HISTORY OF JOSEPH HAMBLIN

Youngest Son of William Haynes Hamblin and Mary Amelia Leavitt

(as dictated to his daughter, Aloha)

My mother was living in Pinto, Utah (which is on the California trail) when I was born. Father had another place at Gunlock where Aunt Betsy and her family lived. She was Father's other wife and Mother's younger sister. The place was named for my Father by George Albert Smith, who after spending the night with him asked him what they called the place and he told them it was known as upper Santa Clara Creek. "We will name it officially after you since everyone calls it Gunlock Hamblin's place anyway." That was in August 1857 when Apostle Smith came down to warn them of Johnston's army. My half sisters, Elmira and Annie were born in Gunlock and Duane while Eliza, Vernon, and Tom were born at the Santa Clara. Then we moved to Pinto. My Grandmother, Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt was with mother when most of the children were born. It was only about 23 miles from there to Pinto. While we were here Father was gone for over 3 years. Two of my sisters were out looking for the cows. They had been gone for sometime and they began to cry when a Man with a long white beard appeared and told them the cows were over the next draw and their father was on his way home. They were so happy they started running to the draw when they stopped to thank the gentleman and could find no trace of him, but the cows were where he said and their Father came home as he said. After talking it over we thought it must have been one of the three Nephites, who were given the same promise as John the Beloved that he should not taste death until the Savior comes again. Richard S. Robinson was the presiding Elder of the Pinto Ward. Then the following year, July 11, 1867, he was made bishop. My parents were on an Indian Mission among the Piute Indians. They weren't free to move whenever they desired, but were counseled to move to Clover Valley 80 miles northwest of St. George as there were more people than the land would support. When Father returned he had wagons full of supplies; enough to open a store, so in Clover Valley we had several rooms that were divided in half, one for us and one for Aunt Betsy with a large front room that could be divided and opened up that we used as sort of a trading store. As the houses were built close together in the shape of a fort with the town ditch running through the center. It was twenty miles from Panaca where father's mine was. Mother would not move there among the heathen men for they were greedy and would kill or do anything. Here Luke Syphus presided in 1870. There were 12 or 15 families. We were attached to the Hebron Ward 30 miles southwest.

The Indians were quite peaceable when we first moved here. They would bring dried berries and pine nuts to trade, but later the winters were bad and then some prospectors came to the lower end of the Meadows and began to shoot the Indians if they stole anything. They became restless and old Bush-head was the head of the trouble- makers so we had to gather our cattle in at night and keep a strong watch around the corral. One night Mr. Hunt shot an Indian and was afraid the other Indians would find out who did it and shoot him, so he moved away. Later we were advised for those living in scattered communities to move together for safety. Uncle Frank and Fred Hamblin were living in Eagle Valley. They moved to Kanab. Uncle Dudley and Jeremiah Leavitt moved to Hebron. We didn't want to move at all. It wasn't the Indians we were afraid of, but bad white men.

It was at Clover Valley Sarah Daphne, my oldest sister was married to Edgar Deal in June 1871, and the next year she and her baby girl were buried there. Then Father was poisoned in May of 1872. All I remember of him in his coffin and before that I remember my Mother put a pink dress on me and I tore it in shreds getting it off. If she didn't spank me she should of done. I don't know if it was for punishment or she had nothing else to put on me. Another time the old cat had some kittens and they were going to drown them and I said I want at least one, but they threw them all in and I jumped in and got the little white one.

