AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN MORSE JONES
by John Morse Jones " 1882-1975
Son of Ricy
Jones
"It was in the early summer when a gypsy woman came to
mother's door inquiring if she could tell mother's fortune. "It will only cost
you fifty cents," said the gypsy. Mother
said she didn't have the money. "Oh, yes," replied the gypsy, pointing across
the room at the mantle shelf above the charteroak
stove, "In the vase on the shelf is fifty cents." So, mother, being caught, gave her the last
fifty cents in the house. The gypsy then
turned to mother and said, "You have a big family of girls and you are going to
have a boy."
"On Tuesday, I was born in the middle room of a long three-room log house on the
most important corner in the center of Wellsville. I was the sixth child and
first boy in my mother's family, and the sixth boy and 14th child in
my father's family, as he was a Polygamist but had divorced his first wife, Ann
Howell. She with her eight children had moved to Brigham
City before I was born.
"My father was born in the old rock dwelling on the Masybidya
Farm in Wales
where four generations of his predecessors were born before him.
"I was named John Morse Jones after my two grandfathers. My paternal grandparents were John Jones and Hetty Davis. My
maternal grandparents were John Morse and Anne Bennet. I was blessed in Wellsville by Evan Owen, and
I was baptized in a small stream in Wellsville by Richard Brenchley.
"My schooling was quite limited, as by this time we had moved to our 120-acre
farm two miles out of town. There was
always plenty of work in good weather, and being the oldest boy I never got to
school except in the wintertime. About
the first thing I remember doing was going to the farm with father in the
wagon, driving the two mules. Of course,
with father I was the only boy in the world, as he and mother had five girls
before I came along. So, wherever father
was, I was right on his heels. Everyday,
I followed father while he farmed, doing everything, of course, by hand. After I turned five years old, father sold
the choice corner lot to Joseph Howell, where Mr. Howell built the Co-op Store.
"While waiting for father to rebuild the house, as he had to tear it all down
to move it to the farm, we lived in what we called "Howell's old rock house,"
which was built on the same block as ours.
This house, by the way, is still standing after almost 79 years. While living there, my second brother High
was born. I remember my older sister
waking me early that morning and when I wanted to know why, she said we were
going for a long walk. I suppose mother
had instructed her just how long to stay out, because when we returned to the
house a new little brother Hugh with lots of red hair was there.
"When I started school, our schoolhouse was one big room with a wood stove in
the center of the room; it was located in the center of a file-mile-square
farming district. Most of the 25 to 50
students walked from one to three miles to school. There were no grades, just the first to the
fifth reader all together in one room.
My first teacher was Mary Owen, the daughter of Evan Owen. Every Friday afternoon before dismissal, the
whole school would choose up sides and have a spelling bee down to the last
student, or the teacher would tell us a true story. One day, Miss Owen told us how her father
lost his middle finger. He was hauling
rocks from the mountain to build a house, and when he lifted a big rock, a
rattlesnake bit his middle finger. There
was no doctor, so he took out his pocket knife and put his hand on the wagon
and cut his finger off at the second joint.
"When I was in the third reader, my teacher Robert Pierce,
offered a prize for the best speller in school.
So, liking spelling and arithmetic, I began learning to spell every big
word I saw. For my efforts, I received a
beautiful fountain pen for being the best speller in school that year.
"As we burned wood in the stove, the trustee's bought anything from small maple
cordwood to piece-logs 3 to 4 feet through.
One day a man brought a load of logs, and Mr. Pierce, being busy, asked
who would like to go out and measure the logs so the man could get his
pay. I volunteered, and when I brought
the measurements in, he asked me to write them on the board so we could discuss
them in class. That started a routine
which I have followed most of my life.
About twice a week after school, instead of going home, I went with some
of my school chums and measured their haystacks, woodpiles, grain bins, water
tanks, or anything handy. Then the
teacher had me put the figures on the board for our class work. I completed the first through the fifth
reader in that same one room and graduated at the age of seventeen.
