Truman Leonard: A Pioneer Mormon Farmer

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 44, 1976, No. 3

Truman Leonard: A Pioneer Mormon Farmer

By Dr. Leonard

FOR TRUMAN LEONARD, finding himself seated at the head of the table at Brigham Young's gala Christmas party in 1856 was not so much an honor as an opportunity. Leonard's carefully worded letter of three weeks earlier asking the Mormon leader's permission to marry both a second and a third wife had gone unanswered. President Young had advised Leonard four years earlier that upon fulfilling his proselytizing mission to India he should implement the newly announced principle of plurality in his life. Reluctant at first, the faithful elder had had long months of loneliness to consider the Mormon doctrine; then, on his journey home with the Ellsworth and McArthur handcart companies, fortune had blessed him with the acquaintanceship of two young English girls. Truman Leonard grasped the opportunity during the conversation of Christmas evening to remind President Young of his promise to the missionaries called in August 1852. "If one plural wife was sanctioned, would two be agreeable?" "Yes, of course," Young responded. "Take two or three."

Truman Leonard's commitment to Mormonism almost always led him to accept the counsel of his priesthood leaders. He married those two young women, plucking one of them right out of Brigham Young's own kitchen, and took them home to Farmington, where Ortentia, his wife of ten years, accepted them, though with some misgivings, into her two-room adobe cabin.

Though he was slightly more married than the average Latter-day Saint of his day, in many ways Truman Leonard was a typical Utah Mormon. Both of his plural wives were taken during the flurry of marrying stirred up by the Mormon Reformation, just before James Buchanan's armed expedition arrived in the supposedly rebellious territory. Like many of his neighbors, Leonard participated in the Utah War. At other times he served his community in response to priesthood calls in a variety of civic duties, from county selectman to chairman of a July 4 extravaganza. A missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints four times during his seventy-seven years, and a home missionary and seventies president in between, he was one of those religious exiles from Nauvoo who managed to mingle a zeal for salvation with hard work on a small but productive Utah farm. And through it all he struggled with the humanness of being determined, even obstinate at times, while developing a reputation for unbounded generosity.

Why Truman Leonard chose in 1850 to live iia Davis County has not been recorded; but whatever the reasons that took him north from

Salt Lake City along the narrow, sloping Wasatch Mountain foothills, he did find himself among compatriots. Within a year of his arrival, census takers for the federal government counted eighty residents of Farmington, Truman Leonard included, who listed New York State as the place of their birth. That was a full 47 percent of the town's adult population. Most of the other family heads were Illinois or Ohio natives, and many of the western New Yorkers had accepted Mormonism in one of those midwestern states. The percentage of New Yorkers in Farmington was double that of the territory as a whole, but even in Utah itself no other state claimed a larger share of native sons. Furthermore, 78 percent of Farmington's workers listed farming as their livelihood. In this, too, Truman Leonard fit the common mold of early Utah. Thus, though Leonard is virtually unknown in Utah history, his life can illustrate the contribution to his community of a typical man, belonging to an uncommon but dominant religion, living in a representative nineteenth-century Utah Mormon town.

Truman Leonard first heard of Mormonism as a young man. His father had left Massachusetts in 1811 and moved to Ontario County, New York, where, like so many other New Englanders, he sought a new life of economic opportunity in the new West. At Middlesex, among the Finger Lakes, the family was only a few miles from the center of early Mormon activities. Stories of a gold bible, discovered in a hillside by one Joseph Smith, Jr., spread by word of mouth throughout the district. Excerpts of the translated record soon appeared in Obediah Dogberry's Palmyra Reflector in 1830 and then the book itself was offered at doorsteps in the hands of earnest missionaries. Truman, who was born at Middlesex on September 17, 1820, once visited Hill Cumorah out of curiosity for a personal inspection of the landmark.

But the new religion did not catch up with the Leonards in New York. Truman's father, Truman Leonard, Sr., sold his improved 148- acre farm for $4,221 and moved on to Chatham, in Medina County, Ohio, where he started over again on a 396-acre spread. That was in 1835. Young Truman was fifteen years old and it would be another eight years before his investigations and the visit of Noah Packard, an itinerant Latter-day Saint preacher, would lead him to accept baptism. Packard's proselytizing apparently attracted the interest first of Harvey Edwards, husband of one of Truman Leonard's older sisters. Truman was baptized in the Black River on March 25, 1843, followed quickly by a younger brother, John, over whom Truman assumed a self-appointed guardianship from that time on. In the ensuing months, others of the family followed these three into the Mormon church. Eventually Truman's father, probably his mother, and five or six of the other eleven children became members.