After Father's death, Mother began talking about moving to Arizona. Before we left, Eliza and Amelia got married the same day, July 11, 1872. Then in November started for Kanab. It was on the border between Utah and Arizona. It took eight days to go from St. George to Kanab, 120 miles. We stayed in Santa Clara with Grandma a few days. Some of the Mangums caught up with us and said they were down on the Paria, so after visiting with Aunt Pricilla in Kanab, we went down there for Christmas. Then Amelia was going to have a baby so Mother and I went back to Clover Valley. We left Rachel and Tom with Eliza on the Paria. The baby was born August 9, 1874, so I must have been six or seven. We all came back the first of September so Mother could take care of Eliza when her first baby was born. Then the United Order was started the 1^st of October 1874. I gave my little pinto pony and Mother gave her cows and all she had. And when Bishop Stewart died 1877, his sons claimed everything, but Mother got her old cows back because father's brand was on them, and a man gave me a little colt mare racing horse. I traded it to the Navajos for part of our equipment and clothes. Mother talked Aunt Betsy and all of us to go to the St. George temple which was just finished April 6, 1877. We must have been there for the dedication for all the people there hauled logs and lumber from the Buckskin Mountains on the Kaibab Forest. During the year 1875 one hundred men were engaged at the temple in construction work. One hundred more were at the rock quarries and forty were engaged in furnishing lumber, totaling 240 men. Over a million feet of lumber were used in constructing the building. Some of the beams were exceedingly large being 12" by 24" by 26' to 46' long. Much of it was hauled by ox team.

We wanted to cross the Colorado River when it was low in the fall and early enough before the snows fell in the Buckskin Mountains. It was in November we went over the Mountains and camped at House Rock. Mother and Rachel and Tom and I camped in front of the fort and Eliza on one side and Amelia and her three babies on the other side. Aunt Betsy and her family inside and I think Aunt Pricilla too came at the same time. This was the fixing-up-place before we crossed the desert. It was about here we saw the camels Lieutenant Edward Beal brought in from Syria. They carried three times a mule-load and were declared ideal for pioneer uses and his survey of the 35^th parallel across Arizona in 1857 and 1859, but our land was too hard for their feet and they were turned loose on the plains when he made Minister to Austria in 1878.

In taking the cattle across the Colorado River, some would swim and some were ferried across and some of them were so obstinate they would swim back every night and had to be crossed as many as three times. At House Rock Mother traded a cow and calf for an ox that ran off the next day which we never recovered. We heard later they had been sold countless times, but always would find its way back to its original owner who knew its trait and that he had traded it to a poor widow. John Will Mangum traded his fine black matched horses for oxen. We were told that any one that ever tried to go to Arizona with horses was sure sorry they didn't have oxen for the roads were just trails, either rough chunky rocks or sand so deep that the spokes buried out of sight, and the little Colorado was dangerous with quicksand beds.

At Moenkopi where Father had been several times, my pony Mother had given me to take the place of the one we traded to the Navajos was stolen as were all the horses. So I joined a party to hunt them and didn't see Mother for three months, but found the mare and got a start from her, and gave my sister colts from which they got their start.

When we found the folks forty miles away from St. Johns, they were living at Milligans Fort where the Mexicans had shot it to pieces. They would gamble and fight and kill. There was a stream of water running Northwest which was frozen up, so they couldn't run the saw mill or grist mill and their supplies were running out and the snow was three feet deep. They went to Nutrioso and traded for some barley so we lived on barley bread and hogs heads. Mr. Milligan had about 300 head. He got Charley Webb and John Will Mangum to kill them for him for the heads and that is how I found Tom cleaning hogs heads. Then they got a contract to log some pines out of the mountains. Tom and I helped, then we went to McNary where Emily and Warren Follett lived and worked all summer from daylight until dark for one dollar a day to earn enough lumber to build a log cabin and did the chores for the man before daylight until dark, and built a two room log cabin for our Mother near Springerville. She was kept busy as a midwife. James Harvey Mangum was born February 4, 1880. Then my other sister Amelia had Charles Webb April 8, 1889 and Aunt Pricilla had Dudley May 5, 1880. Then my sister Emily Follett had Rachel near McNary at the Forks of the road in 1881. Mother was called from all over for she was so kind and had such good luck she was in great demand. My sister Rachel married Albert Lewis, step-son of John Wesley Norton. This was the 2^nd marriage in Amity and she had Sarah. She was engaged to her cousin Lym.

