not perish from the earth.

–45–
 And all the conquered countries will look to us for succor, and Old Eng-
land will still fight to the last Frenchman, andthe last New Zealander and the
last Hindoo and the last Canadian and the last American, while we pay her bills
under a gift system, misnamed lend-lease, and send our men by the millions to
guard her shores against invasion, and transport our armies and our fighting
equipment to every corner of the globe to protect and maintain every island and
colony in her world-wide empire. England talks and talks and bull-dozes, but her
tommies do little fighting themselves, they have never changed since they hired
Hessians to fight us in the Revolution, but the Canadians and Australians and
South Africans and the New Zealanders fight on with grim courage and determi-
nation.

But let us not despair, the Wallaces and Perkinses and the Ickeses and the
Harry Hopkins have great plans for us in the new world to come. We must be the
wet nurse for the world, and feed and coddle them, and work for them while they,
in their idleness, prepare for another war. We must hand them the milk and hon-
ey and the luscious fruits of our people, produced in sweat and blood and tears,
instead of telling them to rouse up and awake, in the world freed from dictators
and oppressors, and to work out their own salvation.

Our men have flocked gladly to the colors, andour armed forces now num-
ber in excess of eight million men, and still the draft goes on, gathering in fa-
thers and boys, all to fight the battles of our country, and incidentally Churchill’s
English battles, too.

Hundreds of thousands will spill their life’s blood for Freedom’s sake, and
millions will be shattered and maimed and wrecked and disfigured, but the ter-
rifying Axis menace will at least be conquered, and slaves will be free again, and
America will still be the best land on earth, and Americanism will live on and be
purged of the isms and old world handicaps whichsome would foist upon us.

The news gets brighter as the days go by, and someday there will be great
celebrations and unrestricted rejoicing, and the war will be over, and America
will settle down to quietly weep for its dead, and to re-adjust its billions of dol-
lars, which will be saddled upon the bowed shoulders of our children for genera-
tions to come, until the dictators and power seekers again trample the nations
under their feet and repeat the process.

–46–
 SOME LITTLE JOURNEYS

Somehow, it seems I have inherited from my Pilgrim and Pioneer ances-

tors a wanderlust, an unquenchable thirst to move out to the edge of things, to
begin again, close to the virgin forests, and the unplowed sagelands; to live by
mountain lakes, or on the banks of great rivers, where the air is clean and sweet
and unsmudged by the smoke of cities and factories, and where men and women
and little children are genuine and unspoiled and where neighbors are friendly
and helpful and where one never sees the hypocritical smirk and the business
smile, assumed and affected and insincere.

Just to clear the land of forest trees and sagebrush, and to plow and sow
and reap, to build and plan and create, to dream and make a new home, to drive
blooded horses instead of gas-spitting puddle-jumpers, to milk Jersey cows, to
catch the fighting rainbow of the splashing bass, to bring down a pine-hen or
a prairie chicken on the wing, to stalk and bring home a six pronged buck or a
moose or a bighorn. To all this was a man born, and not to a smoke-filled office,
tied to an irksome desk, or to fight for existence in the business marts, the stocks
and the jail houses of life killing trade.

I have never been able to break loose and leave it all for the things I want-
ed to do, and so I have done next best. I have built new homes and remodeled old
houses. I have planted gardens and lawns and orchards; not a full realization of
my urge to pioneer, but the best I could do, and still live and move and fight in the
cities and marts of men. I have spent many days whipping the trout streams of
our mountains, and hunting grouse and wild chicken upon the sage uplands of
our valleys. It is the sport of kings.

Then, again, I have sallied forth on occasion for brief vacation trips to the
mountains and the parks, and the great out-of-doors, and sometimes to distant
cities and places, noted and famous in our national history; and here I pause to
give brief accounts of some of these excursions which have provided surcease
and variation from the daily grind of monotonous yearly serfdom.

–47–
 TO CALIFORNIA AND ITS TWO WORLD FAIRS – 1916.

I had but recently been admitted to the Bar, and armed with my professional card
and a heart full of justifiable pride, I set out for California for the mammoth World Fairs of
1916. Down to Ogden on the new inter-urban car, over the west hills and along the rugged
Wasatch Range, through the beet fields and peach orchards of Box Elder and Weber Valleys.

The round trip ticket cost $35.00, without berth, and I still had a hundred dollars left
to enjoy and marshal and spend after purchasing my Pullman ticket. It was some thrill to
follow the nigger porter into the swanky Pullman and to be assigned my upper next to the
observation car, with its plush chairs and its books and magazines and fancy appointments,
to eat in the diner for a dollar and to drink in the landscape as it passed; to watch the tide of
humanity flow by and listen to the wise conversation of the Travelled and the Cosmopolitan.

It grew dark just after we had crossed the great tressle, twenty-eight miles long, over
Great Salt Lake, and while we were pulling around the long steep curve past Montello, Ne-
vada, andonto the great American desert. Soon the porter said, “yo burth is ready, Sa”, and
I climbed into my swaying rocking unsteady upper to sleep not a wink. I never can sleep
the first night on the train, but give me the second night. Then I am so tired and weary I
sleeplike a lobster.

I stretched my stiff bones and arose next morning just east of Sparks andReno, the
town where the movie scum get rid of their wives and husbands before eloping with the
next blister or bounder. I remembered that my wife had carefully wrapped some delicious
chicken sandwiches and tucked them away in the far corner of my big grip and I appeased
my appetite at once with the aid of a ten cent bottle of milk.

Up over the Sierras we climbed through the twelve miles of monotonous snowsheds
to the summit, then down, down through countless rock tunnels to Roseville and Sacra-
mento, hot, scorching, humid Sacramento. July 1st, and not a breath of air for a young man
just beginning to get a little fat.

Crossing the Sacramento river to the west of the city, I saw for the first time some-
thing that resembled ships, the river barges andsmall boats that navigate between the
State Capitol and San Francisco. Then out over the hot torrid inland plain, past oaks and
eucalyptas trees and meadows of grazing Guernsey cattle, until we stopped at the Wharf
of Martinez Straits, where the long train was cut up into three sections, run onto a great
Ferry Boat, and towed for a mile and a half to the other shore; then down around the point
of the mountain, bordering the swampy sands, where hundreds of shore diggers ferreted
out snails and oysters and scallops and shrimps.

The cool evening breezes from San Francisco bay were a welcome relief from the
unbearable heat of the island, and we soon arrived at Oakland pier with its noise and bustle
and confusion, with its endless din of shrieking gongs and whistles, and the meaningless
chatter of many languages. Six miles across the bay, threading among countless ships and
boats and foghorns and shrieking sirens. Then the Ferry Building, the threshold of San
Francisco, the most cosmopolitan city in the world with all the noises of the earth min-
gled and mixed together into a babel at once strange and conglomerate; everywhere

–48–
men and women from every nation and every isle in every ocean, Jews and negroes and
men from the Sudan, Japs and Chinese and Hindoos from the Orient, Spanish and In-
dian planters from South America, and greasers from across the Mexican border, Scan-
dinavian and Polish seamen and Russian and Finnish stevedores, flaming gypsies and
denizens from the Barbary Coast, with a few blue bellied Yankees and drawling Dixie
Southerners thrown in for good measure. You can never forget the Ferry Building.

A much traveled friend had scheduled my hotels for the entire trip, the Larne for
San Francisco, the Gates for Los Angeles and the St. James for San Diego. These hotels
were located in the very heart of things, among the places of interest and amusement
for the traveller, and were clean and dependable and within the price range of a young
man of my limited means, and I had it all figured out, just what to do to get the most out
of the cherished hundred dollars.

Porters and hackdrivers and rustlers all fought for my traveling grip and I re-
luctantly surrendered to a rough looking bus driver and took a seat in his car, which I
noted was nearly empty, the reason of which I learned later. Up through bustling Mar-
ket Street, in and out, dodging countless busses and autos and streetcars and walkers,
and finally we arrived at the front door of the Larne Hotel, I recovered my baggage and
paid a dollar and a quarter for the ride, whilethe hotel clerk looked on with amusement.
“What did you pay him for the ride?” he asked, and I answered, “Just one twenty-five
from the Ferry here.” “Well, you are just another traveling sucker, lucky you have been
fleeced the first night in, be careful from here out. There are hundreds of jitney bus-
ses running from the Ferry Building up town, and it only costs a nickel”, and so I had
my eye teeth cut, but I still had my wisdom teeth to bring through. I had a comfortable,
clean, quiet room for a dollar and a half and enjoyed a good night’s rest.

Next morning I was up and out bright and early, to see the great city. I said
bright, which is not quite true; it was so foggy you could cut it with a knife, but the dense-
ness cleared, and the bright San Francisco sun shone through about noon, and one could
see long distances through the clean atmosphere. “Always take the Grey Sight Seeing
Buses if you want to see the big cities in the shortest time”, my friend had advised, and
so I looked up the Grey cars and found a seat near the driver and the squacking mega-
phone announcer, and we started out to see the sights.

It was a typical California summer day, the kind the Chamber of Commerce raves
about, not the kind of dull, rainy weather that almost always happens, the day you get
there. The Bay was blue and unruffled, as we sat in the Grey Bus blocked on the big
ferry. Up through the estuary and into the slip at Oakland Pier we sailed, and enjoyed
every minute. Then around Oakland, and over to Berkeley, and across the campus of
the great University, ending with a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, then back again to
a hot fish dinner in a typical Italian Café.

In the afternoon we set out for the great Golden Gate park, the daddy of all the
parks, with its flowers, green lawns, its countless specimens of trees and shrubs, and
mossy ferns. I lingered long at the Aquarium, one of the world’s best. I sure enjoy look-
ing at the fish and the sea life. It was amusing and intriguing. As we approached the
top of the hill another sight seeing car, the counterpart of our own, rolled past, and the
wisecracking
–49–
Megaphone squawker unburdened himself thusly: “ladies and gentlemen, there goes a
rubberneck wagon, filled with country suckers. This, Ladies and Gentlemen, is a sight
seeing car of traveling tourists.”

At the summit in view of the sea our car was brought to a stop, and standing up,
our braying wiseacre gushed: “Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the Pacific Ocean. It is
the largest ocean we have in California,” and I noted a number of our crew nod know-
ingly to their neighbors, with the remark, “It must be purty big then,” How I loved to sit
and watch the breakers roll in and pound themselves into white foam along the shore,
and the seals and walrus roll and dive on seal rocks. I can always sit and dream by the
ocean. It is the happiest and best place to dream and build air castles.

Of course night is the time to go through Chinatown, and seven-thirty found us

again seated in the grey hack, after regaling on fried chicken and pie, all ready for new
thrills. Chinatown in 1916 was Chinatown, not the tame relic which I saw ten years
later and again twenty years later on subsequent trips. Three burly policemen and
afriendly licensed guide, just a young man with black locks then, which were streaked
when I went with him again in 1926, and white in 1936 when he led us through the
same old paths and alleys ending up with Sing Fat’s big novelty anddepartment store.
On that first night I saw gambling dens and hop joints, with Orientals and some white
men, with black hearts, and people of all kinds and shades, dead to the world under the
deadly influence of opium. I marveled when I saw young soldiers and girls, and hag-
gard women fleeced of all their wages and savings at the racker tables and in the poker
games. It was a tough, dangerous locality, was Chinatown in the old days of 1916.

Just ten years before, the great Earthquake had riddled the buildings and
homes of the great city, andfire had finished what was left. Now there were hundreds
of gaps between the new buildings, filled with broken brick and stone and debris. San
Francisco had crawled out of the wreckage, but had not erased many of the blemishes.
When I came again in 1926, there were only a few vacant places where the old houses
and stores had been shaken and burned. The city had almost recovered, and in 1936
no trace of the earthquake was to be seen, except the arch, “Portals of the Past” in the
Park.

I had planned to take either the Harvard or the Yale to San Pedro and experi-
ence an ocean voyage, but the first night in San Francisco I was informed that the Yale
had been wrecked upon the rocks seventy five miles down the coast, and so I discreetly
decided to take the Lark over the Coastal route, so that I could be near the ocean as
much as possible. You see I was quite infatuated with the “largest ocean in California”.
Part of the way the train threads up, through, and over, steep mountain passes, then
down into the wide valleys, and past hundreds of green dairy meadows filled with
herds of black and white Holsteins and yellow Jerseys and Guernseys. Then close along
the lapping Pacific, so sometimes with the blue breakers dashing right up to the ties,
and then again along the brink of cliffs, upon which the waves pound with an endless
roar. Then over more high mountains, and slowly crawling through the black gaseous
tunnel over a mile long and into the vineyards and orchards of the Great Lost Angeles
valley, and finally Los Angeles just after dark.

–50–
 This time I found a jitney bus, and paid my nickel for a ride to the Gates Hotel on
Figeuora Street, glad to eat a light dinner and climb into bed. By this time my grey suit
was all wrinkled up and I had to lie in bed while the porter scoured a dry cleaning and
press.

