1
Tape 1
Begins with harmonica playing “I’ll Go Where You Want Me To Go, Dear Lord”
This tape is an interview with George Payne (G), Leo Stokes (L), Roscoe Anderson (R) regarding the history of Bothwell as they remembered it in their parent’s time and in their own. It was made in the home of Reed Anderson with Reed and Mabel Anderson (M) and Jeannette (JR) and LaMoyne Roberts (LR) present, April 10, 1975 [intro transcribed from tape].
G: I believe it was a Lou Grant that brought them folks over too, remember a Grant that lived over by Honeyville? I remember Dad talking about Lou Grant
L: I can remember him mentioning it
G: We had to pay work out $40 for this Grant paid his tuition fees or whatever you call it from coming from England over here, see. They charged at that time so much to come into the country.
M: To come into the country?
G: There was one guy that had to work two years to pay his off.
L: Who was it sponsored your father then?
G: No, this Grant sponsored my father and then he herded sheep for him to pay it back.
L: Oh, I see.
G: Then he earned enough money to bring my mother over to Honeyville. They lived over to Honeyville. There was us three kids. There was my oldest sister, Erma, and Rose and me all born over to Honeyville.
L: Oh, Did Grandpa Payne come first?
G: No
L: When did come?
G: He come right after, he come with my mother, him and Grandma.
M: Well now, what was your father’s name?
G: William George Payne, that’s where I get my George from.
R: They used to say, “Safe as the dollar in Bill Payne’s pocket.”
M: Well, they had to be thrifty, you know.
L: Did everybody that come from Europe have to pay that emigration fee?
G: Well, I don’t know. Somebody had to sponsor them. There was several guys that sponsored them, but they had to work it out or else pay it when they got here and got some money. I don’t know what kind of a deal it was on. And when this canal got here, I guess, that got what--$0.89 a day to work on it and skilled labor got a dollar to put this canal around here. And when this canal was built, it was built bigger than it is today. And then they found it was too big. It went down as far as . The first time it was built, I believe it was the Lawrence Peterson place and they stopped it there for awhile. The next year they turned the water in and started watering and they found out that they had so much water they just let it run over the ground in here and it kind of waterlogged the ground, the way I understand it. And they couldn’t raise much. Then they had to start tiling and building ditches and leveling it, so they could get it all and the wastewater away. I been telling it all, but I can’t remember it. To tell you the truth, don’t ask me to tell it to you. There’s a lot of little things I can remember but—
Someone comes to the door.
L: Roscoe, Roscoe! Come in. I’ve got a seat for you.
R: Who’s these to old codgers you got over here?
L: Hurd came along. Oh, he says, “Don’t raise up to shake hands with me.” I says, “Brother Hurd when I lay in the casket, you come along, and I’ll raise and shake your hand.” He’s always got some joke or other to tell.
M: Isn’t he cute? He used to live next door to Mother and Dad, and he always had something.
R: I thought you was talking about me.
Laughter
LR: When we said being cute, huh?
R: This guy on the pulpit was getting his casket built and he was going to have a lock on the inside because he didn’t want anybody dropping in on him.
Laughter
L: That’s a good one.
M: What we really wanted you gentlemen together for, we are trying to write as authentic a history of Bothwell as we can. We thought maybe we would start out with, since your parents were the first to come into the valley, we would start out with you remembering what your parents told you about coming here.
G: Well, Virginia’s got all mine, except outside the dry farm a little.
M: Well the thing of it is, if they were members of the church, did they ever tell you how they were converted?
G: Mine never did me, much. My mother was quite religious when they first come here, but Dad never was.
M: Was he a member of the church when he came?
G: Yeah, he was married in the temple.
M: Which temple, Salt Lake or Logan?
G: I think Salt Lake because they lived over here in Honeyville for five, six years before they ever homesteaded the dry farm, then they went up there till they—I believe in them days maybe you had to live on a dry farm and build a home for five years before you could prove up on it--I think we was up there for six years before he got this place down here. He bought this twelve acres when the water come in, then he sold two acres to the school board when they built that schoolhouse. The schoolboard sold it back to us when the school was removed.
M: And that was where, by Gladys?
G: Um huh, just south of Gladys’s.
R: You also had to fence it, didn’t you?
G: Um hum, we had to keep it fenced.
L: Now was that a three-year agreement with the government or five, George?
G: I thought it was five, Leo. If I understood it right, them days it was five. You had to do so much for them and do so much fencing and build a home on it ‘cause my father and them built that log cabin.
M: And where was that? Which place/area now if we went to designate it? Where was it at?
G: Reed Harris place, where Reed Harris got was the place. It’s a half-mile wide and a mile long. Goes clear up to Isaacson’s fence.