A growing number of believers in Chatham soon created the need for a regular church organization. Therefore, a small branch was formed in September 1843, with Truman Leonard, Jr., as presiding elder. Then, only four months later, he answered a missionary call to Ohio and New York and left the branch presidency to his father. During this critical year for Mormonism, Joseph Smith was moving toward a national campaign for the United States presidency. Truman may have joined the dozens who mingled proselytizing with politicking that spring and early summer of 1844. The prophet's murder in late June ended the quest for political authority, and in the flurry of uncertainty that followed, several Latter-day Saints were claiming the right to religious leadership. In succeeding years, Truman's oldest brother, Ebenezer, followed James J. Strang to Beaver Island. Several others of the family remained in Chatham, Ohio, where both parents died in 1846. About this time the little branch voted to disband and move en masse to Nauvoo, but apparently none of the Leonards joined Truman and John who had already tied their fortunes to the leadership of Brigham Young.

On July 11, 1844, at the close of Truman's eastern mission, he and his young brother arrived in Nauvoo. For the next two years, Truman worked on the Mormon temple. He was a registered voter in Nauvoo, and in January 1845 became a Master Mason in the Nauvoo Lodge. The wiry young man, then in his mid-twenties and standing five foot nine inches tall, gained a reputation for hard work and caught the attention of the new Mormon prophet.

An anecdote told by his descendants reflects the energetic determination with which Truman Leonard approached his task as laborer. As the temple walls rose skyward, workers used the construction derricks as personnel hoists. Each morning they hauled themselves upward to their work stations, and at noontime or evening rode the swinging ropes down. A game developed among the young men to see which of them could reach the hoist first and thus touch down ahead of the others. Truman, swift of foot, often edged out the other roof-top racers in the dash for the elevator. On one occasion, outdone by his fun-loving companions, he surprised them all by leaping from the roof of the temple as the derrick was swinging toward the pickup point. Grabbing the rope in midair, he was successful in winning that night's race to the supper table. Another version of the story has the impetuous young man falling from the temple walls and breaking several bones that were then healed by an administration of the elders. Whatever the consequences of his zeal, Truman Leonard apparently did earn a promise from Brigham Young that when the temple was opened for ordinances the first marriage performed would be that of Truman Leonard and Ortentia White. On January 1, 1846, Elder Heber C. Kimball performed the marriage and then, as a memento of the solemn occasion, handed the twenty-year-old, New York-born bride a photograph of himself and a lock of his hair.

The temple, only partially completed, was not yet formally dedicated, and although most church authorities and a majority of the Saints fled from the threatened city early that year, Truman and Ortentia stayed on to help put finishing touches on the sacred monument to Joseph Smith's threatened empire. According to a report preserved by Ortentia's children, Truman helped install the angel atop the completed temple's spire. Then, when Hancock County citizens attacked Nauvoo, he joined the Spartan band in defending their Zion city. For five days, while Ortentia wondered at his fate, Truman manned a powder plot for the rag-tag militia. There were injuries and deaths on both sides. Truman escaped unharmed, but performed the sorrowful task of removing the bodies of William Anderson and his fifteen-year-old son from the battlefield and then of prying out the bullets so their bodies could be washed and clothed for burial.

The Battle of Nauvoo ended the Mormon stay in Illinois, and the Leonards were among those forced to flee in September 1846. Crossing the Mississippi, they joined the sick and unwilling exiles in the trek to Winter Quarters. The journey was especially hard on Ortentia, who was pregnant with their first child. The couple reached the Mormon camps along the Missouri in late fall before the birth November 4 of Ezra Newton Leonard, who died and was buried the same day. For three, nearly four years, Truman and Ortentia remained in the Council Bluffs area. Many of Brigham Young's ablest teamsters had joined the Mormon Battalion. Consequently, Truman's talents as a handler of livestock and skill as a builder were valuable assets. The interlude also allowed him to acquire a few possessions of his OWTI—oxen and a wagon, cattle, and the supplies they would need for the trek to the Great Basin.