Next day I regaled upon ham andeggs, once turned over, and again sought my
old standby, the Greys cab for sightseers. With open mouthed awe I took in the old
town and Chinatown, quite tame after San Francisco, the big hotels, which lads like
me were welcome to look at and admire, but at which we could not stay, Santa Monica
and the ocean, and all there was in those early days of Hollywood and the movies. We
exclaimed as the home of the stars were pointed out, just like they are today, “John
Bunny’s, Mary Pickford’s, Fatty Arbuckle’s and Lue Tellegen’s, the pioneers of the silent
screen, and in the art of marriage and divorce.

It was nip and tuck in those days between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The
bay city claimed the largest population, with four hundred forty thousand, the great
southern Metropolis claimed four hundred sixty-five thousand for greater Los Angeles.

Well, it was now time to take in San Diego and the World’s Fair and I engaged a
pass in a 1912 Oldsmobile for a most interesting ride of one hundred fifty miles. Down
through Orange County with its orange, olive and lemon groves, and then through the
oil fields, with hundreds of derricks and pumps spouting oil, the whole countryside
pungent with the smell of gas and burning oil and smoke. At noon we had covered half
of the journey and ate crabmeat and strawberries at a swell wayside café, with pretty
Mexican girls for waiters. During the ninety minute stop we explored the old Mission
and chapel of San Juan Capistrano, build by the Padres away back in 1767. The swal-
lows and pigeons flew in great flocks among the rafters and the crumbling walls while
the old friar told us hair-raising stories of romance from the days when the seashore
belonged to old Mexico. From Capistrano, it is only a few miles to the sea, then a long
ride along the very edge of California’s largest ocean, and up through the cedar passes
and down into San Diego on the great Bay, where ten warships and countless smaller
craft rode the waves. I was lodged in a room on the eighth story of the St. James hotel,
with a full unobstructed view of the Bay and the ocean, and I spent many hours watch-
ing the ships come in and sail out, and day-dreaming again as I always do when looking
out to sea.

The World’s Fair was in full blast and I sauntered from building to building and
from exhibit to exhibit, and marveled and exclaimed at the wonders, both natural
and man created, then out across the Balboa Bridge and back into town and the mov-
ies. The climate at San Diego is superb, about 70° all the year and generally clear, so
that the Chamber of Commerce boosters do not have to brag so much about it, as in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Of course we went down the Silver Strand, and into Old
Mexico and took in Tia Juana, with its bull fights and its brothels and saloons, quite
novel in those old days, so long before the Jew venders killed prohibition, but of course
I did not even sample the liquor or cross the threshold of the questionable dens, and to
the credit of the gang in our party, be it said that only two men drank the grog of the
greasers.

–51–
 Well, now I had seen it all and was eager to get back home to my wife and
five kids, all waiting anxiously for Dad to get home from his journey with the
presents they knew full well he would have in the big grip. It took twenty-six
hours for the Los Angeles Limited to haul us into Salt Lake, up through Death
Valley, with the temperature at 112, and the sun beating down on the steel non-
air-conditioned cars. A big fat man, almost as fat as I am now, sat across the
aisle from me and groaned like a sick horse all the way from Barstow to Las
Vegas.

The train stopped in Las Vegas, then a little desert town of fifteen hundred,
with a deep well dug in the prairie and a roundhouse and a railroad subdivision,
and asphalt streets, where the hot tar slipped under my feet as I stepped out for a
few minutes to cool off. I had been bragging about Ogden and Salt Lake to a new
found friend who had traveled much, telling him that Salt Lake had skyscrap-
ers like those of Los Angeles, and so when the train stopped at the old frame
Railroad Station, and we walked up South temple past the dilapidated lumber
shacks from the station to First West,, my friend bawled me out good and plenty,
and I was forced to admit that the old buildings looked pretty dumpy an dshabby
alongsi de the skyscrapers of the big Coast cities.

I was glad to again board the new Inter-urban car for good old Cache Val-
ley, up in the cool mountains, where it was quiet enough to sleep where men
are men and women treat them like poodles. My wife and the youngsters were
happy to have me home, and into the satchel we went and fished out the presents,
and then back again to the daily grind, with the vacation over and the next one
twelve months away.

My wife accompanied me back over the same trail in 1926, and in addi-
tion to the things I had seen and knew about, we sailed all afternoon around San
Francisco Bay, threading in and out among the great Fleet of our Country, both
the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets being in the Bay, and spent three hours aboard the
Mississippi, one of the greatest and the Flagship at that time.

Again, after ten years we went down to see the bridges, so great, so stupen-
dous, so magnificent, so unbelievable. The Golden Gate Bridge spans the ocean,
where it meets the Golden Gate, and the Oakland bridge jumps from Goat Island
to the mainland and from the island to Oakland Pier. They are marvels of the
age, a fairy tale in construction and engineering come true.

–52–
 UTAH’S DIXIE AND THE SOUTHERN PARKS

In July, 1927 we fitted up our new Studebaker Sedan and started for the South-
ern Parks, Utah’s Dixie Playgrounds. The car was loaded, what with tents, grub, bed-
ding and endless equipment and my wife and seven children and me, the driver. Com-
ing to the junction of the road just north of Hyrum we read the sign, “All herds going
west, turn here”, and so we turned and took the lower road. Before reaching Wellsville
we had aterrific hot-box in the right hind wheel, and routed a service-man out of bed at
four-thirty in the brisk morning, to make repairs.

It was a refreshing ride through the Canyon and down to Salt Lake City, and on
south through Provo, Springville and Nephi, and west across the valley, past the Se-
vier Resevoir, and over the hills to Fillmore, the first Capital of Utah. In selecting this
city as the Capital, I suppose the central location was considered, and that our leaders
were overawed by the unlimited distances and the mammoth plains that look like the
Mississippi Valley, where the sun goes down to flaming prairie. The road south of Fill-
more leads through low hills, and a number of winding canyons, and along the main
streets of Meadow and Kanosh, and on down to Cove Fort, a typical old, rock enclosed
rectangle, with inside rooms along the walls, and many rifle loopholes for convenience
in picking off attacking Indians. One of the great ton doors still hangs and swings on
its rusty hinges, and the other is reared against the great doorway, its red fastenings
broken and its timbers rotting away. If the lava rock walls could speak they would tell
many tales of heroism and Pioneer hardihood and endurance, and of a number of real
old wild west, Indian battles, with a few scalpings and many flintlocks and spears and
bows and arrows.

Paragonah and Parowan, farther south, hark back to the rough Pioneer days of
seventy years ago, and they are just that much behind the march of streamlined mod-
ernism with characterizes the cities and hamlets of north Utah. The mountains now
begin to take on tints of red and brown and gray, and we know that we are entering
the landof bare painted canyons which border the Southern Utah Wonderland.

Cedar City, nestling in a mountain cove, is quite up to date, with modern homes
and stores and churches, and a real hotel, unique in style and appointments, named El-
Escalante, after the old Spanish Scout and Explorer, upon whose trail the city is locat-
ed. Still motoring south, we traverse the cold, windy, barren plain of Kannara, then
down over the Black Ridge, from the Frigid Zone into the Torrid Dixie of the Saints.
The road turns east at Anderson’s Junction, up through steep canyons and over roll-
ing hills, past Rockville, rightly named; and into the Painted Zion’s Canyon. Zion’s is a
regular National Park, located along the riley, sluggish Rio Virgin River, between tow-
ering, flaming walls, two thousand feet high, reaching into the bluest of blue skies.

We gazed upon the “Three Patriarchs”, our informer announcing, “Ladies and
Gentlemen, to your right you see the Three Hebrew Patriarchs,” and a brassy Jew in
the next car, with a hooked nose and talking hands, exclaimed, “Oi-Hart, Scheffner
and Marx.”

–53–
 We sat behind the spray of the weeping rock, and drank in the color and the
beauty of the Vale of Sinawava, and wandered up the narrowing canyon until we could
touch, with outstretched arms, the rocky walls on both sides of the chasm. We were
feasting upon the natural Wonders of the World. As we checked out at the South Gate
of the Park, the Forest Ranger and Guide advised us to travel down to Hurricane, sixty
miles out of our way, rather than to try to navigate the steep narrow dugroad, up from
the river, and over the mountain into Arizona, at Rockville.

But I had a new Studebaker, which I thought the best car in the country, and my
brother-in-law drove a powerful Dodge, and so we took the risk. We stopped at the foot
of the two mile hill to get our bearings, and to plan the climb. The road is so steep in
places that a car with all brakes tight will slide slowly back in the gravel and usually
two men, with teams, stand by to help the autos up over and to brake the speed in the
descent. This help was not in sight for us. Then began the climb. About a third of the
way up the grade my car was all on fire. Smoke and fire spouted from the wheels and
from the gear, and with difficulty I stopped while my wife and the children poked rocks
under all the wheels to hold us. I discovered that in my excitement and apprehension I
had left the brakes tight and had pulled up the mountain against the brakes, grade and
all. Well, we cooled off, and with my brakes loosed this time, we plowed right up and
over the top. I could have pulled the whole caravan. But our troubles were not over.
One of the cars, a big Cleveland, just couldn’t make the grade, and all hands pushed and
held and blocked, until a cowboy on a big raw-boned roan, hitched on with his long lariet
andpulled the balky car over the top.

Now came the Arizona desert, hot and parched and burning dry, one hundred fif-
teen in the shade, and no shade, one of the worst deserts in America, with mirages and
dust storms and snakes and lizards, and you bet we sighed with relief when the sixty-
five miles of sand and rocks and illusions were left behind, and we camped around the
ice-cold, willow circled Pipe Spring. If there ever was an Oasis in a desert, then Pipe
Springs is an Oasis. We ate our chicken sandwiches and filled up on the ice water for an
hour, and then bumped over some more desert for twenty-five miles to Fredonia, where
the old Pioneers used to find a haven in the days of the Raid, just over the line, out of
Utah andinto wild Arizona.

Then another young desert to the southeast, up to the edge of the Buckskin
Mountain. This mountain is also known as the Kiabab, upon which stands one of the
greatest and finest forests of America. First we passed stunted cedar and scrub brush,
then dwarfed pines and balsam, then the grand old monarchs of the forest, great Gi-
ants, centuries old, three to five feet in diameter and reaching a hundred feet to the
sky; seventy-five miles of these ancient monarchs, clear up to Bright Angel Point on the
north rim of the Grand Canyon.

One of the children wished, as we entered the forest, that we might see a real live
deer. Well, after a while we really did. Then we saw two more, and then herds of five
and ten, and the kids counted the flocks of ten and twenty and fifty and a hundred until
more than a thousand cotton tailed does and fawns and bucks had been passed, and
then the counting stopped. It was too much trouble to make the score.

–54–
 We made our beds that night at V. T. Ranch, eighteen miles from the Canyon, and
upon arising early next morning we chased more than a hundred deer, championed by
many stomping horned bucks, over the meadows covered with frost that looked like
snow, up into the mountain.

At last we stopped our car abruptly, right against the awful brink, and almost
lost our breath. We looked a mile straight down into the gaping earth, and upon ridges
and cliffs of gold, and scarlet and amber and blue and green and yellow, and the Great
River, like a narrow ribbon threading through the flaming canyon at the bottom of the
mammoth pit. Far across, thirteen miles through the misty blue, we could see dimly
the farther rim and El Tover.

Who wrought this magnificent wonder of the World, in what furnace was forged
the brilliant rocks and crumbling crags and silent walls? Who dug the earth’s deep-
est and widest and wildest and grandest gorge? The stillness is almost oppressive,
the changing color is bewildering, the great hole is so stupendous and awful, that one
stands transfixed in wonder and fear and in speechless worship. It is a sight never
to be forgotten; one will always see in vivid, colored memory the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado.

After countless sighs and exclamations of wonder and amazement, we silently

retraced the Forest road, past Jacob’s Well, and down into the valley to Fredonia, then
north over the state boundary, through Kanab, the county seat, andup across the
Mount Carmel desert, dropping down over the narrow winding dugroad into Order-
ville, of historic interest to every Mormon who has heard of the “UNITED ORDER”.

After supper I hunted up the ancient Patriarch of the town, old brother Egan,
who remembered all about the days when the people lived as a great communal family,
eating in a wide central dining hall, and working together in the fields and in the facto-
ries, a self-supporting, sufficient and efficient, colony of pilgrim Saints in the far desert.
“They were good old days”, said Brother Egan, “When all men loved their neighbors
and worked unselfishly to build up the kingdom. Then selfishness and envy wedged in,
and after years of happy social contact and brotherly cooperation, the Grand Plan was
abandoned and we slumped back again into the old rut, with every man for himself,
and the Devil take the hindmost.”

Bright and early next morning we were on our way, up over Hatchtown and
onto the headwaters of the Sevier River, then down along the winding stream, widen-
ing with each new creek that supplemented its width and volume to Panguitch, named
after the Old Ute Chieftain. We climbed up through the red Canyon, twenty-five miles
to another of nature’s wonders. Bryce Canyon is a great, deep Amphitheater of Organs,
and Castles and Cathedrals and forts and images, wrought in the flaming furnace of
nature a million years ago, glowing and shimmering in all the glorious colors of the
rainbow. Like the Grand Canyon, it held us speechless and silent and worshipful. Why
try to tell or explain its wonders, or try to inform men how it came to be, and by what
process it was formed. No man, except perhaps verbose Bill, who sees all, knows all
and hears all, would assay to explain its silent mysteries.