"Then I went to Idaho and worked on the highline canal long enough to see me
through one year at the AC College, where I went in 1900-1901. In 1902-1903 I attended BYC in Logan
where I was in all the same classes and taking the same course as Hugh B.
Brown, and associated directly with Melvin J. Ballard, who was teaching singing
in some of my classes every week. I was
supposed to leave for a church mission in 1903, but having a streak of bad luck
in the form of a hail storm, I had to forget the mission and go to work for the
next eight years. The hailstones from
this storm were as big as hen's eggs and they destroyed everything in their
path, killing hogs, mules, horses and cows.
The destruction was most evident in Wellsville, and continued up towards
Mt. Sterling. It took up to six weeks to get the scattered
stock back to their owners. I then did
an assortment of different things such as farming, mining, saw milling,
railroading, and building. My father passed
away in 1908, and two years later I was again called on a mission, which I
accepted, and left for Ireland
16 May 1910. In that day we were sent on a mission without
purse or script.
"While tracting one time with my companion, we came
upon eight or ten men threshing and made a deal with them, that if we helped
them thresh, they would listen to the gospel.
Threshing was completed in two days instead of the usual week. Then we preached the gospel to them and they
listened. Another time I wore a hole in
one of my shoes and had to have it patched.
It was done skillfully for the price of only 35 cents."
This next part is transcribed from a tape
by my nephew Owen J. Olsen in 1957:
"The summer of 1912, after I had filled 26 months of missionary work in the
Irish Conference, I went to Cardiff Wales in search of my ancestors. After spending all day riding with a priest
on a jaunting cart, I had the privilege and pleasure of stamping down the same
roads, of visiting the same neighbors, and visiting the old schoolhouse where,
some 84 years previously, my father had attended. I also had the pleasure of eating supper in
the dwelling where my father and four generations before him had been born; a
beautiful, well-kept Welsh long-house built of rock on the old Masybidya farm in Abergorlech, Wales. From the unfinished attic of that house, I
collected splinters from the black oak rafters and put them in my "Testament,"
which I carried in my back pocket.
Later, while at the Coronation, a woman weighing 200 pounds took my
Testament, probably thinking it was a purse.
I never recovered it or the oak splinters.
"There was a spring, clear as crystal on top of the ground, with Hawthorne
around the outside. American beauty
roses were growing all around the house.
It was really a pleasure as I contacted some of the friends that grew up
with my father. They told me of some of
his young life while he was yet going to this school which I had the pleasure
of trudging three miles down the dusty road to see. He grew up the same as they had done for four
generations before him, with the same religion and the same routine, the same
neighbors, in a farming community. They
were considered wealthy as farmers in those days. His family consisted of eight children, five
girls and three boys, father and mother.
They lived the same life, the same religion, down through the ages for
four generations that we know of, never changing religion, never changing even
the neighborhood.
"When I visited in 1912, the same neighbors were there that had been there 84
years before, when my father was born. An old gent with a beard below his waist
told me quite a bit of the boyhood of my father and his friends, the school
that they all attended, and everything was practically the same routine up
until about 1847.
"Then, I think, there was a missionary who came into the district from a new
country, America, which was then practically new, preaching a new religion the
world have never heard, preaching a different form of religion than had never
been preached in the country before, even worshipping a God that had body,
parts and passions, that they had never heard tell of before, such as a human
being. Well, at this time, a few of the
God-fearing people of the district recognized that there was something
important to this religion. As my father
was about 17 at this time, a husky, inquisitive young man, he investigated this
religion. By 1849, in the spring, he had been baptized, joined the church,
decided to leave his family, his friends, his estate, and everything near and
dear to him in the world to go to a new country and embrace a new religion,
something that was new to the world at that time. He had no idea, of course, what condition he
was going into, because the people of Europe had no idea
what a desert was. They had no idea that
2000 miles of desert and nothing but Indians and wild beasts would make much
difference. But, he had enough courage,
enough determination to leave all that was near and dear to him, and embrace
the gospel and move into this new country.