Before Truman and Ortentia set out from Kanesville in June 1850, they had rejoiced in the birth of a second son whom they named Truman Milton. But just two days before their departure the eight-month-old boy died of the dreaded "black canker" and was buried in an unmarked grave.

Joseph Young, presiding church officer in Nauvoo after Brigham Young's departure, headed the wagon company. He was thus acquainted with Truman Leonard, who had worked for him at the temple. As the procession moved out across the plains, it soon became apparent that too many families had been enrolled for convenient supervision. Elder Young reorganized the party and placed Truman Leonard in charge of one of the sections. The twenty-seven-wagon group arrived at its destination in early October.

Then began the period of Truman Leonard's greatest usefulness to his church and community. The decade of the 1850s would see him involved in a variety of religious, civic, and cultural duties. Thirty years of age in 1850, he had proven himself through a half-dozen years of faithful church service and through a demonstrated facility for practical things. His file leaders would see to it that his willing hands were engaged in helping to build the kingdom at home and abroad.

It is possible that an advertisement in the newly founded Deseret News turned Truman Leonard's attention toward the fertile farmlands of central Davis County. Willard Richards was building a sawmill four miles up North Cottonwood Canyon. He needed men skilled in the building trades and laborers to get out timber and build roads and bridges. After Leonard had provided a small cabin on a farmsite a mile and a half further north, he probably worked much of the time through the winter in the canyon.

Already the settlers of 1848 and 1849 had appropriated much of the land along the bigger streams. They were calling their scattered community alternately Miller's Settlement and North Cottonwood, but after 1852 it became Farmington. Truman staked a claim, approved by Bishop Joseph L. Robinson, to at least fifty acres stretching in a narrow strip from the mountains westward. Within the first year he cleared and put under cultivation ten acres of the best land. His principal crops were wheat and potatoes, with a few garden vegetables added as he found time to care for them. The first harvest brought in a reported 160 bushels of wheat and 200 bushels of Irish potatoes; and that same year he realized a surplus of 25 pounds of butter. That he had not arrived in Utah completely without resources is demonstrated in his claim to twenty-nine head of livestock, including five milch cows, eighteen working oxen, two other "cattle," and four horses. It was the oxen that gave him the greatest pride of ownership. Truman Leonard enjoyed the animals as some men enjoyed a good riding horse, and his neighbors soon came to recognize his stable of working oxen as among the finest in the community.

His efforts toward a moderately comfortable life were interrupted after only two years by the call to full-time missionary service in India. He and eight others whose names were read from the pulpit at the special August 1852 general conference spent nearly two and one-half years in the Hindoostan Mission with little to show for their efforts, plus another eighteen months getting there and back.

The call to India interrupted an important opportunity for community service. In 1851 he had been assigned by the bishop to help organize the North Cottonwood Ward into school districts. Soon afterward he was named a selectman from the central district of Davis County and sat with the first county court in March 1852. His service fell at a significant time in county history. With Judge Joseph Holbrook and selectman Daniel Carter, he helped divide the county into electoral precincts and school and highway districts, appointed watermasters, and in many other ways took actions that established precedents for local government. At the regular election in August 1852 he was named to a second term on the court but resigned the position a few weeks later to answer the missionary calling.

Truman had two months to get his affairs in order. He left his farm under the charge of his twenty-one-year-old and still-single brother John, sold some of his livestock to help finance the journey and sustain his wife, and obtained a promise from the local priesthood that Ortentia's needs would be cared for. She had lost another baby by now, an experience that would be repeated four more times, but earlier that year she had borne a healthy girl, one of three girls who would live to maturity. Helen Mar was six months old when her father loaded a wagon and headed for Los Angeles to begin a globe-encircling missionary tour.

Because of the season, the Asian missionaries reached San Francisco's international port by the circuitous route through Las Vegas Meadows and Los Angeles. In southern California they sold their fifteen wagons and forty-six horses and mules for cash, purchased passage on a coastal boat, and sent the surplus funds to their families. At San Francisco they collected enough from church members and others to pay their fares of $200 each. An eighty-eight-day sea voyage aboard the clipper ship Monsoon brought them to Calcutta, on India's east coast. They were welcomed there May 1, 1853, by the family of British army officer Matthew McCune. Already converts to Mormonism, the McCunes were able to assist the elders, and on one occasion nursed an ailing Truman Leonard back to full health.