–55–
 Upon emerging from the Canyon, we enjoyed a fine dinner and beefsteak
with fried potatoes and apple pie, at Panguitch, and went on our way. Up through
Orton and Circleville, Kingston and Junction and over the ridge into Marysville,
the terminus of the Denver and Rio Grand. Then up the Sevier Canyon, through
Joseph, Elainore, and into Richfield, the metropolis of southern Utah. Here we
slept peacefully, the sleep of near exhaustion, and then drove north, up Sevier
and San Pete Valleys and back to Nephi, the cement town, and back through Pay-
son and Ironton and Provo, past the Point of the Mountain, and back to Salt Lake
City.

Here we pitched our tent in a meadow just south of town, and next morn-
ing took in the great city, Fort Douglas, the State Capitol and Liberty Park, end-
ing with a dip in the brine of Great Salt Lake, and then north in the late after-
noon, and home, tired and happy, like Farmer John home from his journey, with
the dog leaping up with wagging tail to greet his master. Not an accident or a
puncture or a mishap on the entire trip, but next morning when I went into the
garage to drive back to the daily grind, I found the two back tires had blown out
during the night and so torn as to be utterly useless. Well, that was more good
luck than good management.

–56–
 THE LAND OF ROSES AND GIANT CEDARS

My vacation of 1930 was spent in the colorful Northwest, a land of sun-

shine and forests.

I boarded the special Pullman car from Portland at Cache Junction, on a

sunny June afternoon at 3 P.M. and following the advice of my much traveled
friend Herschel Bullen, I handed the Coon porter a dollar so that the tipping
might be settled and over with for the entire trip out, instead of handing out
quarters so often.

The lucky darky seemed dazed by my generosity, and bowed and scraped
profusely as he led me to my lower. In about an hour we pulled up at Pocatello
and were switched on to the Portland Rose, and my smiling porter, with his easy
dollar, picked up his satchel and went off shift and was replaced by a new son of
Ham, who, of course expected, and got his tips at twenty-five cents per fling. It
seems that on every trip I have to cut my eye teeth all over again.

I alwaysenjoy riding the Pullman, where I can sit back with my number
tens on the other seat, and watch the colored landscape rush past and study
people and types.

The Pullman car is perhaps the best place to find intriguing amusement
studying human nature and faces.

Over the great Snake River Valley we sped, most of the time along the
broad and winding river, which named the largest valley of them all next to the
Mississippi.

Over sagebrush plains and lava blackened hills, and roaring down through
black canyons out through the ages by the foaming water, as it rushes down to
the Columbia.

As usual when night came, I dozed a little, androlled about in my berth,

and so I was up with the dawn just as we crossed the state line into Oregon. Here
the railroad leaves the Snake and winds up over many long curves and steep
grades, across the Blue mountains and drops down into frontier Pendleton, the
city which made Rodeo famous as a national sport.

Leaving Pendleton, with its cattle barons and horse wranglers, and its in-
sane asylum, we pass down the narrow wooded Umatilla River valley, emerging
upon a high barren plateau, where we get our first view of the mile wide Colum-
bia, rolling down from the Coastal snow topped mountains to the sea. In the far
distance it looked like a narrow white thread, but as we approach it it widens and
grows until it rivalsthe Mississippi.

–57–
 At the Dalles we transferred to the Union Pacific bus for the breathtaking ride
down the Canyon. Up and down over hills and mountains, and through valleys, past
Hood river and the Cascades, then up and over rocky mountain peaks to the summit,
always in sight of the great river and white caped Mount Rainier in the far distance.

Portland reposed among wooded hills, on the broad Willamette, atidewater river
which floats the largest ocean liners, in a land of mighty rivers and towering pine cov-
ered mountains, a city noted for its Rose Carnival and prime, fresh cod and halibut.

I was dog tired when we landed in the Rose city and was glad to drop into a beau-
ty-rest bed at a quiet hotel, just my size, and slept like a dog until nine next morning.

Then off to my old standby, the grey bus, upon which I began a long day of sight-
seeing up the river and into the great forests, then down to the river again to go from
mast and rigging down to the farthest black point of the hold of the old battleship Or-
egon, one of the main points of interest for the tourist. The old Battleship which sailed
around the Horn to pummel the Spaniards for sinking the Maine in the Spanish-Ameri-
can war.

In my little home town the Chamber of Commerce has shouted long and hard
that up in Logan Canyon grows an old cedar six thousand, three hundred thirty-four
years, eleven months, two weeks, three days, six hours and eight minutes old, the age
being precisely fixed by these long haired wise acres from the College on the Hill. They
advertise to the world that it is the oldest tree in existence, and the biggest juniper the
earth has ever produced since the beginning of time. They have been very positive and
precise about this.

Well, I saw up in the Northwest, just out of Portland, cedar trees twenty times
as big as our old gnarled juniper. But let the chamber still think what they please, and
still make their extravagant claims for old Juniper Jardine, (I think that is what they
named it the last time), because we are rather short for famous things to talk about.

Next day we crossed the great Columbia, at Vancouver, over into Washing-
ton, and after four hours through pine hills and wooded slopes, we saw the south tip
of Puget Sound, one of the most beautiful tide-water lakes in the world. On we rolled
through the lumber marts of Tacoma, whose Boosters Club long ago adopted the slogan,
“Watch Tacoma Grow.”

As we rolled on up the Sound, we traversed beautiful orchards and vineyards,

small fruit farms, with pines and vines and roses growing around cottage doors right
down to the blue waters edge.

I was especially interested in a small row-boat stationed out in the Sound about
a hundred yards from Shore, with a happy fisherman sitting in the bow pulling out
big speckled lake trout, while his yellow Guernsey cows browsed in the green meadow
bordered by raspberries and strawberries. I resolved to come back in my old age, and
buy this place and spend my declining years in Paradise, and I don’t mean the burg just
south of Hyrum.
–58–
 Three P.M., and beautiful Seattle, overlooking the blue Sound, built like old
Rome, on seven hills, but without the background of Katos, Ceasers, Neros and
the dole taking rabble. My big hotel covers a whole block, and is the last word in
hostleries even for Western America.

Again the grey cars toted me to all the points which the roving rubberneck
wants to see, up over the campus of one of Americas largest and finest Universi-
ties, over the green, pine covered hills, past skyscrapers and down the slips at
the wharf.

Early one morning our trip took us east of the city to the shore of spar-
kling Lake Washington, which looks like Bear Lake and the Yellowstone, and
here we boarded a small ship of about two hundred capacity, for a five hour sail.
Up through the clear, green lake, abounding with trout, we threaded in and out
among wooded islands, past mammoth lumber camps and sawmills, then back
into Union lake in the center of things, where the great steamers load the lumber
and mill materials from the worlds greatest timber country for the ports of all
the world, then down through the locks, some of the earths largest, andyou don’t
have to take the word of the Chamber of Commerce for that, and into the Sound,
and then a delightful ride over to Bremmerton and back again to the docks and
the hotel for a chicken dinner that I can still taste, for boy, I was good and hun-
gry.

If you ever travel in the Northwest don’t forget to order fish. You never
see such salmon, cod and halibut and trout in the haunts of the landlubber. Well
I had now seen about the whole show, and was ready to retrace my steps back
to Portland, down the Columbia Highway, over the mountains, into sagebrush
Idaho, and on down into beautiful Cache Valley, still the most beautiful and desir-
able place in the world, despite the crowing of the Chamber of Commerce.

–59–
 YELLOWSTONE, GREATEST OF THE PARKS

I have always enjoyed the company and comradship of my children when travel-
ling, or away from home, and on many occasions I have taken one of my little boys to Salt
Lake City, or on camping trips, or to other places for two or three days at a time.

The summer my eldest son Charles was twelve and my son Eldon was eight we
took our first vacation in the Yellowstone. Mayor Lundstrom toted us to Cache Junction
to catch the 9 P.M. Yellowstone Flyer upon which I had secured reservations by phone.
The boys rocked and swayed in the upper and I lay all night in the lower tolling off the
towns through which we passed up through the Snake River valley and across Island
Park, the country of pine forests and swift rivers.

We rolled into West Yellowstone at 7 A.M. and at once fell to devouring thesplendid
breakfast which the trip provided, then into the front seat of the first yellow car, at the
drivers side, and we were off along the Park Highway into the pungent balsam forest,
along the banks of the Madison.

Splashing rainbow trout could be seen at every bend of the river, and an occasion-
al black or brown bear provided a chill and a thrill, while we exclaimed at sight of slen-
der deer and horned elk browsing along the green banks.

We passed Madison Junction, where the Gibbon and Firehole rivers converge to
make the Madison, and at once our car plunged into the steep and rugged Firehole Can-
yon, with its towering black, lava cliffs and foaming cascades. Soon we could see count-
less columns of blue smoke and white steam, like a thousand chimneys belching forth as
we rode into the Firehold Basin, the first approach to the Wonderland. Here everybody
left the bus to marvel at the spouting geysers and the colored pools and the pits, and the
bubbling white and yellow and red and green creams of the paint pots.

When we came back to the yellow bus to again occupy the coveted front seat, we
were just a minute too late, for a brassy Jew and his brazen vixen of a wife, named Ap-
plebaum had beat us to it, and we were obliged to take a rear seat, and forever after, on
the entire trip we were compelled to listen to the braying of these crude, uncouth, hand-
talking Hebrews, who insisted upon being the bride at every wedding and the corpses at
every funeral, while all the civilized whites looked on in disgust. We had found the flies
in the ointment.

As we rolled up into the Upper Firehole Basin we learned a new song, with which
every tourist of the old days is familiar;

“Keep your eye Gearjammer on the wheel,

Keep your eye Gearjammer on the wheel,
Keep your eye on the wheel, keep your eye on the wheel,
Keep your eye Gearjammer on the wheel.”

The wisecracking driver, through his megaphone, pointed ou the Riverside and
the Giant Geysers and the Morning Glory pool of deep blue, and the enchanted trail
through the Black Sand Basin, over which we hiked next morning.
–60–
 The river banks and the forests spouted flame and smoke, and dozens of little
geysers tried vainly to imitate the Great Spouter, Old Faithful, where the hordes of gap-
ing travelers gather every hour to watch the roaring gusher play its water and steam
and vapor two hundred feet into the sky.

So you will know, or remember, all the gaping suckers who travel in yellow cars
are Dudes, no matter how humble their station, while the drivers, the camp hands and
entertainers, both boys and girls, are known as Savages. It is the duty of the Savages to
keep the suckers entertained and amused and happy.

We were assigned to a large comfortable tenthouse, with fine spring beds and-
plenty of warm blankets for the frosty nights, where a savage boy filled the big water
pitcher and made our fires. We all ate in a stupendous community dining room with
hewn log walls andceiling and a great backlog fire roaring and spitting in the rock-
bound fireplace. The food was always food, oh so good, and we were always ravenous,
what with tramping over the hills and through the dales with their uncounted points of
interest and wonder.

We took a swim in the sulphur smelling pool of geyser water, and sat around an
open air bonfire in the cool evening while the savages sang and danced and performed
as an occasional dude, with plenty of ego, contributed his amateurish mite to the pro-
gramme.

The second station is Lake camp, with its great Yellow hotel, and its comfortable
cabins, all facing the clear, blue Lake of the Yellowstone, which looks like Bear Lake and
Lake Washington. The highway, from Old Faithful to Thumb, where we first strike the
lake, winds over high, wooded mountain passes, twice crossing the Continental Divide,
with one view, far to the south of the sparkling lakes of Jackson National Park. Here
we not only feast upon the sublime scenery, but also upon speckled trout caught in the
river as it leaves the lake and plunges into the canyon.

Everyone fishes, with tackle of every variety, from the crowded Fishing Bridge
andfew there are who are so allurgic to fish that they fail to catch one or two.

Here the bear and the fawn and the woodchuck vie for the notice and attention
of the dudes and to catch the scraps and crumbs from the table. Again we sit upon flat
rocks, around the roaring fire, and listen to the nightly revels of the savages and the
occasional gush of some poor dude in his feeble effort to compete with the professionals.
We see bear, deer, elk, moose and antelope as well as the smaller varmints which hang
around the camps to enjoy the garbage. At the bear dump we sit securely behind the
high wire fence while the brown bear and Grizzly fight and growl over the slops and the
refuse from the kitchen.

Who can describe the Canyon of the Yellowstone, half a mile deep, with its bril-
liant flaming walls and crags, its yellow and carmine and gold, and its foaming and
smoking cataracts bounding over rocky ledges to the swaying mists below. At Artists
point and at Inspiration point one stands transfixed and gazes in speechless wonder,
while he drinks in the beauty and the awful grandeur of Nature unleashed.

–61–
 Leaving the colorful canyon we climb painfully up and over Dunraven
Pass, with towering Mount Washburn on the right, down through long, winding
canyons, andover rolling meadow plains, with fleet antelope darting away in the
distance, on through the petrified forest and finally tired and hungry at Mam-
moth Hot Springs and the Cascades, with herds of buffalo and bubbling, painted
pools and the usual campfire show for the evening, and then to tumble into a
warm bed, where we sleep, oh so comfortable, until morning.

