Childhood in Gunnison, Utah

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 51, 1983, No. 2

Childhood in Gunnison, Utah

BY WILLIAM G. HARTLEY

IN 1863 IN MORMON UTAH, JOHN CHRISTENSON married a second wife. He was thirty-five, his first wife, Christena, twenty-seven, and his second wife, Johanna, twenty-three. The three were LDS convert-immigrants from Sweden. In 1865 they moved to Gunnison, Utah, a Mormon village fifteen miles southwest of Manti, where they lived the rest of their lives and raised eight children — three were Christena's and five Johanna's. By grouping together the growing-up experiences of the eight children, the resulting group biography of their youthhoods provides useful insights into a variety of historically important subjects.

This group biography gives a case study of the rearing of a first American generation by immigrant parents, of a family's persistent involvement in three decades of a Mormon village's history, and of life-course events as they affected youths in. The first post-pioneer generation. It offers a case study, too, of a normal polygamous family — one husband and two wives — that was not of the elite or of the pitiable types that seem to attract: historians' attention. Davis Bitton observed that, despite growing historical literature about Mormon polygamy, "much remains to be done in bringing out the personal dimension of polygamous living." The story of the Christensons' childhoods provides such personal dimensions.

What follows, then, is an in-depth look at an everyday, garden variety, plural LDS family during its child-rearing years in a typical Mormon village for three decades, 1865 to 1896.

THE PARENTS

John Christenson was eight years older than first wife Christena and twelve years older than second wife Johanna. He was in his mid-thirties when he first became a father. The family's childbearing years extended from 1863 to 1881, and the last child left home in 1896. First-born Caroline died young, so the widest age span separating children was sixteen years between the oldest surviving child, Joseph, and last-born Frankie who also died young. All but two of the children were born within a ten-year period. The children therefore grew up close to each other in age, and seven of the eight left home within five years of each other. The children and their birthdates are:

Children by Christena and Birthdates

Caroline 1863, Minnie 1865, John 1868, Tilda 1871

Children by Johanna

Joseph 1865, Anna 1867, Emma 1870 Hannah 1873, Hyrum 1877, Franklin 1881

John came from a Swedish peasant background and his wives from Swedish working class, more urban backgrounds. The two wives, after Johanna established during her first months in the marriage that she was not Christena's servant, got along well with each other. Both family tradition and historical evidence establish that the three parents, during the child-bearing years, functioned together harmoniously. Not conforming to the myth that Mormon men typically were absent from their families, John Christenson never left home for lengthy church missions or errands. He had nearly daily contact with all his children as they grew up.

THE VILLAGE

Gunnison, with its twenty large residential blocks, resembled the typical Mormon village. The Christenson children grew up aware of all the neighbors' residences, which slowly changed from pioneer log structures to respectable adobe and rock houses, and of a handful of community buildings. By the early 1870s the town's public square was ringed by a rock schoolhouse, rock tithing granary, two-story rock Relief Society hall where church meetings took place, post office, and cooperative store. In 1881 the Presbyterians joined the landscape by erecting a chapel that also hosted a school.

Gunnison was a farming community, although villagers tried minor industries such as salt refining, sorghum distilling, and milling. Large town lots allowed families to grow vegetable gardens and to keep their cattle by their houses. Farm fields were located outside the town, mostly south and across the bridge that spanned the Sanpitch River. The farmers mainly grew wheat on 7,000 to 10,000 irrigated acres. At an elevation above 5,000 feet, Gunnison had a medium-length growing season. Winters usually put very little snow on the ground. The climate was dry, and people, plants, and animals depended on the network of irrigation canals to bring them water. Winters milder than normal meant droughtlike summers for Gunnisonites, such as in 1876 when the Sanpitch River dried up. By the late 1880s most villagers had dug wells on their town lots, and well water met their culinary needs.

Gunnison, a precinct until it became a city in 1893, held a population of between 500 and 1,200 during the Christensons' growing-up years, a cluster half Scandinavian and half English or American. In 1881 only twenty-six non-Mormons lived there. The village had no newspaper, but telegraph lines bisecting the town informed people about outside events. The Christenson children grew up in Gunnison's prerailroad, preelectric, pretelephone era.

