Thursday, May 21, 2009
Aunt Ruth's Book, Frank's Autobiography, page 1, paragraph 4
My father visited Mesa, Arizona in August 1885 and liked it so well that he moved with his wife and baby to Mesa. They went by Smithville, (now Pima) in Graham County, Arizona where they visited mother’s family. While there, I was seized with convulsions and was administered to by patriarch McBride and healed at once. I never had any more attacks.
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Would someone please look in Our Ellsworth Ancestors to see if this “visit” in August 1885 was the trip to pick up Edmund on his release from several months in the Yuma Territorial Prison for polygamy? As I recall, Edmund recommended the Mesa area to his sons at that time. I was born and raised in Mesa and even I can’t understand how anyone—-especially in 1885—-could be impressed by the place in August when they already had a home in the pines and meadows of Eastern Arizona, a place that residents of Mesa now try to get away to in August! Note that the clan had only been in Showlow (and Arizona) for 5 years at that time and that Edmund’s children were coming of age and needing more room. Note also that Mesa was a well-established Mormon community with room to expand and no snow on the roof. It’s one thing to make a 4-hour drive from Mesa to Showlow to enjoy a weekend in the snow and quite another to make a 2-week trip between the same two towns on 1885 by wagon over rough and scary roads. We’re talking commitment here.
Grandpa Frank mentions that the family consisted of father, mother, and himself only at the time of the Big Move to the desert. They got off the Mogollon Rim as quickly as possible by heading down to the Gila Valley. Let’s not forget that the Apaches weren’t completely controlled by that date (something else to look up), and that the trip took them through what is now the San Carlos Reservation. Also, these were young newlyweds. George, Sr. was 27-28, and Sarah was 19. Nineteen! Frank was less than a year old. What a miserable trip that must have been. I wonder who traveled with them from Showlow to Pima. Also, would someone please check to see when the next child was born. I suspect that Sarah was pregnant, and nursing, and changing 1885 diapers, the whole trip. Yep. This is confirmed later in Frank’s narrative. His mother was in the first trimester of pregnancy with his sister, Hilda May, who was born at the end of July 1886 in Mesa. Oh, the discomforts!
Grandpa Frank says they visited his mother’s family, the Folletts, in Pima (then Smithville) on the way to Mesa. It makes me wonder when and where they met. Sarah’s father, William Alexander Follett, was a bishop in Provo when Sarah was born in 1866. There were only four wards there at the time. Sarah’s mother, Nancy Fausett (Fawcett), was the daughter of one of the other bishops, William McKee Fausett.
Sure enough, Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches surrendered the following year, 1886. In other words, while baby Frank and his parents were traveling from the Gila Valley to Mesa, the U.S. cavalry was in the same area trying to capture the last Apaches.
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