It is the last day out, and we are now on the home stretch. Early in the
morning I met the Park Supervisor who kindly invited me and the boys to ride
with him, in his private car down to West Yellowstone, where we could catch the
noon train for home, and of course we gladly accepted, because the yellow buses
left only on schedule at 2 P.M., and connected with the night Yellowstone Flyer.

But we were doomed to disappointment, for when we rushed up to the big

man’s auto to enjoy a fast ride and save seven hours time, we found Applebaum
and his wife, the obnoxious Jews comfortably seated with our friend, who ex-
cused himself by saying that Mrs. Applebaum was sick and must be given the
preference, and I am sure that every other passenger was sick, whether the gall-
forward Jewess was or not, and we were glad to be well rid of them.

Our afternoon ride down through the Garden of the Gods, past the smok-
ing mountain and the headwaters of the Gibbon river was delightful, bear and
deer and elk and splashing fish to satisfy the fondest hopes, then into the famed
Norris Geyser basin with its countless gushers and pools and smoking chimneys,
and here we were really lucky to see a new geyser which spouted irregularly and
infrequently, throw a great volume of inky mud and water fifty feet into the air
just as we approached.

Soon the loop was completed and we were again running smoothly west-
ward down the canyon of the Madison to the Western Gateway, where we regaled
upon mountain trout and strawberry pie, our last meal on the railroad, before
entering the waiting Pullman for our ride down the canyon, through Island Park
and into the broad Snake River Valley.

Then on past towns and more rivers and finally back to old Cache Junc-
tion, and home by auto to my waiting wife and kids who sat with open mouths
while we told and re-told the story of our travels, and described, as best we could,
the indescribable wonders of the Yellowstone.

–62–
 TROLLIN’ ON HEBDEN DAM.

Three of my true friends have been, and are, Presidents Oliver H. Budge, Joseph Quin-
ney Jr., and A. E. Anderson, my associates for many years in the Logan Stake Presidency,
and many fine times we have had together in the mountains, at the ringside wrestle and on
long trips to the Yellowstone, on the Madison and upon the back waters of Hebden Dam in
Montana.

Joseph Quinney was a master with the fly and could always fill his creel while I man-
aged to catch a half dozen. The fish just came to him naturally and he could land them any-
where. He was tolerant and congenial and made friends immediately wherever he went, and
his friendship was the kind that withstood the years. He has gone on to the future life and
to a rich reward for a lifetime of good deeds and helpful service.

On one of our trips to Madison Canyon, enjoying, as usual, a fine dinner of steak
and chicken at McGinns on our way, I suggested, that inasmuch as Joseph had always out-
stripped me with the fly rod, that we take a day trolling upon the Hebden dam, a beautiful,
clear body of water twenty miles long and two to five miles wide, with an abundance of lock-
laven, rainbow and land locked salmon eager to strike.

We were up and going before sun-up on a clear bracing morning so common to Mon-
tana, and with Fred Miller, an expert boatman and fisherman, we stepped into the outboard
motor boat and trolled out our lines a hundred feet, with red devil lures spinning at the end
of our leaders.

In a few minutes Joseph’s steel pole almost lurched out of his hands and with a shout,
“I got one”, he began to reel, and the fun was fast and furious. Splashing and struggling, a
four pound salmon was landed, and the prospects looked good. In a few minutes my own rod
began to pull and lurch and I landed another land-locked salmon, about two pounds. The
boat stopped while I had my fun and Joseph Lost his red-devil lure on a tree in the bottom
of the lake, and that was just too bad. He tried every lure he had and various spinners and
other bait, but all the fish wanted was our red-devils, and so it was that Joseph preferred to
watch me and take off my fish. And fun, did you say, for three hours the speckled beauties
bit and struck and splashed and fought. I would wind them in with my automatic reel whir-
ring and spinning, clear out to the end of the line, and again I would tug and wind, and un-
der the boat, and then at last, when we were both winded, I would flip the finny beauty over
the side to flounder in the bottom of the boat, and off we would go for another whirl.

And so the fun went on until I had thirteen beauties, rainbow, locklaven and salmon,
weighing an average of about three pounds, remember – I said ABOUT. We packed the catch
in ice and scudded off for Utah and Cache Valley, and and don’t forget that I told the story on
many occasions, and with emphasis, afterwards.

Several years later, at a farewell party for President Quinney at the College Institute,
when he was leaving to preside over the Northwestern States Mission of the church, in mak-
ing his little speech, he said, “I’d like to have President Dunn tell that fish story of his. Ev-
ery time he tells it the fish get bigger and more of em”. And so I told the story all over again
without depreciation, as I have on many occasions since. Joseph was a good sport and a
true friend.
–63–
 TROLLIN.
– – – –

If you crave a real vacation,

Free from gloomy office walls;
Hit the trail for old Montana
To the lake above the falls.

For the Madison’s a beckonin’.

And the roarin’ Canyon calls;
So just spend a day a trollin’
In the lake above the falls.

Blue the air and crisp the bracin’,

With the tang of mountain pine;
And the yellow sun just peepin’
As you test your trollin’ line.

Now to launch the out-board motor,

Swift the boat swings up the stream;
While your nerves are all a tingle,
And your face with joy agleam.

Let your line troll out behind you,

Red lure dartin’ in the sun;
To the shoals of land-locked salmon,
Where the wary rainbows run.

This is life, O this is livin’,

See yon towering rocky ledge;
And the spruce and pine a growin’,
Right down to the lappin’ edge.

Twixt the glowin’ sun and water,

In the calm, unruffled pool;
Nature’s artist paints a forest
On a mirror clear and cool.

Look out! there’s a strike, stop dreamin’,

Wake up man! you had a bite;
Brace your feet and troll like blazes,
Use your head, you’ve got a fight.

Boy! He jumped clear out the water,

Watch your line and keep it tight,
Keep him comin’, he’s a rainbow,
Four pounds, if he weighs a mite.

–64–
Now he sees us, quick as lightnin,
Turns and darts far up the stream;
Give him rope, don’t get too anxious,
Hear that new reel whirr and scream.

Now again you’ve got him comin’,

Let him splash and pull and fight;
Don’t relax, look sharp! you’ll lose him,
Look out, keep that silk line tight.

Now he tires, it seems the battle,

He has lost, and you have won,
Scoop him in, look out he’s slippery,
Boy, but that is tops in fun.

Cutthroat, native and looklaven,

Lamp the beauties, what a string;
Tired and happy in the evening’
Back to port the boat we bring.

Tired and hungry and contented,

What a day of joy and thrill;
Back to camp as falls the twilight,
There to rest and feast at will.

If you want a real vacation,

Free from office care and sham;
Pack away to old Montana,
Andtroll a day above the dam.

C. W. Dunn

–65–
 KILLGORE, THE LAND OF MEADOWS AND TROUT AND WILD CHICKEN.

Nobody but me ever enjoyed a tripwith his sons quite so much as my own father,
and we used totake him on many a long excursion, vacationing and hunting and fishing.
How his lips would smack over a choice morsel of trout or fried chicken, and how his old
soul would fire up with happiness at prospect of a long auto ride. In midsummer, about
the year 1929, we loaded my car with good, warm bedding and plenty of provisions and
started on our way.

Our trip led up through Snake River Valley to Idaho Falls, where we finished
replenishing the larder, and crossed the great Snake on the narrow bridge, below the
Falls and Eagle Rock, which was the old name for the city in the Pioneer days. The long,
winding road leads up the west bank of the river, past the sand dunes and Mud Lake,
and over the long hill to the pasture land of Camas Meadows. Our company consisted of
my father, my brother Sim, his father-in-law and my friend, James J. Facer, his son and
grandson, and my boy Eldon and myself. It was a jolly crowd, bent for a good time.

We drove through the border town of Spencer and out over the plain eighteen
miles to Killgore, in the midst of the greenest, most luxuriant timothy clover meadows
I have ever seen. They extended for miles on every side. My friend James Facer had a
choice ranch right in the middle, with a fine ranch house and all its appointments, where
we were happy and comfortable. As we neared his place we noted about a dozen sage-
hens feeding in the grass, and so to make room for our oars, and incidentally to have
fried chicken for supper, we brought down aim that first night, and smacked our lips and
filled up on a supper fit for kings.

Early next morning we paired off and set out for the kill, my friend Facer and I fol-
lowing up the creek bed, the banks of which were fringed with scrub willow and brush.
Before we had proceeded very far, up flew a sagehen and “Bang”, my friend let loose,
but missed the target. Several times he shot again but failed to bring down the whir-
ring fleeing birds. “Let me try my luck”, I pleaded, and he handed me the gun, and in
about ten minutes I bagged six fine specimen and gave the gun back, after which James
J. brought them down right and left until we had the limit and then some. Back to the
house we went, and found all the others there in advance with all they could carry.
Chicken, did you say! We regaledupon roast chicken, stewed chicken, fried chicken,
chicken livers and chicken breast until none of us could look a chicken in the face.

My brother Sim suggested that we have a change of menu, and thus it was that we
set out the next day for the large Reservoir in the Camas Creek Canyon and came home
with trout galore, and still more trout. I had better refrain from accounting accurately
for fear of being doubted. Trout and chicken and chicken and trout. Before we left for
home the long table in the Facer living room was completely covered with fat chickens
lying on their backs with drumsticks sticking into the air. Then back home again,
another long ride over the finest country out of door, and back again to cool quiet, pleas-
ant Cache Valley. The vacation was over again, and the next one twelve months in the
future.

–66–
 I must here relate an incident of this vacation which was amusing and
also rather embarrassing. On the journey out we were discussing the Word of
Wisdom, and I casually remarked that we had never kept tea or coffee in our
house. On our arrival we had postum for supper and between bites of brown
chicken I took a long drink from my steaming cup and then smacked my lips and
sniffed the air. How my companions hooted. It smelled like coffee, and it was cof-
fee! Fay Facer had heard my boast about keeping the Word of Wisdom, and had
dumped a handful of coffee into my cup of postum, and so broke the spell. Well,
that was the last time, and I have again forgotten the taste, but of course have
not forgotten the smell, because every dining room and every cafe and every ho-
tel reeks with the smell of coffee and second hand tobacco. They make you take
it in whether you want it or not.

–67–
 THIS AMERICA OF OURS.

Just at the beginning of the great depression, in the summer of 1931, I set out
with my brother-in-law, John A. Israelson, to take in the East, with its skyscraper
cities, and its wooded hills and big rivers.

We boarded the Los Angeles Limited at the Ogden Union Station at 7:30 P.M.,
and located our lower. The sun went down about the time we passed Devil’s Slide in
Ogden Canyon, with its picturesque clifts and numerous rock-bound tunnels, and it
was ten P.M. when we stopped in the Evanston yards and ambled around a block or
so in the cold night air, just to get a last whiff of the mountain ozone before plunging
into the humid East. It was dark as pitch when we crawled through the Aspen tun-
nel at the top of the Continental Divide. I remember one trip through this mile and a
quarter hole in the ground, when my brother and I were locked outside on the Obser-
vation platform, and nearly choked to death on carbon-monoxide before the Conduc-
tor let us in, all smoked up like niggers, into the air-tight protection of the Pullman.

After crossing the divide, we crawled into the narrow berth, wide enough for
one thin man, and neither of us were what you call thin, with John A. insisting on
taking his half in the middle, and me hanging on the thin sharp edge of the bunk
and gazing wide-eyed into the night as we rolled over the prairies and deserts of
Wyoming, because as you know, I never sleep the first night on a train.

Before leaving Ogden we had regaled on tender lamb-chops and were allergic
to food until we pulled into Cheyenne, next morning at nine-thirty, when we did jus-
tice to ham and eggs at the U.P. Cafe, a good place to eat, and the trains always stop
at the Capitol city for a half hour or better.

With full stomachs and glowing anticipation, we dropped down to Denver and,
having a four hour’s wait, took in the mile-high town via the old stand-by, the Grey
bus. Denver has forty splendid public parks, well kept and green and beautiful. I
think its system of public playgrounds is the best in America. It is also noted for its
great Museum of Natural History in the gold-domed State Capitol, and I reveled for a
couple of hours among its ancient Indian relics and antiques. I saw there fine linen
and figured silk, perhaps a thousand years old, taken from the air-tight vaults of the
ancient cliff dwellers, and hard-wood beams and hewn stone slabs showing clearly
the ax marks of iron or steel instruments. Well, the Book of Mormon tells us that
the old Nephites made swords and spears and tools of fine steel, and that they were
expert in weaving fine linen and silk, while modern archaelogists used to loudly
proclaim that iron and steel were unknown among the ancient dwellers of the New
World, but then, of course, these streamlined sooth-sayers of the Intelligentsia, knew
nothing of the Book of Mormon.

We dined in an Italian restaurant on broiled chicken. I asked the young lady

who took our order if she was sure the fowl was fresh and she countered, “Mr. ev-
erything is fresh here but the waiters”. “Well”, I said, “I hope the grub is not quite as
fresh as the help, if so it will need more salt.”