M: Oh, north of Daddy Anderson’s?
L: No, not north of Daddy Anderson’s.
M: Well, Isaacson’s is up that way.
LR: That’s three, no two, miles north.
L: It’s up there farther, against the mountain.
G: We built the log cabin on the north end of it, clear up there, pert near to the north fence. It was just a little ways from the north fence because the Isaacson place was next to us at the time. Course, they didn’t own that at that time.
LR: How big was your log cabin at that time?
G: This was just one room, it was twenty [feet] by thirty [feet]. All in one.
M: How many children?
G: There was three of us. Ida was born there just before we moved down here. There was four of us up there, but she wasn’t there only just born a few months just before we moved down to this place.
LR: What kind of a stove did you have to heat it in the wintertime? Just a cookstove?
G: Um hum.
R: Used plum and hickory.
Laughter
M: Sagebrush?
G: All we did on that dry farm was burn sagebrush, fence, and haul rocks.
L: When your first grain was cut, how did you harvest it? With a header?
G: We didn’t have a header. There wasn’t a header made then. There wasn’t hardly any machinery.
M: Did you have the horses tromp it out or something?
LR: Did you use a binder?
G: I think so. I think they had some old binders in those days, of some kind that they bound.
R: Bound it, then thrashed it.
G: Horse-powered thresher wasn’t it, Ros?
R: Yes, they didn’t have any floor on, they just had a straw stacker. They used to hand beat them, too. A man stood up there and he kept .Remember the old horse beater with Lou Christensen’s and . That was pretty well along the same style as that Grundy.
M: But that was a few years later.
G: Yeah, that was a long while later.
L: The first thresher machine had a horsepower. It would go round in a circle. You’ve seen that.
M: I’ve seen that.
L: You know we’d a got a good education if we’d a gone up to Mendon and saw that deal. A person could stand there and feed that thing, it was real dusty, they had to stand right to the mouth of it. You’d see them get a handkerchief around their neck and then a big wad of tobacco in their mouth.
M: To keep their throat moist.
L: Well, these horsepower was our folks’s.
R: Remember old Charlie Forsgren, Dick’s dad? He could make two bits a day from them horse-powered threshers. They had kind of a steel bucket; it’d hold thirty pounds.
L: That’s a half bushel
G: That’s how they measured the grain and weighed it and kept track of it for threshing.
L: It had ears on it so you could take it off.
G: They gave me two bits a day to hold sacks for that for while they dumped it in there.
M: We’d like to go back to why they came to this country in the first place.
L: Well, I’ve heard Grandpa Payne, maybe George could tell it better than I, but he joined the church in the old country, in England.
M: You don’t know which missionaries it was that converted him?
L: No, you can get that from Dorothy Firth. Grandpa Payne came, and he was one of the first settlers along with Andrew Anderson and Nels Anderson and Rasmus. My father came in later, and he settled up next to Blind Springs on a homestead up there. And Grandpa Payne was just, well his corner joined father’s corner, and Lada (?) walked down through the field to see Grandma Payne.
G: Grandpa and Grandma Payne, my Grandma and Grandpa Payne that maybe you were talking about, lived on the old Hawkins place. They homesteaded that about the same time we homesteaded the other one joining it, see.
M: Oh, that’s where Leora Eberhard lives.
G: No, that was the dry farm.
M: Oh, up on the dry farm.
G: Yup, up where the new well is.
L: Father relinquished his rights to Uncle Eph Summers for thirty dollars. He sold out to Uncle Eph before he moved up. And Grandpa Payne sold half of his piece of ground, that would be 160. Father had a little piece where the Nelsons did live. He traded that little piece for 160 acres, so Father had half of Grandpa Payne’s homestead. Now, maybe you didn’t want to get into that.
M: Yes, we do. Now why did Grandpa Stokes come?
L: Grandpa Stokes came later, so he had to take what was left. Now the piece that George’s father got and Grandpa Payne, they were real good pieces, but Father’s was—the mountain cut into his piece and he--
M: And where was it?
L: Joining Grandpa Payne’s on the north.
G: It was beyond the Isaacson place.
L: No. Isaacsons were over toward the west more.
G: Isaacson goes over clear to the George Summers place, so your--
L: The old Summers’ place was father’s homestead.
R: You’re talking about the dry farm.
L: Um hum. I’m talking about the dry farm. Father [Joseph Stokes, the first bishop of Bothwell] cleared twenty acres of sage and he got it ready for planting that fall. He got it up real nice and the hot winds come and burned it up the next year, so he didn’t have any crops. So then he got discouraged and relinquished his rights to Uncle Eph Summers and he went down on the Central Farm as manager down there. He had thirty men working under him.
M: That’s where LeRoy Firth’s place is.