"In the spring of 1849, my father left his native land, sailing to the new
world, and was on his way to American, where he spent 55 days on the
ocean. They landed alright, after losing
many souls with cholera on the ship, and he came straight through New
Orleans to Council Bluffs,
landing in the Salt Lake
Valley in the fall of 1849, two
years after the pilgrimage across the plains by the company of Brigham Young
and his 145 followers.
"When my father landed in Salt Lake,
he didn't have any money. He didn't have a job, and it was late in the fall,
too late to accomplish a great deal, so the first winter he lived on anything
that he could find, mostly digging tame sego lilies, on the side-hills of Salt
Lake Valley. He finally got a job from Brigham Young and
worked for his board for the first year.
Eventually, I think in 1854, he married Ann Howell. We have in her history where Ann Howell Jones
carried her first son Ricy Howell Jones, and went
from door to door begging and getting what help they could to start life as a
family. He eventually acquired the lot
where the D&RG depot stands today.
He had a ten-acre lot right where the depot was afterwards built.
"Father was an officer in the Indian War, for which he and his wife Margaret,
after he died, received a pension as long as they lived. He, of course, was called to settle the
outlying districts. I think in 1855 he
went to Brigham City. The house still stands in Old Brigham City
that he built of rock in 1856. It was
right along the road under the east mountains where
the old road went, three miles north of Brigham City. He lived there and reared quite a few of his
children. John Taylor was supervisor
over the whole north end of the District of Utah then, and eventually they sent
father to help settle Cache Valley. When he arrived there, he dug a hole in the
side of the hill where Wellsville now stands and lived in that dugout. One or two of his children were born
there. In 1868, if I remember correctly,
he married my mother Margaret Morse and in 1874 he divorced Ann Howell. Ann took her children to Brigham
City, and he raised another family by Margaret Morse
in Wellsville, where he spent the remainder of his life, and where his second
family grew up.
"What they call Wellsville Creek, runs past town,
within one-half mile. It was probably
three-fourths to one-half mile wide. The
clay banks on the west side were straight up and down, about 50 to 60 feet high. That is where they all went and lived in
dugouts the first years until they could build homes. After building their first log house up in
town, they moved out of the dugout.
Then, when he homesteaded the farm two miles south of town, he moved it
on the farm and built a three-room, split-log house in the center of Wellsville
where he raised his family, except the last two, or the last four.
"Father homesteaded 160 acres just two miles south of town. We sold the house in Wellsville and moved out
on the farm when I was five years old.
My second youngest brother Hugh was born after we moved out of the
house. We rented a house belonging to
Ann Howell's brother, Joe Howell. My
brother was born in that house just two months after we moved out of our old
home.
"I was five years old when we moved on the ranch. The first I remember of any consequence was
two years before we moved out. My father
used to take me out because I was the oldest boy, and I was always with
father. When he homesteaded, he hired my
wife's grandfather to help him put up the fence which still stands around the
120 acres that he fenced, and I carried water for my father and my wife's grandfather. It was a barbed-wire fence, and it is now
owned by my baby brother Sterling,
as we all relinquished our claims to him, since he was the youngest in the
family, and he took over the 120 acres.
"The other 40 acres in the homestead was sold to a once Negro slave who came to
Utah with the Bankheads,
and started out for himself. He called
himself Nate Bankhead. He purchased this land before we even had
time to fence it. He ran that land, got
married, and raised a family. The Bankheads, three brothers, all lived neighbors to us. Nate, being one of
the slaves of John Bankhead, one of the three
brothers, started out for himself. Up
until they settled in Wellsville, he stayed with his slave owner, the Bankheads, and moved from the South with him.