–68–
 Fortified with oranges and ham sandwiches for supper, we climbed the U.P. Pull-
man about 4:30 P.M., for Kansas City. As the train crawled through Eastern Colorado
the terrain degenerated from green grainfields and meadow pastures into sagebrush
and alkali desert, but with daylight again we were riding into the great dry-farm wheat-
lands of Kansas. We stopped ten minutes in the Capitol, Topeka, just before daylight and
then on down the Kansas River to the state line, and we were in the land of the Missouri
pukes.

Kansas City lies in the big bend, on the west bank of the muddy Missouri, and is
noted for its stockyards and cattle marts and for its beautiful terraced home-sites on
high hills overlooking the broad river and the unending plains. It is the very center of
America, and is just slightly west of the center of population of the United States. It is
the old land of Adam-On-Di-Ammon, where Adam built an alter of thanksgiving. It is in
the New World, but it is the birthplace of the human family.

We took the trolley line out to Independence, twenty miles away, and ate a late
breakfast on Missouri sow-belly and Plymouth Rock eggs, then off to take in the rem-
nants of Mormonism, all that is left of the Center Stake of Zion. The mid-summer air was
humid and oppressive and the shrubbery and vegetation was rich and luxuriant.

Independence is in Jackson County, Missouri, the Center Stake of Zion, so desig-

nated by modern revelation to the Prophet, Joseph Smith, and here is located the Temple
Square. Someday the Saints of the Most High will gather back to regain the inheritance
which is their right, and from which they were scourged and driven by nigger-driving
mobocrats in the eighteen-thirties. The rightful owners will purchase again the very
land and homes of which they were ruthlessly robbed by the plundering frontiermen of
the nineteenth century.

Formerly the great Temple Square was composed of about sixty acres, on a low el-
evation with a commanding view of all the country round about. It is a choice land above
all other lands, a land which could flow with milk and honey, if redeemed and cultivated
by the Latter Day Saints, the greatest builders and empire makers known to history.
All manner of vines and grains and trees thrive in profusion, and the land, under favor-
able conditions, will produce two and sometimes three crops each year. It is a veritable
Garden of Eden, and the day will come when the New Jerusalem will rear its walls and
beckon to all the nations, and an Ensign will be set up proclaiming Peace and Good Will
and Righteousness to all the World, and out of Her shall the Law go forth, and the Word of
the Lord will be trumpeted from her portals to all the Earth.

At the center of the block, near the spot designated for the Lord’s Temple, the He-
drikites have scooped out a basement hole for their Church, which cannot be a Temple,
because they know nothing of the Divine Plan of Temple building, and across the street
stands a mammoth shell of a building with seats rising on all sides from a platform in
the middle, like the ring of a prize fight. A crude, unfinished hulk of castle, covered with
mortgages and plastered with linens. It belongs to the Josephites, an apostate group
who lacked the strength and fortitude to endure the trials and drivings andplunder-
ings to which the saints were subjected, and who fell by the wayside, while the Lord’s
Church and His People, tried as gold in the furnace of adversity, pioneered into the West
and raised an Ensign in the tops of the mountains, where they have become a great and
–69–
a mighty people. No, the real Latter Day Saints will not leave basement holes in the
ground, or abandoned concrete, unfinished walls to crumble to dust when they come
again to Zion and rear the promised Temple, and build the divinely planned city of
the New Jerusalem.

As we entered the door of the Reorganite ruins we were greeted by one of the
leaders of the apostate sect, who was very gushing and attentive while he almost
lost his breath condemning the Rocky Mountain Saints and trying, in a pitiful man-
ner, to bolster up his cause. We listened patiently, as he led us up the long bare steps
to the top and down the inclined stairway, through many crannies and alcoves and
irregular rooms and back to his desk by the door, where he proceeded to show us
the largest and most abusive collection of anti-Mormon books and literature ever
assembled in one place. All the old lies and colorful, besmirching, yellow-backed
mouthings of all the Mormon haters, including Mrs. Shepherd and Frank J. Cannon,
were there in profusion, and our guide took great pains to point out the high spots
and the blackest pages.

“By the way”, asked our host, “Where do you hail from?” “From Utah”, we
answered. “Oh--------then perchance you belong to the dominant church there”, com-
mented the alarmed Reorganite. “Yes,” replied John A. “we are stake presidents”.
You should have seen his face. Was it red? Needless to tell you, he dropped us like
hot potatoes and turned on his heel. What a criminal waste of good time, dosing
Mormon stake presidents with such baloney and anti-Mormon propaganda.

We trolleyed back to Kansas City to a hot roast beef dinner, then all over town
in the sight-seeing hack, ending at the soldier Memorial on top of the hill above the
Union Station, and then down the steep hill to the railroad, where we boarded the
Wabash Pullman in the evening for St. Louis, the Capital of the Old South in the days
of the cotton slave drivers. The railroad follows the wide muddy river most of the
way, and we passed through two Missouri thunder storms, the kind that crash and
pour along the great stream, typical river storms. We saw plenty of niggers of all
shades and sizes, as they carted through the red and yellow mud between the old
plantations.

We crossed the wide Missouri, just west of St. Louis, and arrived at the new
Union station at eleven P.M., very tired and ready to hit the hay in the Robert E. Lee
Hotel, which had been recommended by a friend. Surrendering our suitcases to an
honest looking driver who met us at the door with much courtesy, almost too much,
we were driven precisely half a block from the station to the front door of the Robert
E. Lee, where he dumped us out very bruskly, and demanded a dollar and fifty cents
for the ride. Of course we had been taken for a ride, and we inquired, “Is this the
Spirit of St. Louis?” It was just after Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight in the famous plane
of that name. “My boss makes me do it”, he informed us, and so we paid up and gave
him some plain talk including the accusation that his boss, and he as well were
crummy crooks and skunks.

–70–
 We slept well until four A.M., and then climbed out, and after a cold shower,
hiked away down to the old Town, lingering at the ancient Court House, where
many a mulatto and quadroom wench, and hundreds of prize young niggers, had
been sold down the river. The Old Town reeks of the Old South of slavery days, and
here in this very courtyard many companies of hot-blooded Confederates had been
mustered into fight for their slaves, and the right to pull out of the Union, and here
too many a defeated, dilapidated,, depleted company had been mustered out after
Lincoln had taught them their lesson, and had impressed them with the fact, “That
the Union must, and shall be preserved.”

We walked five miles up the great levee in the early morning. Oh, what a
levee, through coons, and more coons, and tough looking greeks and dagoes, and
skulking half breeds of every shade and color. It looked dangerous and a bit scary,
but we pulled our hats down tight, and doubled our fists, and walked fast and came
through. What imagery the Great Levee called to mind. What stories it could Tell,
if it could but speak, of the voyages of the river boats, the fitting out of pioneers and
colonizers, and the westward journeys of the hunters and trappers of the last cen-
tury. It is an integral part of the land we call America. We devoured more Yankee
trout and turned over eggs, and found our chairs in the new coach of the Baltimore
and Ohio, all set for a twenty-five hour ride to the National Capitol.

Crossing the Mississippi just north of the city, we sped over southern Illinois
and Indiana, as much a part of the south a Kentucky itself, with negro shacks and
poor white trash galore, then on into Ohio and up the Ohio river to Cincinnatti. We
followed the great river, which the fleeing slave niggers used to swim, and over
which Eliza bounded on the floating ice, crossing over at Pertersburg, into West Vir-
ginia, leaving the wide Mississippi Valley and climbing up, up into the Alleghanies.

We were traversing the old Cumberland Pass of Daniel Boone and the early
Western homeseekers. Shortly after crossing the summit we noted a small creek
running eastward along the railroad. It was the beginning of the great Potomac.
Then more small brooks and creeks joined it in its roll to the sea, and then rivulets
and finally many great rivers made their contributions, and the little creek of the
summit was a great, wide, tide-water river, deep enough to float ships. We crossed
the river at Harper’s Ferry and had the experience of passing through three states
within five minutes.

Now we began to pass farms and homesites and small villages, then larger
towns and great plantations; through meadow and orchards and wooded slopes,
until we rolled into the great Capitol and Union Station, the place where the hearts
of new Congressmen beat with eager anticipation, and where the disappointed lame
duck Senators and Congressmen and defeated, has been, Presidents and fired bu-
reaucrats limp away to private life. It is said a New Deal hanger-on recently asked
impudently, “Just what is a Bureaucrat? You are always talking about Bureaucrats.”
He was asking an Old Guard Republican, who had tasted no political pie for ten long
years, and who was taking his daily exercise berating the men who are so bus-
ily engaged bossing the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave, who have almost

–71–
transformed this goodly land into the land of the Spree and Home of the Knave.
”A Bureaucrat, my friend”, answered the Republican, “ is a New Deal Lame Duck,
kicked out of line by the people, and trying valiantly to stagger along in the Roos-
evelt parade without limping.”

We registered at the Harrington Hotel, where the Congressmen and Sena-

tors used to hibernate before the balmy days of the Shoreham, and climbed into
the cold bath for temporary relief from the humid atmosphere. It was Decoration
Day, at 10:30 A.M. when we came to the Capitol, and after dispatching a good din-
ner we set out to celebrate and to rubberneck around.

Everbody seemed to be going somewhere, and following the crowd, atop the
upstairs of a Washing ton Cab, we threaded along Pennsylvania Avenue, past the
Treasury Building and the White House, and across the wide river to Arlington
in Old Virginia. The Great Park and Cemetery strings along the south band of the
historical river, and reposes the revered bones of America’s renowned statesmen
and soldiers. We stood at attention at the grave of the Unknown Soldier, three
feet from Graham McNames as he broadcast the highlights of the celebration and
services to listening Yankees over all the land. Then we sat down by the bank
of the running water to cool off a little, while six hundred army planes whirred
and dived and ducked over the river in a great aerial demonstration. It was a
sight and an experience never to be forgotten. Here was the entire Air Fleet of
our Country, one of the world’s greatest, quite insignificant now, compared with
seventy-five thousand bombers, fighters and super-planes all fighting for free-
dom. The Memorial service was held in the open, marble amphitheater, and we
sat and sweated and suffered for two long hours while some freshman Congress-
man practiced upon us, and regaled the heroes of the past.

Then we doubled back to the Harrington and a good hot supper, and off to
bed to dream of the statesmen and the great men and the snides and the politi-
cians and the lobbyists and the grafters who had haunted the famous Capitol in
the by-gones. Bright andearly next morning we procured a yellow cab, driven
by a young sprout named Marler, from Lewiston in our own Cache Valley, who
was working his way through college and at the same time supporting his wife
and baby. Some young fellow! I predict for him certain success if he keeps up the
pace, and keeps his head, and is strong enough to remain clean and wholesome.
We stopped at the Lincoln Memorial and climbed up into the Washington Monu-
ment, and took in the Mint and the Patent office and the great office buildings
which housed the President’s Cabinet on the Triangle.

We sauntered over the White House grounds and studied the great, old
trees, and sat sown in the East room and the Blue room and the Green room of
the Palace of the Presidents, enjoying the antique furniture and the enlarged
portraits of the Presidents and their ladies. I hope there shall never be any en-
larged likeness of the travelling madam hung up beside the picture of Martha
Washington and gracious Dolly Madison.

–72–
 It was on June 1st, 1931, that we repaired early to the Nation’s great domed
Capitol, where we were escorted by the guide through the old part of the famous
building, and where we browsed among the statuary in the Nation’s Hall of Fame.
Each state has the privilege of placing the statutes of two of its illustrous sons in this
hall, men who have greatly distinguished themselves in extraordinary service to
their state and the Nation. Utah, up to the present, has no representation. If I could
have my way our representatives would both be standing there. They would be the
great Colonizer, Brigham Young, and the great Statesman, Reed Smoot, but Utah is a
state of petty jealousies and prejudices andit may be long before our space there shall
be occupied.

Of much interest were the Senate office building and the office building for
members of the House. These are connected with the Senate and the House Cham-
bers, respectively, by underground tunnels, with a road for automobiles and a side-
walk for walkers. In the House office building I selected the suite I would have liked
to occupy, when I should come to Congress, but, sad to say, five years later the people
refused to elect me, but instead sent back a misfit dispenser of pork barrel handouts,
a typical New Deal playboy, and sad reflection on the people of my state, he was the
best vote-getter of them all.

This was the last day of the term of the United States Supreme Court, and we
had the opportunity of seeing the dignified nine Great Men, gowned and caped, and
escorted by pages, walk into the Hall of Justice and take their places. The Justices
were great men in those days, eminent Jurists, highly distinguished for their learn-
ing and achievements. It was before the days of the political purge, in which these
great men were harassed and badgered until some of them actually died, and the oth-
ers were glad to resign and make way for a group of third-rate Jurists, who know less
law than politics, and whose public records are distinguished more by their support
of political bosses than by their scholarship and wisdom. The Congress refused to
permit the President to load the Court in the unconstitutional method proposed, but
the result was accomplished in another way.

Many important cases were decided that day, among them a vital question
touching the right of freedom of speech and of the press. Just before the close of the
session, Judge G. A. Iverson, a native and distinguished son of Utah, moved my ad-
mission as an Attorney and Counsellor before the Great Court, and I stood up, with
uplifted hand, with ten other lawyers from as many states, while the Chief Justice,
Charles Evans Hughes, administered the Oath, and thus I was admitted to the Bar of
the Supreme Court of the United States.