Leonard spent his first seven months in an area not far from Calcutta, at Chinsura. Then he joined Elder Amos Milton Musser for a month-long voyage around the subcontinent's southern cape to Bombay. Consultations with other missionaries led them to a field of labor further up the coast at Karachi (now part of Pakistan) where they remained— sometimes together, sometimes alone—for the next year and a half.

Never totally optimistic in his regular reports to mission headquarters in Liverpool, England, Elder Leonard determined in his last letter to his supervisor, Elder Franklin D. Richards, "to tell things as they are" and corroborate the discouraging reports of his coworkers in other parts of India. All whom he had contacted, he said, had "refrained from obeying the Gospel; they heeded it not sufficiently, they regarded too lightly the day of their visitation, they remain out of the kingdom, and know not its sweets." Furthermore, he was convinced that the "judgments of an offended God" were about to be poured out upon the land, and he cited civil disturbances in the upper provinces as signs of the impending calamity.

Having cleared his conscience of further obligation to "India's sons," he sought passage for Liverpool, but having depended upon the goodness of his hosts for so long—and living destitute often of basic necessities— he found it doubly difficult to raise the necessary fare. He and his companions finally arranged with the captain of a sailing ship to work their passage homeward. At Liverpool Truman joined the Enoch Train, a ship loaded with British converts. He was shortly assigned by Mormon organizers on board to preside over the ship's fifth ecclesiastical ward. His homeward-bound preaching revived his own dampened spirits, for his shipboard audience was not only captive but receptive.

From their landing port at Boston, the ship's Mormon emigrants moved by rail to Iowa City, where Leonard assisted in the preparation of handcarts. When the group was organized for travel, he was appointed captain of the first of two divisions of Daniel D. McArthur's company. Equipped with twelve yoke of oxen, four wagons, and forty-eight carts, plus five beef cattle and a dozen cows, the company of 222 people left Iowa City June 11 and after two weeks at Florence, Nebraska, for final repairs, headed out on the plains July 24, 1856.

The trek of the first handcart companies, well known in the annals of Mormon migration, included much routine and little excitement. Only three special incidents seemed important enough for McArthur to note in his official report to Brigham Young. Two of them concerned emergencies involving older women, and in both cases Truman Leonard was on the scene to give aid.

On August 16, nine days beyond Fort Kearney, while crossing a sandy hillock, fifty-nine-year-old Mary Bathgate, a leader in the walking brigade which was normally strung out ahead of the carts and wagons, was bitten on the ankle by a rattlesnake. Upon learning of the accident, Captains McArthur and Leonard ran the half-mile to her side. Truman opened the wound with his pen-knife and sucked out the poison. Then he helped her into his wagon, and after a two-hour rest, the company commenced its journey. But as the heavily laden wagon started to move, the victim's close friend, Isabella Park, stepped up to inquire of her condition. The driver failed to see "Mother" Park, and she was knocked down, the front wheels of the heavy wagon passing over her hips. Leonard, seeing her fall, pulled her away just short of the hind wheel, which passed over both ankles. The softness of the soil had saved her from broken bones, but bruised, she joined her former walking partner in the wagon for a few days. Neither woman had ridden at all before that time, and as the oldest in the company the two had prided themselves on their accomplishment. Mrs. Bathgate, in fact, good naturedly sought witnesses that she was being placed in the wagon not of her own choice but at the bidding of the reptile! Before they reached Salt Lake Valley, both women were again out marching at the head of the company.

The two young British women who would soon become plural wives of Truman Leonard were members of the Ellsworth party which had left Iowa City just ahead of the McArthur camp. Until they reached Florence, the two groups traveled in a common movement. Minutes reveal that Truman Leonard appeared frequently as a speaker or giver of prayers at Ellsworth camp meetings. The two companies sometimes made contact west of Florence, too, giving him opportunities to get acquainted with travelers in both groups. Besides, he had sailed the Atlantic with Margaret Bourne, who was accompanied by her parents, and Mary Ann Meadows, who had left her family behind in England. In later years Truman confided to Brigham Young that he had courted neither of these young ladies to exceed three hours each. Formal courting began only after his welcome reunion with Ortentia.