In 1881 the Apache Indians were raiding the country so we moved into a fort. Then Bishop A. V. Greer laid out the town October 29, 1882 and called it Amity which means friendship. While we were at the Fort here my brother Billy was living at the Fort in Alpine where Uncle Fred located and my sister Almira Adair, where John Dudley Hamblin was born 8 July 1882 and LeRoy Adair was born 22 January 1882. Then Almira, and Billy and Amelia and Eliza and Rachel all moved to Nutrioso. The climate was better than Alpine and the cows could be kept out in the fields longer. My sister Betsy Mangum was there in 2 July 1884 where George Haynes was born. Then she too moved to Nutrioso. It was about this time we got squatter's rights in a little cove on the divide which was later known as the Dudley Hamblin place. Abe Martin lived there before Dudley; before that Billy. One morning mother went to the door to go to the spring when a big brown bear ran right in front of her. We had a large place there where all the young people would come and spend the weekends. We would go to the lower valley for the winter for the roads would be snowed in. The summertime was the time to make press cheese and butter and we would put the cheese in brine water and it would keep all winter, eggs too. We would salt our pork and some beef this way too. We could go out anytime and kill us a deer or turkey. There were plenty of lions around. Whenever the cows would come in we could tell a lion was near. Our clothes were made of buckskin too, at least the pants. I remember I was on the mountain with the cows and one of those sudden summer showers came up before I could take cover. (Sometimes it rained every afternoon.) I came into a cow camp and was bent over trying to keep warm when my buckskins dried in that position. I went over to the chuck wagon to get some beans and one old man thought he would get the laugh on me. He said, "For goodness sakes, Joe, if you're going to jump, jump." I noticed his buckskins were about in the same shape as mine. To get the cows to market we would have to drive them to Magdelina, New Mexico where the railroad was and bring a freight back for some store to make the trip pay. Then we began to hear about the Gila Valley. A lot of the people were moving there. More work for cash and the climate wasn't so cold. You could raise so many more things and a larger valley. Tom made a trip in 1881. Annie married Ezra Lee in September 1882, and they went down and Clara went to stay with Annie and married Frank Lee in December 1888. Pricilla married Tom Alger in December 1891 in Nutrioso and they moved down. He was the first bishop of Lebanon. Tom married Irene Copelan in June and they moved to Gila. We went as far as McNary with them and stayed with Emily until they got ready to go. (She hasn't been right since she was out riding on a half wild horse and hit her head on a limb and knocked her off. It was quite awhile before she was found.) From then on Mother thought she should be near her to help with the children. She had one more born to her in the Gila Valley.

Now that they had captured Geronimo, it was safe, for he was the one who stirred up trouble. As a rule most of the Indians never bothered the white people, but hated the Mexicans since Coronado took all those Indians captive so they had war ever since. They treated the white man as the white man treated them.

Charley Webb and John Will Mangum got a sawmill in the Graham Mountains, which was first J. K. Roger's and then Harve Blain and Mr. Jeddar, a school-teacher got it, and they got it from them. The mountains were so rough we had to haul the logs out on a point and shoot two logs tied together to the bottom. If you wasn't careful they would bust like match sticks. We would call down to watch the children for we were going to shoot. Later we had a cabin in back of where the Arcadia Ranger's Station is. It was here in the Graham Mountains when mother died 12 August 1893. (They sent Will Follett to town for the doctor). A panther followed him all the way. It must have been locked bowels that she died of. All the girls dressed in white dresses and with tree limbs followed all the way to Pima to keep the flies away. After she was buried, the railroad went by the spot so we had to move the grave in 1899. In moving it some of us wanted to see how things were and when the air hit the body it fell like a balloon, but her hair, which was jet-black and long had grown quite a bit. She is now at rest in the Pima Cemetery.