We visited the homes of many of our distinguished Presidents and were espe-
cially interested in the home of Abe Lincoln and the little Ford Theatre where he was
shot just after the triumph of Freedom over Slavery. We ended with a half day at the
Mammoth National Zoo, in its superb setting among wooded hills in the North-west.
The time had now come when we looked for new worlds to conquer, and with unabat-
ed eagerness we took the noon Flyer of the Baltimore and Ohio, up along the shores of
Chesapeake Bay to Baltimore, the very center of the southern Aristocracy, the home
of the Lord Baltimores and the Carrols. Points of interest there are old Fort McHenry
–73–
of Civil War Fame, from which fluttered the Star Spangled Banner which inspired
Francis Scott Key to pen our National Anthem. We regaled upon fresh fried
oysters right out of the Bay, and loitered awhile in the old Southern Hotel, where
George Washington slept on his way from Mount Vernon to Philadelphiafor his
first Inaugural. Those were the times when a great President was satisfied with
two busy terms. Washington and Lincoln lived in the good old days when no man
was indispensable.

We steamed into the City of Brotherly Love just at sundown, and after lo-
cating our room, we walked up the broad street past the home of Betsy Ross, and
into the old Grave Lot back of the Church, where the bones of Ben Franklin, the
immortal sage of the Constitution, lie under a crumbling sandstone marker, with
his name cut deep into the fading surface, just as his deeds are cut deeply into
the enduring shaft which is America. The gray bus again towed us to the points
of interest, over the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, to the City Hall
and the Civic Center, and deposited us at Independence Hall and Constitution
Hall, set back on the green among the trees. We viewed the Old Liberty Bell and
sat in the Chair, with our feet under the identical table upon the very rug where
Washington and Franklin sat to affix their names to the Supreme Law of the
Land, the Inspired Constitution.

As the hearts of every American thrills while reveling among those old
landmarks and cherished relics, our own hearts beat with pride in our country,
and with gratitude for the immortal Fathers of the Revolution, and we highly
resolved that the great principles and eternal standards which they worked and
died to lift and perpetuate shall never perish or be supplanted by the old World
Fantasies which clog the little minds of some egoists who would make the whole
world over according to their own socialistic and etherial planning.

–74–
 OLD CONSTITUTION HALL
–––
Preserve this Temple of the Just
From Tempest and decay O time,
That coming Centuries may know
Thy sacred Halls, O Freedom’s Shrine.
Thy ancient walls proclaim anew
The Declaration of the Free,
And Independence tolls again
From Thy old Bell of Liberty.
Thy hallowed threshold mutely tells
Of stirring scenes long past and gone,
Of Revolutionary days,
And Heroes of the Nation’s dawn.
We hear again the martial strains
Of flute and fife and rolling drum,
Andlisten to the stirring speech
Of Adams, Jay and Washington.
Our hearts thrill proudly to the words
Of Jefferson, Virginia’s son,
“We hold these Colonies are Free,
And Independence we have won.”
“No more Oppression’s yoke shall gall
The Patriots of Colombia’s shore,
And petty tyrants, Lords and Kings
Shall dictate and oppress no more.”
Poor Richard speaks, “Let us invoke
The blessing of the Nation’s God,
For minds undimmed, while we indite
The Charter of Fair Freedom’s sod.”
They scan the jurists of the past,
Andgarner wisdom from the tomes
Of Marous, Blackstone, Locke and Kent,
And glean from Egypt, Greece and Rome.
And Inspiration guides the pen,
And Vision gives to know and see
The Triumph of the West, and write,
The Constitution of the Free.
The Super Law, a Code Supreme,
Securing unto all who come
Life, Liberty and happiness,
A name, a Mansion in the Sun.
Long may It live, our Law Divine,
While waves the flag of flaming bars,
Long may the children of the Free
March on, with faces toward the Stars.
–75– --C. W. Dunn
 The ride along the Coast, through Delaware and New Jersey, was both inter-
esting and intriguing. These old seaboard states have each played an important
part in the events which make our History. Our train stopped at the Jersey City
Pier, and we found seats in a great bus which ran onto the big ferry-boat for the
sail across the bay, and up the Hudson, and finally into the big city, right into the
heart of things, and to the Underground Central Station. I shall never forget New
York Bay and the Statue of Liberty and the famous skyline of the world’s largest
and greatest city.

We took the subway under the East River, and out to Flushing on Long Island,
where we enjoyed to the full a much needed rest at the fine home of our friends,
the Knechts. We rode over three of the mile long bridges, which span East Riv-
er, among them the famous Brooklyn Bridge, the first of the great suspension
bridges, and after which all the others are patterned. We did the subway and the
elevated to our heart’s content, pausing at Grant’s Tomb on the Hudson, and at
Fosdick’s Church, and reveled for hours among the water creatures of the Bat-
tery, then across the Bay and to the top of the Statue of Liberty, with great ocean
liners passing in and out and bright colored planes and bombers circling the
tower, and some mammoth bronze blimps soaring past for good measure.

Times Square at noon, or in the evening, at the close of the work-day, is a veri-
table din, people, people and more people. Jews, dark skinned Dagoes and Finns,
Poles and Serbs, Negroes, Chinamen and Japs, men and women from every land
and clime, all jabbering to create a conglomerate Babel, which rendered the con-
fusion of Tongues at the Tower in Babylon, a mere singsong.

Everybody takes in the Great Zoo and so did we, after which we walked the
plank boards, and ate the hamburgers, and looped the sight of Coney Island and
down on the Ocean. Here again we elbowed uncounted Jews and boats of dark-
skinned immigrants from the Balkans. No wonder LaGuardia, the Little Flower,
can pull an election, and no wonder that Tammany can garner the votes among
these denizens of the lower strata, with such few white folks and one-hundred
percent Americans dwelling among the rabble.

–76–
 OLD NEW YORK
New York is a modern Babylon,
And London and Paris all in one;
It smacks of Memphis and Thebes and Rome,
Petrograd, Tokyo and Cologne;
The Western Jerusalem, Jews and Jews,
Jewish Americans and Hebrews,
Irish policemen and Swedish mugs,
Danish immigrants, German pugs,
Congo niggers and Southern coons,
Half breeds, mulattoes and white quadrooms,
Greek and Dago and brown Burmese,
Chink, Hawaiian and Japanese,
French Apache, Egyptian shiek,
Indian mogul, Laputian freak,
Turk and Greaser and black Hindoo,
With a few Americans scattered through.
A jargon of noises, an endless din,
Whirr of the plane and propeller spin,
Whistle of steamer and honk of bus,
Swearing draymen and cabmen’s cuss,
Howling newsboys and sirens scream,
Say men, but this is no place to dream;
An endless stream of humanity,
Surging about like arestless sea,
Jostling and crowding and shuffling on,
From daylight till evening, from dusk till dawn,
A human maelstrom that has no end,
A million faces and not a friend.
Narrow alleys and dusky streets,
Murky canyons, the sun n’er greets,
Skyscrapers stretching out of sight,
And long straight ribbons of blue skylight;
Marble column and grimy wall,
And towering palaces straight and tall,
And row on row up Manhattan Isle,
Garret and tenement, mile on mile,
Trolleys and streetcars and subways black,
And railways above running track on track.
Banks and theatres, clubs and shows,
Hotels and restaurants rows and rows,
Wall Street, the Hudson, Fifth Avenue,
High bridges spanning the river’s blue;
Parks and mansions and dash an style,
The Bowery, the Toombs and old Coney Isle;
It’s some place to visit for just a day,
A nervewracking town if you have to stay,
Since old Noah ruled in his ancient ark,
There’s n’er been a city like old New York;
You’ll enjoy a brief call if you ever roam,
Andbe mighty glad when you get back home.

–77– C. W. Dunn, Feb., 1933.

 I was glad to leave the great City, with its glamor and its pretense, and its
fraud and hypocracy and its insincerity and its blaze and blare, and its clamor and
clangor, and bray and din and noise, just to be once more in a place of peace and
quiet repose, and a little closer to clean Nature as God made it, and not as man adul-
terated and spoiled it. More than anything else in the famous metropolis, I enjoyed
the great parks and the museums.

From Grand Central Station the electric motored train crawled into a dark,
narrow tube, down, down, under the noisy city and the Hudson, and up into the
light of the clean fresh countryside, then on through New Haven and Little Rhoda to
Boston, the famous city where the blue-bellied Yankees once gave the bossy English
a Tea Party, when we too were one of the bull-dozed Colonies of the dogmatic Empire
which hires its armies and fights to the last Frenchman, and leaves its war debts for
Cousin Jonathan’s millionaires to foot.

We registered in the Menger Hotel adjoining the North Station, bordering the
Charles River with a fine view of Bunker Hill Monument from our window. The first
night we felt hungry for a good picture show, and after satisfying our physical hun-
ger, we set out along the devious winding cow lanes of Old Boston, and soon found a
little show house with an evening’s diversion. Coming out of the theatre, we decided
to turn to the left and take another street home, the show house being about three
blocks from our hotel. After about an hour and a half we concluded we were lost and
inquired of the lone policeman on his beat where North Station and our hotel might
be, and he informed us that we were five miles away, on the foreign Water Front, and
it was eleven o’clock at night and a little foggy and stormy. He told us we were in a
very dangerous place and that no cars or buses were running. Well, we pulled our
hats down and walked fast along the car line as directed and finally back to our ha-
ven of rest and we were mighty glad to get there. It was home, sweet home to us. We
had walked through the toughest thugs and ocean going holdups and gangsters that
ever graced an American water front.

We traversed the devious cow-land streets of Boston Town on foot, loitering

in the famous Boston Common, where every man can have his say, and through the
Navy Yards, and spent two hours on board the Old Warship Constitution, “Old Iron-
sides”, of which every schoolboy reads; after which we regaled on real Boston Baked
Beans. No man knows beans until he has been to Boston and eaten the luscious pork
and brown beans equaled nowhere else. Then we browsed in the Old North Church
and the Old South Church and were often reminded by what we saw and what we
heard, of Paul Revere and the Adamses and Warrens of revolutionary fame.

A whole day was pleasurably spent in the great Museum of Fine Arts, one of
the grandest and largest in the world. Many days could be enjoyed with profit in
the halls of this spacious national institution. Incidentally, while crowding into an
uptown theatre, some pickpocket filched the pocket book of John A. containing a few
dollars and the checks for our travelling bags and we had to name and describe all
of their contents before the desk clerk at the Menger Hotel handed them over.

–78–
 We now took the Boston and Maine Railroad, winding up the Merrimack
river most of the afternoon to our destination at the Carpenter Hotel in Manches-
ter, New Hampshire, a great manufacturing city, with the largest shoe, boot and
woolen factories in the world. Here we attended the State Postmaster’s Conven-
tion and banquet and met many fine people, Republican postmasters, of course,
because the G.O.P. had been at the bat for many years. Here I also met the old
war-horse, Senator Moses. We were invited by a Mr. Davis, a postmaster from
western Vermont, to ride with him from Manchester to Portland, Maine, and so
it was our pleasure to drive down to Portsmouth, New Hampshire’s only sea-port,
and on up the rocky Maine Coast to the Capital city of Portland. The night we
slept at the Falstaff in Portland, Maine, my father, who was somewhat of a glo-
betrotter himself, slept in Portland, Oregon. The Falstaff is the oldest hostelry
in Maine and dates back to the days before the revolution. Here we attended
another Postmaster’s Convention directed by John A. who was then the national
Vice-President, and where I had the privilege of addressing the New England
Yankees, and to eat deep sea scallops with them in the big banquet hall of the an-
cient hotel. At this convention I met a very splendid young Republican Congress-
man, recently elected to represent the Rock Ribbed State and who told me confi-
dentially that he could be re-elected as long as he desired, because Maine always
went right, but a year later I read with sorrow that my friend had gone down in
the New Deal avalanche of 1932.

We came back to the Menger in Boston on the train, along the rugged
coast, crossing the river Saco where it plunges into the sea, and I have never
seen such wicked water as the flooding Saco as it crashed down through its rock-
bound channel to the ocean, although on the night of our stay in Portland we
went down to the Bay to watch a foundering wreck pounding to pieces upon the
rocks.

Leaving Boston again next day we journeyed up through Ducksbury near

Braintree, the home of Fussy Arnold, and came to rest at the Old Samoset House
in Plymouth, where New England had its birth, when one hundred Pilgrims
stepped from their boats to the Plymouth Rock in the bleak December of 1620.
Samoset House is the oldest hotel in New England, and one sees here clocks sal-
vaged from the Mayflower and antique furniture shipped from old England in the
early part of the Seventeenth Century.

The banquet of Massachusetts Postmasters was a genuine New England

Clam Bake with all the trimmings. We listened to some professional entertain-
ers, one of whom made a pencil portrait of John A. who was the main guy there.
It was a dandy, with fiery red hair and a typical grin. Again I was called to kid
the P.M.’s and told them that Utah was founded by men from New England, Old
Pilgrim stock and that Mormons thought and talked and acted like New Eng-
landers to the present day, and that we in Utah still cherished and upheld, and
lived by, the fine old laws and high standards which the Pilgrims brought to
Plymouth Rock.