The two companies of handcarts reached Salt Lake Valley on the forenoon of Friday, September 26. William Pitt's brass band, dozens of city residents, and a representation of officialdom headed by Brigham Young were on hand at the canyon mouth to greet the pioneers. After a surprise but welcome melon bust, an impressive procession down South Temple Street escorted them to the public square. They reached the immigrant campground at sunset, heard an official welcome by President Young, and then, as they had done a hundred times since leaving Iowa City, the weary trekkers pitched their tents for the night.

On the following day, Ortentia arrived from Farmington, and after a night with friends in the city, the reunited couple returned home. Truman had left his wife and new daughter in a small log cabin on the farm, two miles north of Farmington. Wandering Indian bands often frequented the area, looking for food or seeking wild game. On one of their visits after Truman's departure, Ortentia had been so frightened by an intruding Indian man that Bishop Gideon Brownell decided to move her into the newly settled townsite. The local priesthood had helped Ortentia build a two-room adobe home at the far northeast corner of the city plat. To this comfortable cabin Truman returned in 1856.

In between visits with friends and relatives and speaking engagements at ward meetings in Salt Lake City and Farmington, the weary missionary pitched in to help his brother with the wheat harvest on their farms and again settled into an agrarian life.

Within two months he had obtained Ortentia's approval to marry polygamously. On December 5 he sent his friend Daniel Miller to the city with a letter and an invitation. The letter was the one asking Brigham Young's permission to take a third wife along with a second one; the invitation brought Margaret Bourne to Farmington on an official visit. For the next few weeks Truman busied himself with his farmwork —killing a beef, fixing fences, gathering wood from the canyon, and repairing his farm tools—while awaiting the official reply that did not come. And then when the returned missionaries gathered at the president's new Lion House for the Christmas Day party, he asked the question in person. On January 5 Truman obtained approval from Margaret's parents and from Margaret; contacted Brigham Young and formally proposed to the young woman, Mary Ann Meadows, who was gainfully employed in the president's kitchen; and then, having received Mary Ann's acceptance and having bought a new dress for Ortentia, he scheduled a double wedding at the Endowment House for the following day.

Margaret, having been the first courted, firmly insisted on being the first married, and it was so agreed. Mary Ann, as her posterity explain it, though last in marriage, received a compensating blessing, for she was mother to seven children, all of whom lived to maturity, while Margaret, for reasons only fate could determine, endured a long life of childlessness.

During Truman Leonard's extended absence from his farm, the bishop had found other settlers needing soil to till and had divided the Leonard homestead with them. Truman's brother had already received a portion of the original claim and half interest in part of the remaining land as an enticement to remain with Truman in a cooperating farming arrangement. The bishop's realignment in 1855 left Truman—and everyone else in town— with a farm of about twenty acres, a parcel his descendants have continued to farm as their inheritance in Zion.

Nearly destitute after four years away, Truman immediately began the process of rebuilding his economic resources. He spent the winter preparing for the season ahead. He visited the local lumber mills and blacksmith shops for materials, built himself a harrow, and constructed others for neighbors in exchange for goods needed to sustain his family. Plowing began early in the spring, followed by the sowing of his wheat and potatoes. Then came the long summer months of furrowing, hoeing, and irrigating before the harvest rewarded his labors. His enterprise paid dividends; by the second year he was forecasting a one-thousand-bushel grain harvest.

By 1860 his herds included at least 116 sheep. That was the number lost in a fire of November 17. The disaster was caused by the east wind that, from the first days of settlement, had been testing the security of Farmington's buildings. It had not taken long for early residents to learn that a carelessly laid roof required emergency reinforcement when the gray wind cloud formed along the eastern mountains. Molasses barrels or discarded millstones worked well as weights, and logging chains helped tie down flimsy housetops. But little could be done to prevent the scattering of sparks from a wood-burning fireplace. In that early, predawn windstorm of 1860 a spark from a chimney twenty rods away landed in Truman Leonard's straw stack. The resulting blaze destroyed the straw, several tons of hay, a mule, and the 116 sheep. It then spread across a wide lane to the home of Andrew Quigley. As the family fled into the cold night, their log home burned to the ground.