HOUSING

The children's youthhood home was the native gray sandstone duplex John built on one of his two town lots in Gunnison by 1873. The duplex was a practical housing solution for a double family. It had two front doors. The interior was divided in half, with no interconnecting door. Each side had one large back room used as a kitchen-livingroom-bedroom, an attic room, and kitchen cellar for foods that needed cooling. By community standards theirs was a large house, but at its peak occupancy, when nine children lived there, it was crowded. A family story illustrates the sleeping congestion. Once when Apostle Lorenzo Snow and his wife Minnie lodged with the Christensons, they stayed in Christena's side of the duplex. She gave them the front room that was her bedroom; and she and her three daughters slept in one bed in the kitchen and son John slept on a trundle bed that slid under the kitchen bed during the daytime.

Father John divided his time evenly between his two families. He had his own bedroom, barely big enough for his narrow bed and a bookshelf, in the middle of the house. According to Tilda, "He ate his meals, one week with mother, next with Auntie [Johanna]." The wives took turns cleaning his room and doing his laundry.

Federal land records show that John homesteaded 160 acres two miles south of Gunnison in Centerfield. His land application states that from 1876 to 1881 his wife and five children—Johanna's family — resided continuously on that land in a log house. It was a token home built to make the claim legal but hardly occupied — a typical frontier way to homestead extra land.

In 1887 Johanna moved to Centerfield to help John avoid arrest for polygamy. (He was arrested twice by 1891 but apparently was never convicted.) The youngest of the eight living children, Hyrum, was then eleven and he lived a few years there. Except for Hyrum's teenage years, the children grew up in the Gunnison duplex.

FOOD, CLOTHING, AND SUPPLIES

The Christensons fit the pattern of farm households where "husbands and wives were partners not only in making a home but also in making a living." Theirs was the "household mode of production," and feeding and clothing two families was a sizable challenge. Crisis never seemed far away, with water shortages and insect invasions two familiar devils plaguing Gunnison's farms. Tax records show that the Christensons fared above average for their town, being in the top third in terms of property worth. But their standard of living rested near the subsistence level.

The double family earned its living by farming. By the 1880s their sixty tended acres produced mostly wheat and some oats, sorghum, barley, and food for the animals. The Christenson boys helped their father plow, plant, irrigate, weed, and harvest. The girls helped too. Minnie became so expert at bundling grain that she could tie as many bundles as any of her brothers. "Farming was accomplished with the simplest of tools," a granddaughter recalled; "a cradle was used to cut the ripened grain at harvest time. The children followed after, tying up the stalks into bundles." The grain then was taken, Tilda said, "to a threshing floor to be flailed out and winnowed." By 1890 the two oldest sons had left home, and the youngest son, Hyrum, became the primary farm laborer. By then John was in his sixties and slowing down, and the "very hard work on the farm" convinced Hyrum to move at age eighteen to Salt Lake City.

On the Christensons' two city lots the women and children produced other food for the family. Following good Swedish custom, the wives and children took care of the milk cows and provided the family with milk, cream, and butter. The double family owned a dozen cows in 1877 and a half-dozen by the mid-1880s. The two wives raised chickens jointly, taking turns weekly to feed and care for them. At week's end the eggs were divided up, half for each family. The duplex's gardens also produced table vegetables and fruits. Both wives paid tithing to the LDS church on their butter and eggs.

Tilda and Emma, a year apart and from different mothers, teamed up for chores. They gathered eggs, located missing chicken nests, hunted for hens, and herded cows together. In the fall, after harvest, they drove the cows to the family farm two miles south of town to pasture. "We took our lunch and stayed the day," Tilda said. The farm was not fenced, so the girls' main task was keeping the cows on the Christenson land, "which kept us pretty busy."