–79–
 I climbed the hill above the town to the first graveyard and reveled among the
ancient tombstones, crumbling away, but still bearing the legible names of many of that
first hundred who came in the old ship. I found the grave of Priscilla Mullins, who told
John Alden to speak for himself, and of her father, William Mullins, and of her mother,
and of Governor Bradford and many others whose names are carved upon the tablet of
the revered hundred.

I spent hours down by the shore, beside the famous rock, which had in years
gone by been chiseled and carried away by hundreds of souvenir hunters, but which
is now guarded and protected by a high iron fence, and by soldiers who pace back and
forth both day and night. I watched the tide ebb and flow and when the waters had re-
ceded back a block and a half, I walked down on the wet sands, and studied the forms of
ocean life and shells which had been washed by the flow. At the ebb the old rock stands
four feet above the ground and is about five feet long and four feet high, but when the
tide is full it rises eight feet, or more, above the top of the old landmark. While the
guard looked on, I raked a stone from the base of the rock and when I returned home I
had it cut and highly polished and set in gold mounting, and I treasure this ring among
my most cherished possessions.

Here I met some of the oldsters who gave me first hand, many of the ancient sto-
ries and traditions which hang in memory of old Plymouth Harbor, and of the men and
women who first landed there, and their Indian friends who made their wickiups in the
forest. I became acquainted with hardy fishermen from down on Cape Cod, and their
stories were most interesting and colorful.

All good things have an end, and so we took the Boston and Albany flyer west
through Massachusetts, passing many pine bound lakes and swift rivers, and changed
cars at Springfield for a fast ride along the Connecticut River to Hartford, and another
convention and another delicious banquet. The capital of Connecticut is noted for its
Insurance companies and for its river factories and its machine dies.

Arriving back in Springfield, we boarded the fast Wolverine, the swankiest train
in New England, bound for Albany and western New York. It was dark when we ambled
down from the high New England mountains, across the Hudson and into New York’s
State Capital of Albany. Rolling on west, we arrived about midnight at Syracuse and
were dropped at the door of the best hotel, the Onandaga, where the final convention
was to be held. Next day was the Sabbath and very early we set out to hunt something
that looked like Mormonism and smacked of Utah. I asked a burly Irish policeman if
there was a Mormon mission or branch in the city, and if so, to direct us to the place.
“Hell, no,” he thundered, “We driv all o’ them mongrels out of New York a hundred years
ago, and none of ’em ever come back.” After I had proceeded west, John A. ferreted out
some Mormon missionaries, who had come back, and had a pleasant time with them.

I took the New York Central west, a day ahead of my brother-in-law, and arrived
in Palmyra, of Mormon fame, about 10:30 A.M., and inquired of the ancient railroad
agent in the little dump of a station if he could direct me to the Hill Cumorah. He said,
“You must mean Mormon Hill”, and so he called his friend with a wired-up Ford, who

–80–
toted me to the ancient hill, made famous in the Book of Mormon. It is the highest
elevation for a hundred miles around, and from its summit Jaredite scouts watched
through cupped hands for the armies of their enemies, and a thousand years later
Nephite watchmen made signal fires upon the summit to warn their people of the ap-
proaching Lamanite hordes which finally overcame and destroyed them. Here in
bloody civil wars the Jaredites were destroyed to the last man, who wandered aimless-
ly south and westward, and finally was rescued, starving and exhausted by a people
called the Mulekites, who took him to Old Zarahemla on the waters of the Sidon, where
he ended his days among the on-coming Nephites.

Surrounding this hill the dark skinned Lamanites overcame the last remnant
of their fair white brothers, the Nephites, and again a lone survivor wandered away
from the desolate scene, after depositing the golden plates containing the History of his
people in a rock-bound box buried in the earth near to top of the selfsame hill; and here
the Sacred Records reposed for fourteen hundred years until that same last survivor
Moroni delivered the golden contents of the stone box to the boy Prophet Joseph Smith,
who translated the plates through the gift and power of God and gave to the world the
Book of Mormon. It is a true Record and History, and contains the Gospel of the Master
in its fullness. The saving message between its lids is true and eternal and bears re-
cord and testimony of the divine birth and mission of Jesus, and of the sacred truths of
the Bible.

I thoughtfully climbed the Sacred hill to its summit and walked along the Hog-
back ridge down to the level plain, and then came back close to the spot where the
Plates had lain in the stone box, and where the Angel had delivered them to the boy
prophet, and there came into my heart a sweet and powerful assurance of the Truth
and Divinity of the Sacred Book and of the goodness of God to His children.

Elder Dean, the caretaker of the Famous Hill motored me down to the historic
Smith Farm where the Prophet and his parents and brothers and sisters lived and
worked and played and prayed in the days when the church was young.

The gnarled orchard trees, back of the old house, were planted by the young
prophet and his father and brothers more than a hundred years ago, and the room
where the Golden Plates were partially translated is intact, much as it was then. The
quaint farm homestead is the cradle of revealed Truth and should always be preserved.

Elder Dean offered to accompany me to the Sacred Grove, but I wished to go

there alone to think and meditate and to pray.

There had been a refreshing summer rain in the dawn, but now the air was clear
and fresh and the sky a deep blue with the sun beaming forth in its splendor. It was
a June day, perhaps just like the lovely morning when the little lad, fourteen years
old, went down among the forest trees to ask of the Lord the all-important question. I
passed the cattle barn, behind which the first saints were baptized in a pool dug by the
eager brethren, and on down the path through green meadows, interspersed with red
and white clover and matted with fragrant flowers.

–81–
 The bees were humming and the birds were singing, and all nature was filled with
song.

The grove is a forest of leafy giants, with countless shrubs and vines and flowers
in profusion. It is a perfect retreat in which to commune with God. I found the great tree
under which the little lad knelt as he sought for Truth from the Source of all knowledge
and the Fount of all Wisdom. I remembered the beautiful story, and the Testimony of
Joseph and his own account of the Sublime Vision.

I recalled that my grandparents had heard the message of Truth in a foreign land,
and that because of what happened here that I was born in Zion, under the New and Ev-
erlasting Covenant, of goodly parents, and that I was blessed with a loving family, whose
hearts were loyal to the cause so dear to my heart, and that I had always been associat-
ed with kind friends and upright men, my associates in the Priesthood. That, because of
what happened here, I was a member of the Lord’s True Church, a candidate for salvation
and exaltation, and that my feet had been started along the Eternal Highway into the
Infinite. That the dead of all ages could be redeemed, and living Saints could be exalted
and inherit Eternal Glory because our Kind Father and His Beloved Son stood here and
instructed a little boy, with a heart full of Faith, under this very tree.

It was a Sacred spot, and the ground upon which I stood was holy, and my heart
burned with gratitude to the Giver of All Good, and my soul was filled with joy unspeak-
able as I poured out in humble, tearful prayer, the Thanksgiving of a humble heart, and
into my being another, a potent and satisfying Testimony was bourne to augment my
already satisfying conviction that Joseph’s Message was indeed true. That God, The Fa-
ther and His Gracious Son, Jesus, the Master of Galilee, has stood here and uttered the
Divine words which ushered in the Great Dispensation of the Fulness of Times, and has
revealed again the Gospel Plan of Life in Its Fulness and Perfection.

Silently, and in an attitude of humble joy, I retraced my steps to the Homestead,

with a memory which can never leave me, and with a sweet, calm happiness which will
always linger in my heart.

Elder Dean escorted me about the town, to the building where the first edition
of the Book of Mormon was printed and published, and to a street crossing with a mod-
ern church on each of its four corners, churches of four different denominations, four
streamlined, up to the minute, castles of man-made worship where the contention and
the confusion and the bickering and the envy and the jealous opposition still goes merri-
ly on, just as it did in the same hamlet more than a hundred years ago, before the Vision.

No train was available on the New York Central, out of Palmyra, and so I took the
trolley line west to Rochester and Buffalo, where I transferred to the little gas-spitting
puddle jumper for the ride along the wide river to famed Niagara Falls, My room was
high in the Niagara Hotel, with a fine view of the foam and vapor rising into the air from
the American side.

–82–
 I arranged with a cabman to take me along the American bank, and across the
whirling, swirling, boiling waters over the bridge to the Canadian shore, where I spent
three or four hours drinking in the thrills of the terrible water as it tumbled over the crest
and into the rolling, splashing, foaming, cauldron so far below, with the great multi-col-
ored lights playing upon the spectacle and the geyser like spray. No one can describe it, or
portray the sensations that spring up in the heart in contemplation of the awful, gorgeous
spectacle.

I took a hot bath and went to bed at midnight for four brief hours of rest, and was up
at four A.M. to see the Great Natural wonder by daylight. For three more hours I drank in
the beauty and splendor and marveled at the awesome power, and the inspiring grandeur
of the famous spectacle, and then came back to Buffalo for bacon and eggs in the station
restaurant, and then settled in my Pullman chair of the fast Michigan Central for Chicago.

We crossed over the wide Niagara just out of Buffalo and sped through Canadian On-
tario until we came opposite Detroit, where we dropped down through the steel tube under
the river, a mile wide, and up into the city of labor unions and automobiles and a skyline
that looks like Manhattan.

The small towns and hamlets of Ontario, through which we passed, seem fifty years
behind the ambitious, streamlined villages and cities of America across the border, but
they are characterized by an air and demeanor of peace and good will and law observance
which is altogether lacking in the brazen, fast growing towns of their southern neighbor.

Hungry as a bear, I ordered lamb chops in the diner and nibbled the scorched, tough
half cooked single chop, of doubtful age, which the nigger, with much palaver set before
me, with nothing else but a slice of bread and a glass of rather stale milk and then dug up
the dollar and a quarter written on the bill, without a tip and minus gratitude or thanks-
giving.

Down through Battle Creek and Kalamazoo to the tip of Michigan we sped, along
the calm blue of the Lake, nosing around across the Indiana loop and into Illinois. Then on
through stock yards, stinking tanneries, smoking rubbish heaps, four hog pens, roaring
factories and countless box cars and into New York Central Terminal, where we jumped
the gap over the Windy City, in a blue hack, between skyscraper canyons and to the mam-
moth Union Station.

I slept in a noisy room on the seventeenth story of the LaSalle on the Loop, and
awaited the arrival of John Israelsen, who showed up when I had almost given him up for
lost. We lunched on Utah eggs and Alabama ham and Idaho russets and hied off to the
Gray Sight Seeing Station to have a look at the great city.

We did the Stockyards and the parks and the loop, and got a breath of cool, fresh air
as we whisked up the Boulevard along the Lake-shore to the University. We smelled the
flowers and admired the plants and foliage of the great greenhouse, and edged our way
through the Arts Museum, and sweltered as we craned our necks to get a glimpse of the
tops of the forty story sky-scrapers, from the dark caverns between.

–83–
 Chicago is like New York in many ways, with an added Western atmo-
sphere, and a morbid expectation of killings and holdups and robberies to come.

Then tired out and leg weary we sought out our lower in the late evening
on the Chicago and Northwestern, and lingered on the observation platform to
watch the towering buildings and the bright yellow, green, red and blue lights
fade in the distance, and then crawled into our bunk to repose until daylight re-
vealed the wide plains and the green farm lands of Iowa.

We crossed the muddy Missouri, from Council Bluffs to Omaha, the old
townsite of Winter Quarters, where the Saints paused and wintered before their
jump across the plains in ‘47, and then came the long, hot, tedious ride, along the
sandy, crawling Platte river and down to old Cheyenne, and the great Continental
loop was closed.

Have you ever sweat it out for eleven long hours in a non-air conditioned
steel Pullman car, in July and with only brakish, warm water to wet your whis-
tle, as you groaned and perspired and endured. If so you can sympathize with us
on that sultry, dragging summer day.

The U.P. Lunch Counter in Cheyenne always dishes up a good meal, and we
were hungry enough to enjoy the luscious pork chops and the hash brown pota-
toes and sliced peaches in cream which they set before us. Then we settled for
the last lap of the long trek, and clambered out of our Pullman cushions at eight-
thirty next morning at Ogden Station, to be met by my wife and the kids, who
seemed glad enough to see their dad after a whole month of loneliness.

We ate breakfast together and drove on up to old Cache Valley among the
cool mountains - Cache Valley with its clear skies and its clean atmosphere, and
its politically mistaken people, and I said again, with Farmer John, “The best of
the journey is getting home.”

–84–
 A BRIEF LOOK AT THE PRESENT.

It is the year of 1947, one hundred years since the Mormon Pioneers entered and
made homes in the Salt Lake Valley and commenced to build up Zion in the Mountains, It
is the year of the Centennial and a year of Jubilee and celebration. I trust it will emphasize
and honor the great sacrifices and the toil and labor, and privation and patience and forti-
tude, and the faith and the hope and the accomplishment and final victory of the Mormon
Pilgrims who were the real builders of the Intermountain Empire.

Bonneville and Fremont and Bridger and Kit Carson and the Sublettes and Catho-
lic fathers and other scouts and trailbuilders and trappers and traders and mountaineers
made great contributions in the founding of the West, but it was the Mormon Pioneers un-
der Brigham Young who came and saw and conquered and made these Mountain valleys
a homeland and a garden, with meadows and waving grain and schools and factories and
churches.