It would have been typical of Truman Leonard to respond to the disaster stoically, seeing it perhaps as a trial of faith, a means of divine testing. In the 1860s and succeeding decades friend and foe alike would sometimes seem at odds with him, but for the first years after his mission the challenges were mingled with a fervent activity in defensive warfare.

In September 1854, during his absence in India, Truman had been appointed senior president of the Fifty-sixth Quorum of Seventy. This was his principal ecclesiastical position in the Latter-day Saint church, and it became a lifelong stewardship, a symbol of his commitment to proselytizing, which was the special assignment of the seventy. Perhaps because of this office and no doubt because of his recent service in the foreign mission field, Leonard was given charge of the Mormon Reformation in Farmington. In its broader aspects, the movement to encourage the Saints to live their religion with greater earnestness had gotten its start just before his return from India. Only days before the first handcarts reached Salt Lake Valley, hundreds were being rebaptized in the mill ponds of Kaysville and Farmington as a sign of rededication. Truman and Ortentia had been rebaptized in 1851 but submitted themselves to another immersion while attending the October general conference.

Thus recommitted he picked as counselors in the home missionary calling Joseph France and Thomas Grover and then began energetically extending the call to repentance to his neighbors. Some took offense at his prying catechizing. One family left town for California. Here and there young farmers admitted to branding livestock which had "wandered" into their possession from a neighbor's farmyard. Leonard told a gathering of priesthood bearers he intended to pursue the goal of pruning the Lord's vineyard whatever the personal feelings of his friends, for he earnestly believed that the good life lay in righteousness and that that was obtainable only by cutting out sin wherever it was found. Five unrepentant souls were excommunicated as a step toward repentance; and most of them found their way back into the fold through counseling and increased works of faithfulness. The reformation, though shortlived, left lasting images in Farmington; and while the generation of the 1850s lived, Truman Leonard and his associates resurrected the term whenever they saw the need to enliven their followers in the work of the kingdom.

Meanwhile, practical matters enlisted a share of Truman Leonard's energies. In 1857 he helped count votes at the August election. In that same election he was named to the post of county selectman that he had abandoned for his mission. This time he served three years. Then, for a year after that, he worked as road supervisor for the Farmington district. In 1857 and again three years later, he performed the duties of watermaster for Shepard Creek, a stream that once bore his own last name and that still watered his farm.

In the spring of 1857, Truman Leonard was invited to join the Deseret Brass Band, a local organization with a rapidly rising reputation in the territory. He accepted a position in the percussion section and began attending practices to prepare for the town's annual Independence Day celebration. A member of the arrangements committee, he gave the signal to discharge a responding blast from the militia's cannon to launch the clay's activities. Then he joined with the band in serenading Bishop John W. Hess with the national anthem. All of this happened at four o'clock in the morning. Next, the band performed for a halfdozen sleepy-eyed dignitaries at their homes and enjoyed a sumptuous breakfast at Thomas Grover's large house. At 8 o'clock the town's residents who had been so resoundingly awakened by the predawn ceremonies gathered at the Farmington parade ground. There the militia— both cavalry and infantry—exhibited its marching prowess, and the band performed again to inaugurate a day of speechmaking, picnicking, dancing, and festive tomfoolery.

Three weeks later a more serious mood settled over Farmington. Word had arrived of the approach of United States military forces under the command of Col. Albert Sidney Johnston. The Utah Expedition was marching west to quell a reported insurrection among the Saints. Truman Leonard's first involvement in the Utah War came in late September when the Farmington band escorted a spirited county infantry detachment to Echo Canyon. Early in October the band played at the Deseret State Fair, and in November Truman picked up his drum again to accompany another segment of Col. Philemon C. Merrill's Davis County regiment to the canyon. The band marched to Salt Lake City for orders, arriving November 10. There Brigham Young instructed bandmaster William Glover to dismiss all but four of the musicians. Truman was one of the four to join with the regiment's drum and bugle corps for continued duty. He was also assigned forage master duties for the encampment and remained at his post, struggling against frostbitten feet, until early December.

Returning home, he discovered that in his absence his brother John, not yet twenty-six, had died after a short illness. The sorrowing survivor helped resolve the affairs of his brother, who had married just a year earlier; but before they could be entirely settled, political developments led to a decision to abandon the northern settlements in preparation for the invasion of Johnston's army. In mid-January Farmington residents affirmed their support for Brigham Young's evacuation policy and approved resolutions condemning President James Buchanan's decision to send the Utah Expedition.