That teasing was part of their childhood is shown by a trick the two herd girls played on younger sister Hannah. They convinced her they had a way to reach the distant family farm without walking. Their tall tale told of a mysterious vehicle, a platform with wheels, which was self-propelled. This "car," as they called it, carried them and the cows out and back daily. "Hannah would watch for us at night but we always managed to get the cows into the corral before she saw us," Tilda said. One day little Hannah talked her mother into making her sisters let her go along. But when no car came Emma and Tilda told Hannah the car would not come if anyone was with them and that "she was the cause of our having to walk." Poor little sister believed them.

One hard winter, probably 1879-80, many cattle suffered. One day toward spring, according to Tilda,

. . . my sister Emma and I were to water the cows. The corral was built right close to the road and made of slabs stood on end. As we opened the gate to let them out, a wagon was coming up the road, two men were in it, neither very active in the church. We stepped back until they should pass and heard one say, "Why, those cows look good." The other said, "Oh, John Christenson pays his tithing." Emma said, "Did you hear that?" "Yes, I did." And we both expressed thankfulness that we had a father who paid his tithing. We knew it before but coming from the source it did made us appreciate it more.

The family created most of its clothing. Anna recalled that some evenings, after daily chores were done, Johanna's family sewed by the light of tallow candles or a fireplace fire, and that sometimes the family told stories while working together. Christena's family sewed, too. "I never crocheted much, nor knit a lot," Tilda remembered, "except for one summer and winter when I knit more than all the rest of my life." She and Emma knitted to pass the time while tending cows. "Our hose were all of the long variety that came well above the knee and if we had stockings, we made them." They also made socks for their brothers.

The families created their own yarn. They raised, bought, and traded for wool, washed and cleaned it, then took it to Manti to have it wound into rolls about two feet long. Then, according to Tilda,

. . . Mother [Christena] spun the rolls into the yarn we used or finer thread to be woven into cloth, the commonest called linsey. Mother had a large spinning wheel which one had to stand and walk back and forth to operate and which she used a great deal, or the smaller one for small amounts of yarn.

Christena once loaned her small spinning wheel to a widow to help the woman earn a living. The LDS women's Relief Society helped too. But when the widow died the Relief Society took her property, including Christena's spinning wheel, to reimburse the society for its aid.

For finer cloth the Christensons carried yarn to a neighbor, Mrs. Harris, who had a loom that did much of the Christenson's weaving. Tilda said her "most beautiful dress" came from cloth from Mrs. Harris's loom. It was woven of one red thread and one black, giving a small striped appearance that went around the dress. "Mother brought the cloth home and I thought it was beautiful." Christena made the dress by hand because "she had no sewing machine." Tilda said she "loved the dress and was so proud of it. It was my very best dress."

TRANSPORTATION

Although John and Christena traveled to Salt Lake City spring and fall to LDS general conferences, the children rarely left Gunnison. No train depot was near, until tracks reached Gunnison in 1890, and Sanpete County's roads were dusty in summer and muddy or snowy in the winter. The family owned one wagon, pulled by oxen or horses, that was needed constantly for farm work. Occasionally the family was loaded into a sleigh at Christmastime to visit friends in nearby Mayfield. For those rides, Tilda recalled, John hitched a team to the sleigh, placed heated rocks or adobe bricks and straw on the bottom to keep feet warm, and put heavy quilts over the passengers to make the seven-mile ride comfortable.

Hannah told a story that shows that even fifty miles was too great a distance to travel without good cause. When she was about thirteen a man was taking a load of freight to Salt Lake City and wondered if Hannah would like to accompany him and his young daughter. Hannah said:

I had two sisters in Salt Lake studying nursing, cousins, Aunts, Uncles and friends, so Mother decided to let me go. I had never been away from home, so it was very exciting for me. ... I had a wonderful time but after I had seen all the wdnders, I was homesick and wanted to go home. However, I had to wait 6 months, until someone was going home because the train didn't run nearer than 50 miles to my hometown.