G: As near as I can remember hear, listening to my folks tell me, that the first year or two years that they planted grain just a little bit that they farmed, you know, they only got about three bushel to the acre.
M: Where did they get their seed?
L: Oh, there was plenty of seed around. The binders came in. Hunsaker [Abraham Hunsaker of Honeryville], he planted lots of wheat over in Honeyville and around through there. There was plenty of seed.
G: I think Honeyville. There was quite a few folks there when my folks came here. There seemed to be more there than anywhere.
LR: What did seed wheat cost then?
L: $0.30 a bushel. I paid for it and people bought it from Hunsaker for little more than nothing. That’s what Ezra Anderson used to say.
R: I’ll have to tell you something bout Brother Hunsaker. He run the grist mill over in Honeyville.
L: The Bishop Hunsaker that was here?
M: No. Abraham Hunsaker, the one with all the wives.
G: My dad said he thought he owed him some money, so he went over there and he said, “Brother Hunsaker, I think I owe you a little money. How much do I owe you? I’d like to pay you.” He said, “Well, let’s go look at the books.” So he said they went outside the mill, and there was figures up as high as you could reach all around the mill. They walked clear around the mill. And he said, “No, I can’t find it, I guess you don’t owe me anything.”
L: That was Grandpa Anderson’s story, Rasmus’s.
G: That’s how he kept books. One thing that I could never figure out nor get straight in my head: now when they first come here, they was on the dry farm. We had to haul water from Max Anderson’s, out of the spring for their horses and everything we drank and used, every water all the time. Yet they say we all went to Corinne to the store. Course there was a store in Corinne, but there was also one in Deweyville at the same time. I don’t know how come, but all these folks up here, they all went to Corinne. Was there the railroad that went as far as Corinne, Ros, then?
M: In 1869 the railroad came.
G: I guess that’s the reason they went to Corinne, because they hauled their grain, what little they had. And then they’d take their eggs and butter to get rid of it down there.
R: And even their hogs. They’d butcher ten or twelve hogs and take them to Corinne and sell them.
L: They tell me that Mormonism would have been a flop if it hadn’t been for rabbits and water gravy.
G: I don’t think we coulda lived. That’s what we lived off was rabbits and sage hens, prairie chickens, and ducks.
R: They should have included barbed wire, too.
Laughter
R: No, that was scary. My father and Reed’s father had a horse-powered threshing machine. And Evan Christensen over in Faust Valley was to furnish the horses for them. They had sixteen head of horses or twenty.
L: I know what’s coming. They broke loose
R: No, dad said he’d bring them in a wild bunch of horses and soon as he got them broke so they could work them, he’d come and get them and bring in a new bunch. He said they was wild mustangs. Never ever had a halter on them.
M: And they were supposed to be in there working, right?
R: Well, they could work them with this power machine because they went around in a circle.
G: I guess you can remember when he used to bring his pigs over here and drive them to Tremonton and ship them?.
L: I remember when he used to drive them two mules, him and his wife.
M: They would walk with a herd of pigs to Tremonton from Faust Valley? What time did Foxley get the store over here on the Anderson place?
G: Oh, that was later in life. Let’s see around 1900, wasn’t it?
L: No, it was before that, I think.
R: It was up there when I was a small boy. I know that. See, Priests. Didn’t Priests live in the Jim Foxley place or the old John Eberhard place before Don Priest had it?
M: Then Mrs. Priest was the postmaster, but Foxley had the store?
L: Mrs. Priest had it in her home. A partition room, then after the Foxleys came in, they took the postmaster job over. And then it stayed there until they had the rural route.
G: Didn’t they have a saloon here on Salt Creek once?
R: Yes, you bet. Where Keith’s [Anderson’s] place is?
G: On the north, there where Ellen [Anderson] was, about.
R: I don’t know about that, but Dad used to say that the road to Corinne just kept right through from here.
L: Well, yes, from Salt Creek.
M: There was a Crossley family or something that lived there before Art Wilson, I believe.
L: It wasn’t only Art Wilson place, it was over by Max Anderson’s place, just about over right in his roadway now and it was a two-story. And they had it for a dance hall and a pool hall and they were building the canal. Later, they--
G: Somebody cooked in there a little
R: I just want to relate something that happened just tonight. We were up there and we had Cleone [Anderson] up there dynamiting a big stump on my place. And there was Reese and Curt and Virg [Anderson] and Blair Summers and Cleone and myself. And Reese said to me, “Was the canal here when you was born?” And I said, “No.” The canal was dug about 1909, I think.
L: 1901
R: Well, anyway, he said how did they dig it? And I said all I know is what my dad told me. He said they had a big machine and then they would go down the right of way and put some stakes in and then they had these horsepower turnbuckles that would pull this machine to dig out the canal.