These actions were taken at a public meeting in the upstairs assembly room of the new Davis County Courthouse. On the steps of the same building three months later, the mood of the citizenry was one of patriotic bravado. Alfred Cumming, recently appointed to replace Brigham Young as territorial governor, was being escorted to Salt Lake City. Because heavy snows had blocked the more direct route through Emigration Canyon, the party followed an alternate road down Weber Canyon. A mounted, uniformed guard from Farmington met them at the mouth of the canyon, while Truman Leonard and the Deseret Band waited patiently at the courthouse.

Cumming finally arrived some time after midnight and was pleasantly surprised when the local musicians struck up a fervent rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner." He spent the night in Farmington and on the following evening the band rejoined him for an official welcome to Salt Lake City. Again the band serenaded the new official, playing for him the national anthem, "Hail Columbia," and "Yankee Doodle." Cumming interpreted this show of patriotism as genuine and unfeigned; but one non-Mormon immigrant, who said he witnessed the band's welcome, reported that after Cumming was out of earshot the musicians disobeyed instructions and vented some of their resentment by playing the Mormon "Doodah," a tune whose words lambasted the new appointee. Truman Leonard shared that feeling of resentment, and he believed it was the wise Mormon who laid up a store of arms and ammunition in preparation for the threatened invasion.

When Truman left Farmington in May, during the general evacuation of the ward to Juab County, he took with him special guests who had been wintering in the town. They were Matthew McCune and his family who had so generously looked after the missionaries in India. McCune had arrived with the immigration trains in September 1857. The Mc- Cunes remained in Nephi after the displaced settlers returned to their homes in Farmington early in July.

Truman Leonard once more settled into the life of a Mormon farmer. The next fifteen years saw few interruptions to this routine. He kept busy in his civic responsibilities with the county court and community roads, served as a juryman later in the 1860s, and continued his home missionary work in the capacity of an acting teacher, which required him to visit homes in the ward monthly. Most fast days he faithfully carried in an offering of flour or other foodstuffs for deposit in the bishop's storehouse. In 1865, with many in the community, he donated five dollars to a public works project to help improve the canyon road. Four years later he pledged twenty-five dollars when the ward teachers asked for funds for the immigrating poor. Truman was known to have taken a special concern for widows. When he saw a need, he quietly filled it by bringing in an extra load of wood or sharing a pail of flour. Those who knew him best, said one obituary years later, knew him as a big-hearted man, "generous to a fault."

His hard-headedness and occasional flare of temper did sometimes get the man into trouble. Therefore, the same teachers' meeting that heard his reports about families in the district he visited, sometimes arbitrated the disagreements of Truman Leonard and his neighbors. At question were such things as property lines, water rights, and livestock. On one occasion a man built a home on benchland Leonard claimed, and the bishop ruled in favor of the builder. In 1865 Truman persistently disagreed with arrangements made for the cooperative herding of sheep. Two years later he was awarded damages when another herd trampled his crops. Another time he was reprimanded for flooding the street with irrigation water.

In the late 1870s he was called in before the teachers and charged with mistreating his horses. Truman explained that the animals had been balking, "and being impetuous [he] had done too much, was sorry . . . and would try and profit by the lesson." His mentors then proceeded to advise that kindness, rather than beating, was the preferred cure for balky horses; and since the offender had agreed to do better with his teams, the offense would be overlooked. Although the incident ended with an apparent resolution, Truman was offended that the charge had been carried to the quorum for consideration in the first place. Feelings over the matter lingered for several years.

Truman Leonard and his wives did not let these minor problems stand in the way of continued service to the church they had so faithfully defended for so many years. In the early 1860s Farmington completed construction of a beautiful rock meetinghouse. Truman's contribution, his tithe of labor, was to haul lime from Weber Canyon for the mortar and to bring timber from the canyon. In that same decade he apparently began construction of a new rock home for Ortentia alongside the old one on the city lot, and a rock duplex on the farm for Margaret and Mary Ann.