"My father stayed on his 120 acres and raised his second family, having five
girls first, and then five boys. I am
the oldest of the five boys, and I am younger than the five sisters.
"The Hawbush
Canal or Ditch was a natural stream
that ran from what we called New Canyon,
3-1/2 miles up the canyon, and across about four miles in the valley when it
hit the level country. If I remember
right, there was 10 second feet in what we called the Hawbush
Stream, that ran through the middle of my father's
farm. He acquired 10 shares of water,
and every week, every seven days, we had two days of irrigation. There were only 38 acres, if I remember
right, of the 120 that were under this irrigation system. That is where we planted and raised our crops
until I was big enough to farm the sagebrush that was above the water. I plowed the land, and father and I hauled
1000 or 1200 loads of rock off that land, because it seemed like a sold hill of
rock.
"We hauled the rocks to the fence line and to the ditch, because the ditch was
a natural channel. The Hawbush water ditch had washed through our place for 160
rods about 7 feet deep. In order to get
the water out, we hauled those rocks and made rock dams every 200 feet for that
160 rods. That helped to keep the
channel from washing, and it raised the water so that we were able to get it
out any place along the 160 rods that we had a mind to. So we had two main headgates,
and we irrigated this land. We hired my
wife's father, John Wyatt, to cradle this irrigated grain. He would cut that grain with a cradle, one
acre a day, a scythe with a frame that he called a
cradle. Every swath of that cradle
amounted to one bundle of grain. He
would cut one swath, take it in the cradle, and pull out a handful and bind
it. That was the way he helped us to
cradle our grain. He was the only man I
ever heard of that could cradle and bind an acre of wheat a day.
"For this, John Wyatt got flour and ham, because we always had pork. We paid him in produce, and if we didn't have
the produce, he waited until harvest time when we sold the grain and got the
money. There was only one payday a year,
and that was harvest time. We had a
general store where we did our trading.
They handled everything. They put
it down on the cuff, and in the fall of the year when we sold our grain and
hay, we went and paid our store bill. We
never had any cash. If we had anything
to deal with, it was store orders from the general store. He would issue us a store order if we wanted
to go and buy something he didn't have.
We dealt entirely in store orders.
They only time we ever saw any money was when we harvested our
crops. If we had any produce, we paid
for the harvest in produce such as hams, because my father killed the
pigs. Ever since I was born and big enough
to remember, he had the pork. He took
grain to the mill and had the flour bin full of flour one year after the
other. I never saw a time in my life
when the flour bin wasn't full of flour.
"In Wales they
call a hog a mocun dee. My mother taught me a song they call "The Mocun Dee." When
they killed the mocun dee,
it was harvest time. Mocun
dee is pig black.
In Wales,
everything is backwards. If they want
the dish rag, they will say, "Alice
pass the rag dish."
If they want to say black pig, it is pig black or mocun
dee. If they
want to say red castle, it is Castle koch,
or Castle red. So everything in the
pronunciation of Welsh is backwards.
"I wouldn't know where they got the first hogs, because when I was born, my
father had a herd of hogs.
"Cottonwood trees were planted along the Hawbush when I was about 12 years old. There was a neighbor a mile down the Hawbush stream; in fact, he was right on the end of the
stream. He had what they called a wood
lot which he had built for wind protection. He must have had 10,000 cottonwood sprouts in
that wood lot. My father carried limbs
off those cottonwood trees and stuck them in the mud when we were making the
dams, hauling the rocks. I asked him why
he put the limbs in. I said, "They won't
help make the dam." "No," he said, "they
will grow, and in two years from now we will have what they call a wood
lot." Nine out of every ten of those
shoots that we stuck in the mud along the edge of the creek grew. When I left the ranch in about 1916, there was
160 rods of solid cottonwood trees on both sides of the stream of water down
three feet below the top of the ground, level with the ground. They all had grown and we left them there. You could see them ten miles away. Those were in addition to the natural willows
that grew there. Some of those trees
grew to be 70 feet high and three feet thick.