The terrible war is over and men cry peace, peace, but there is no peace and it shall
not come to the earth until the Redeemer of Men comes to reign in power and great glory
and to consummate the building of his Eternal Kingdom.

My son Eldon served all over Europe as a Major in the Intelligence Service until the
war was over and acquitted himself with great credit and ability.

Conway finished his mission to the Eastern States and entered the Navy, serving on
the west coast and in China and the Far East. He did his full duty in a patriotic manner.
Irving was a lieutenant in the air service and was a real man although he began the service
as a little boy.

Vera’s husband Rex Tolman served in the Navy, a Lieutenant on a Destroyer and had
a number of very narrow escapes from death, and Edith’s husband Robert E. Lee served
with distinction in south Italy and all up through the Boot until the end of the war. He too
was a real soldier.

I am grateful that all the boys are home safe and well. We were favored of the Lord.

Charles is Bishop of a splendid ward in Boise, Idaho and is beloved and respected by
all his people and is doing a splendid service, and is also conducting a successful business in
the Idaho Capital. He has a wonderful family.

Meryl and her fine husband Robert E. Jones, with their three beautiful little girls live
in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Bob is District Attorney and a worker in the Church. Meryl is
also still very active in the church.

Eldon is located in Salt lake City with the F.B.I. His record with them is outstanding.
His wife Edith and little Cheryl live there with their husband and father.

Lula and Ezra Carr, her husband and their little girls, Kathie and Phyllis live at Port-
land where Ezra is a member of the Bishopric and Lula is a leader among the young women.

–85–
 Rex Tolman and Vera live at Twin Falls, Idaho, Rex in the Bishopric and
Vera active too, especially with Karen and David and Ann the baby.

Edith and her little Steve keep house for Robert E. Lee who is working
hard at his Dental Course in Portland, Oregon.

Conway and Irving and his wife are at home attending the U.A.C. to com-
plete requirements for their degree.

Miriam and Helen are home, fine girls and active in the church. I sincerely
hope and pray that Conway and Miriam and Helen will be always true and loyal
to the Church and its ideals and standards, and in time be blessed with true,
loyal Latter Day Saints as their companions in life.

I have had a rather hard summer and winter since May 1st, 1946, when I
underwent an emergency operation. I have had my full share of surgical opera-
tions and ill health, and have accomplished what little I have in life under rather
severe handicaps, but I am still sincerely grateful for the health I now have and
the blessings which are mine.

Well my little narrative draws to a close, my race is nearly run, and my

air castles about all built, but I shall never retire from my life’s work to loaf and
live off the work and sweat of other men, or from a Government dole. It has been
my observation that men nearly always die when they retire and go to town and
quit.

Old men must stay with the bush and pick it clean, and do the work they
have learned and loved and enjoyed, until the end. They must still find interest
and amusement and joy in walking the old paths, and doing the old tasks and
meeting the old friends, and rendering the same fine service until the Summons
comes, and then they may lie down to pleasant dreams, to awake to a new, a glo-
rious life, but a life of work and study and love and devoted helpfulness.

No, I shall probably not build many more castles, or climb many more
steep hills, or rise to very great heights, or conquer any worlds in the few days
to come. I live largely in the past, and rest in the halls of memory, and my ambi-
tions and aspirations for the future will live in my children and posterity.

They are my Kingdom. I shall rejoice in their triumphs and their happi-
ness, and sorrow with them in their trials and disappointments and adversities.
I have never aspired to greatness. I am one of the commonest of common folk,
and I would have it so. I desire to walk shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm with
the plain people, of whom the Creator made so many, to be with my true friends
and with good men as I climb up Life’s Eternal Highway.

–86–
 AUTUMN.

The icy breath of Fall adorns the hills,

In gorgeous Autumn hues.
The quaking-aspen flaunts its flaming gold,
And silver shimmering.
The maple, erstwhile green, now red and brown,
The meadow sere, and leaves bestrew the ground.
The torrid heat of Summer but a dream,
Clear chilly nights, the nipping gray of Dawn,
And hazy days, unruffled, cool and calm.

Tis joyous Harvest time, from Nature’s horn

She pours her lavish gifts ungrudgingly,
Rewarding all her patient sons of toil;
Earth’s copious pay-day, compensation time,
The treasure hour of field and tree and vine.

Like Autumn’s peaceful days, Life’s Eventide;

Old men who yesterday were known to fame,
Recount in memory the victories won,
Or else bemoan of failure and defeat.
Life’s Battletime is o’er, the Race is run,
The days of toil are gone, and best of noon
Has vanished into evening solitude.
Twilight comes on in wake of setting sun,
Life’s Harvest-time, when unto men will come
The Verdict of the Just, the Summons Home.

A FINAL TESTIMONY.

And now, I bear Witness and humbly Testify unto you my children, and to all
Men;

That the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was established and
organized in this, the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times, under the direction and
the Revelation of the Lord; that this Church has, and proclaims to the World, the
True and Everlasting Gospel of Jesus the Master.

It is the power of God unto Salvation, His true and Eternal Plan of Life and
Redemption and Exaltation.

A tree is known by it fruits, and the fruits of Mormonism are good.

I bear, and leave with you my sincere Testimony, that I know, as well as I
know any fact in existence, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the LIVING GOD, the
Savior and Redeemer of the World. That He helped to form and create this World,
and was with the Father, and one with Him in the Beginning.
–87–
 That our Father in Heaven and His Son Jesus Christ, came down from
Heaven and stood before the Prophet Joseph Smith, under a spreading tree, in a
Grove in Western New York, and that Jesus, being bidden by His Father told the
boy Prophet that the true Gospel and Authority of the Priesthood was not then
upon the earth, and that the people had gone astray, and taught for Doctrine
the Commandments of men, having a form of Godliness but denying the power
thereof, and that they draw near unto Him with their lips, but their hearts are
removed far from Him. That in this Sublime Vision, and in subsequent visions
and revelations, the Gospel in its fullness and its purity, was revealed and re-
stored for the Eternal blessing and salvation and redemption and exaltation of
mankind.

I know that Joseph Smith was, and is a True Prophet of the Lord, and that
our Gospel Plan is a Fullness of THE TRUTH.

Cling to the Iron Rod, and walk in the STRAIGHT AND NARROW WAY, and
you will pass the awful Gulf of Sin and Destruction, and come at last to the Tree
of Life, and partake of its golden fruits, which are sweet beyond compare, and
bring to the Pilgrim’s soul Eternal Peace and Happiness.

–88–
 SIGNS OF SPRING.

When the red robin sings in the gray chilly morn,

And the bluebird appears in the brake,
And box elder bugs crawl up the side of the wall,
Spring’s at hand, there can be no mistake.

When the groundhog and bear break the long winter fast,
And emerge from the gloom of the den,
Though the chilly winds whistle, and skies are o’er cast,
Spring is wafting to greet us again.

When buttercups blow and the first daisies grow,

And the willows are green by the stream,
And gay Johnny-jump-ups peep up through the snow,
Spring’s a coming, sure that is no dream.

When the honey-bee hums in the soft balmy air,

And the grass in the pasture is green,
And buds fill the tree-tops, so long stark and bare,
Spring is here it is plain to be seen.

When the thrush in the quaking-asp calls to his mate,

And the morning dove croons in the dawn,
And the lad and the maiden stand long at the gate,
That’s s sure sign that winter is gone.

When you look with new hope to each day at the morn,
And new urges you can’t understand,
Stir the soul to the depths, and emotions are born,
Winter’s dead, and the Spring is at hand.

C. W. Dunn, Logan, Utah

February 1933
 THE STEEL GUITAR.

In the tranquil twilight as I muse,

Neath the flickering evening star;
Across the moor through the deepening shades,
Comes the strum of a steel guitar.
A murmuring steel guitar.

Its strains are plaintive and low and sad,

Like the call of the morning dove,
Or the serenade of a Mauri chief,
As he sings to his lady love;
The wail of a steel guitar.

Lamenting and lonesome, in cadence weird,

Like a wandering coyote howl;
Or the mournful strains of a funeral dirge,
Or a chanting monk in his cowl;
The shriek of a steel guitar.

It speaks of the ocean’s ebb and flow,

And of swaying pines at noon;
And the sighing surf neath the coral reef,
As it dies in the blue lagoon;
The moan of a steel guitar.

A whispered call from a palm-decked isle,

In the far off Southern sea,
Where the winds bemoan as the natives sway,
Neath the glowing Kallilea;
The dirge of a steel guitar.

C. W. Dunn, January 1933

 HAVE YOU THE TIME.

Have you the time some kindness to bestow,

Upon God’s helpless creatures here below;
A beast of burden bore the King of Men,
And He the struggling ox drew from the fen,
Have you the time.

Have you the time to greet a little child,

To be the pal of romping girls and boys;
The Master paused and took them on His knee,
Caressed and blessed them,. Shared their woes and glee,
Have you the time.

Have you the time to seek the erring one,

And guide the wandered into the fold;
The Savior raised a woman from the dust,
And bade her go in peace, in Him to trust,
Have you the time.

Have you the time to feed the Shepherds flock,

To visit the afflicted and oppressed;
The Son of Man gave free the bread of Life,
Restored the blind, and calm where all was strife,
Have you the time.

Have you the time to seek His straying sheep,

In parching desert, or on mountain steep;
The Seer of Nazareth sought His lambs afar,
And died upon the cross to ope the door,
Have you the time.

C. W. Dunn
 ONLY A LETTER.

Life seemed an empty dreary rote,

No sunshine filtered in;
My skies were bleak and dark and gray,
I had no heart to win.

I plodded up the hill alone,

Along life’s rocky way;
And then one day a letter came,
And darkness turned to day.

A message of good-will and cheer,

That changed my skies to blue;
And filled my heart with happiness,
And made my dreams come true.

A greeting from a cherished friend,

Long silent and forgot;
Fired up the urge to struggle on,
A miracle was wrought.

For me the robin in the hedge,

Sang in the glowing dawn;
For me the ever blooming rose
Grew crimson by the lawn.

And sunsets reddened in the west,

And purple violets grew;
And brooklets gurgled merrily,
And all the world was new.

And days and weeks and months and years,

Sped merrily along;
A message from an absent friend
Changed life into a song.

C. W. Dunn
 A SCOTCHMAN’S FUN.

A little ragged barefoot boy,

And a red-head grimy lass
Had paused beside a candy shop,
To gaze through the charmed glass.

With hungry sighs and sinking hearts,

They looked through the open door;
And sniffed the bon-bons and the mints,
But alas, the kids were poor.

A burly Scotchman sauntered up,

And saw their longing eyes;
And understood their wistful smiles,
For the Scotch are keen and wise.

Ten pennies to the girl he gave,

And to the boy a dime;
Their little faces brightened,
And he saw their blue eyes shine.

Into the shop they bounded,

The little lass and boy,
And the Scotchman sauntered on his way,
His was the greatest joy.

C. W. Dunn, January 1935

 OLD SHOES

In the dusty depths of a garret chest,

Where I was want to muse,
I found far down in the musty folds
Four pair of ancient shoes.

They revealed a page from the distant years,

Of a time long past and gone;
And brought back memories of toil and tears,
And of gladness and hope and song.

“We covered the feet of a little lad,

With shining curls of gold;
And big blue eyes and a trusting faith,
And only two years old.

He toddled around through the sunlit hours,

And could lisp his baby prayer;
But an angel called in the chilly night,
And he climbed the starry stair.

And so we were sorrowfully tucked away,

With a little frock of blue;
And a tiny stocking that showed a rent
Where a pink toe had peeped through.”

“We plodded through desert and prairie sand,

On the feet of a Pioneer;
To a golden land in the setting sun,
To a home of hope and cheer.

The trail was rough and the mountain range,

Was beset with crag and brake;
But we persevered to the journey’s end,
By the salty inland lake.

We walked in the furrow from dawn till eve,

In the sterile virgin soil;
Till the sage gray desert in verdure laughed
For the sons of sweat and toil.

And then we were silently tucked away,

In the attic so still and lone;
When the weary feet of the Pioneer
Had found their Eternal home.
A story of war and of battle’s din,
The hob-nailed stogies told;
Of march on march over hill and bog,
Over forest and swamp and wold.

Of marching soldiers and tired feet,

And the scream of shot and shell;
And the moans of wounded and dying men,
Who sank in the scorching hell.

How after the smoke and the mist had cleared,

And a new day of peace was born,
A messenger left at the old farm gate,
The stogies and uniform.

And two old forms bent low in tears,

And pledged their love anew;
As they tenderly wrapped the soldiers shoes
In a coat of faded blue.

“We once graced the feet of the village belle,

In the old Virginia reel;
When the cherry tones of her girlish voice,
Rang with laughter, peal on peal.

But she left the old home at the Siren call

Of glittering wealth and fame;
And entered the gate to the scarlet road,
Down the highway of sin and shame.

We came back home in a few short years,

To receive a fond caress,
From trembling hands in the firelight glow,
Two broken hearts to bless.”

C. W. Dunn