Ortentia, especially, during these years was active in church and civic affairs. She bore six children during the decade ending in 1867, but only the last two, Clara and Hattie, survived childhood. This relative lack of responsibilities at home freed her to participate in public affairs. For forty years her clear alto voice was heard in the ward choir, and for a number of seasons she joined in a popular quartet that sang at ward functions. Continuing the home industry she had commenced during Truman's mission, she took in sewing. With seven other women, she organized sewing classes and established a dressmaking business. A church calling recognized this talent when she and three other Farmington ladies were asked to drape the caskets and lay out the dead. When the Relief Society was organized in Farmington in May 1868, she and Margaret became visiting teachers, and Ortentia was soon appointed presiding teacher over the twenty-three-member staff. The following year she was gone three months visiting relatives in the East, traveling both ways on the newly completed transcontinental railroad. After her return she served for more than twenty years in the ward Relief Society presidency, including a long term as president. Truman's other two wives are less visible in surviving records. Perhaps living away from the center of town lessened their involvement; and Mary Ann, at least, was kept busy raising the seven children born to her between 1858 and 1874.

In 1871 Truman made his first visit to the States since the handcart migration. The occasion was an official short-term mission for the church. Like so many other missionaries to the United States during this period, he spent most of his time seeking out relatives living in Ohio. This mission was followed by a similar one in 1874. Again he contacted surviving uncles, aunts, and cousins; visited with available brothers and sisters; gathered genealogical information; and preached Mormonism to hospitable, but disinterested, kinsfolk.

In the 1880s the polygamy raids forced him into hiding. Several of his neighbors in Farmington were tried and found guilty of cohabitation under the hated federal legislation. A number of other local polygamists of Truman Leonard's generation escaped harassment, according to Joseph L. Robinson, through the grace of a kind God who called them home. Truman, in good health for his sixty-six years, decided in 1886 to go into a safer exile. Placing the care of his property in other hands, he went first to Logan where he and Ortentia spent many hours in the temple performing proxy ordinances for dead ancestors. Then, after another year of hiding, he gathered up fourteen head of cattle and followed them on horseback to Canada.

Margaret later joined him at Cardston, bringing with her one of Mary Ann's daughters, Amy, who had chosen the childless Margaret as a surrogate mother. For six years Truman and this part of his family remained in Alberta province. He worked a small farm, presided over the mass quorum of priesthood, and grew to like the situation so well that even after Wilford Woodruff's Manifesto quieted political conditions in Utah Territory he lingered on. Margaret journeyed to Salt Lake City in 1893 to attend the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, and the following year Truman said goodbye to his adopted land of refuge and traveled home by train. He arrived in December 1894 and helped his oldest son, George, prepare for a mission to Samoa. Truman's light brown hair was now graying, his frame carrying less than the usual 165 pounds. But friends who welcomed him detected no change in the determined spirit that looked upon them through those characteristic, hazel-gray eyes.

On New Year's Day in 1896, while Utah awaited the culmination of a half-century struggle toward statehood, Truman and Ortentia celebrated their golden wedding anniversary. Crippled by a back injury several years earlier, Ortentia was now continuing her sewing on a special lap board. Their daughter Clara, active in the local suffrage organization, teaching school, and serving as treasurer for the Primary, had through her schoolteaching income helped put finishing touches on the long incomplete rock home. Engaged to be married, she was awaiting the return of her fiance from the German mission. Then in August 1897 Clara died suddenly from an unexplained illness. A sorrowing father joined this favored daughter in death four months later. Suffering from pneumonia and heart disease, Truman told the family on November 20, "Put out the light. . . . This has been a hard day, but I am going to rest." Ortentia lived nine months after Truman's death and Mary Ann fourteen months beyond that. Their simple coffins were placed in the two remaining burial plots between Truman and Clara. Margaret was laid to rest at the foot of her husband in 1904.

The imposing granite monument erected by grateful descendants on the Leonard burial plot in Farmington's hillside cemetery stands bigger than life over the simple sandstone gravemarkers that identify the resting places of Truman Leonard and his three wives. Perhaps in its impressive size the tombstone exhibits some of Truman Leonard's own determination to persist, through east winds and blizzards, even the attacks of mobs when necessary. Had the man it honors had his say he would no doubt have chosen one less pretentious, one more in keeping with the frugal pioneer times which characterized his life. But his generation of practical Mormons was dying as Utah entered a new age, and Truman Leonard had been one of many typical Utah farmers who had prepared the way for that change.

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