"My mother taught me a song about the hogs.
It has been a long while since I have sung it. Let's see if I can remember how it goes
now. Sorry, my Welsh isn't
what it might be.
"When they killed the Mocum
Dee,
Oh, how happy we can be,
Oh, how happy we can be.
There was grief and tribulation,
When we lost the Mocum
Dee."
Father's first wife Ann Howell had an estate in Wales. When they lived in Brigham
City, her mother went back to Wales
and got this estate. Father took part of
the money Ann's mother gave him, went to Omaha,
bought a freight wagon and hauled it by ox team from Omaha
out here, which he freighted with, as he was a teamster. He freighted for a livelihood for a number of
years when he lived in Wellsville. He
would be gone weeks at a time, hauling goods from Corinne to Pioche, Nevada. He then hauled freight products back from Pioche to Corinne.
He would load up again at Corinne, haul a load to Montana
and return with a load of ore from Butte.
"I found the last yoke and bow that father ever used in his freight line and
had them put away in the garrett
of the old house on the homestead when I was a kid, so that when I grew up I
would have a relic of the old times.
Before I had a chance to get them out and put them away, the house
burned down and burned my prize yoke and bow; the last yoke and bow that he
ever used on a yoke of oxen in his freight line.
"After the railroad was built into Corinne they had a terminal there, and that
was the outlying station. Everything from there had to be hauled by ox
team.
"On one trip from Omaha with the
wagon, father brought seed corn back with him and it was distributed among the
settlers, so they would have something to start a new crop. This was seed corn that he brought all the
way from Kansas.
"The first wheat that father had a chance to grow after he moved into Brigham
City, he walked to Salt
Lake, then returned, carrying 50
pounds of grain on his back to plant.
That was the first crop of grain raised after he had moved to Brigham
City, after he carried it on his back and walked from Salt
Lake to Brigham
City.
"So, we his children and grandchildren have no more idea of what poverty and
what privation and what hardships our parents, our grandparents, and our
great-grandparents had, to bring us into this world, in this day and age of the
world, and in the best country of the world.
"I returned from my 28-month foreign mission to Ireland
August, 1912, was married and took over the farm two years later. Our first home was the old ranch house, as
mother bought a new home next to the church in Wellsville. I worked on the
first concrete highway north from here through Logan
to the Idaho line. In 1922 I started working for the Union
Pacific yards in Salt Lake
as car inspector and checker, where I had a seven-day assignment. I worked there for about ten years. During this time my family lived in Bountiful
and Salt Lake City. In 1930 I fell from a boxcar, injuring my
head, requiring hospitalization. They
laid me off soon after. I moved to West
Jordan about Christmas 1931, stopped railroading, and
took up farming again on land my mother helped me obtain for $3200. Times were very hard then.
"During World War II, from 1942 to 1945, I worked at Camp
Kearns and Fort
Douglas as a laborer while young fellows were being
drafted for the war. I have been farming
ever since, and we have raised five boys and three girls. Our son Ricy died
in 1942 from injuries in a car accident.
Our daughter Hazel Marie died in 1959.
Two girls and four boys are still living. We have 38 living grandchildren and 42 great
grandchildren living. [1975]
"Despite the fact I moved around considerably as a young man, I was always
active in the church, and came up through all the offices of the
Priesthood. I have taught the 2nd
intermediate Sunday School class for two years, was
YMMIA President for two years at Mt. Sterling,
was Superintendent of the Belfast Ireland Branch Sunday School for five months
with 75 active members. I also taught
the High Priest's class at West Jordan
4th Ward for two years. I
filled a Home Mission and spent two years as President of the Bingham Branch
Home Mission. I've performed baptisms
for the dead and taught genealogy for a year at the West Jordan Ward."
Note: John once played the harmonica,
was a good heavy worker, and a student of religion. He died at the age of 93 at his home, and
left a large posterity of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.