HEALTH

Gunnison lacked doctors during most of the double family's growing-up years. Therefore, raising eight of ten children to adulthood, despite diphtheria, typhoid and scarlet fever, other diseases, and accidents was fortunate. First-born Caroline and last-born Benjamin Franklin died in middle youth, Caroline at thirteen from typhoid fever and Frankie at twelve from scarlet fever complications or tuberculosis — family traditions differ. He suffered for a long time and seemed to have a premonition he was going to die several days before death came. According to his brother Joseph, the LDS brethren who came to give Frankie a priesthood blessing took father John aside "and talked to him so that he was finally willing to give him up. They dedicated him to the Lord and he soon passed away." Upright stone monuments, impressively decorated, mark the children's graves in the Gunnison cemetery. Caboose Frankie was so loved, and his death so painful, that Anna and Hyrum both named a son after their deceased brother.

Ten-year-old Anna caught typhoid fever about the same time Caroline did. She did not die but it caused her long beautiful hair, of which she was very proud, to all fall out. When it finally grew back, she wore it long, almost to her knees. When Hannah was eighteen, in 1891 in Salt Lake City, she also caught typhoid fever.

Christenson babies were born at home, with the other wife acting as midwife. Johanna was "a natural nurse," her daughter Hannah said, and probably Johanna's nursing influenced two of her daughters to later become trained nurses.

SCHOOL

Father John Christenson believed it was necessary "to inform our minds with useful knowledge and raise ourselves to a higher platform of intelligence than that which we occupy." He, Christena, and Johanna believed in education and "saw to it that each child had the opportunity to go to school." A granddaughter noted that "somehow the required tuition was paid by the parents and a book or slate acquired, which was shared."

The Gunnison rock schoolhouse, built about 1870, provided a nongraded school. The students were grouped by readers, the fifth reader being the highest. An 1877 report said that the school served seventy-five students and two teachers. In 1881 a room was added and the school became graded. School terms, two or three per year, lasted about ten weeks. Tuition cost a few dollars per child per term. Although no Gunnison school records survive, other sources show that the eight Christenson children received some schooling there.

Utah's normal school age range then was six to sixteen, but in Gunnison some children, including Tilda, started at four and most youths quit school by age fifteen. The 1880 census says Gunnison had about 220 school-age children and that only 56 percent attended school. Nonattenders were mainly fifteen, sixteen, and six year olds. The 1880 census lists young John, Tilda, Anna, Emma, Hannah, and Hyrum as students, fifteen-year-old Minnie helping keep house, and fifteen-year-old Joseph doing farm work. When Hyrum was between thirteen and fifteen he received but three months of schooling each year and none after age fifteen.

The Christensons sometimes alternated days going to school. One story tells how two of the children took turns every other day because they had but one pair of shoes between them. Evidently the older children attended during the winter school terms after harvest work was done and the younger children went spring term while the older ones helped with spring planting. Missing a term each year did not seem to put the children behind at all, Tilda said.

Some family stories show that the education received in the district school, with its poorly trained teachers and its limited books, was minimal. Tilda told how a peddler once passed through the village and sold mother Christena a first reader which Tilda took to school. "Everyone used it," Tilda said, "it was the only book in the school." The children had to bring their own slates as well as books. Tilda said that "sometimes we would get some brown wrapping paper and make it into books to draw maps and write some of the things we had to keep." Anna recalled the day when the teacher, Nephi Gledhill, was disciplining by spanking hands with a ruler and her older brother Joseph took the ruler away and refused to return it. When Sanpete Academy, now Snow College, opened in 1888 it drew some of the Christenson children. Basically it was a high school. Joseph wanted to go that first year and his father "partly promised to help [him] get money to go to school" — but other plans interfered. John, then twenty-two, Tilda, nineteen, and Minnie, twenty-five and married, enrolled for at least one term. Hyrum, who moved to Salt Lake City in 1896, hoped he "could make enough money to take me through school," meaning high school. But, he said, "in this I was disappointed."

READING

Children recalled that both mothers had their Swedish and LDS books that the women read faithfully. The family subscribed to the Juvenile Instructor — Hannah said she always read it from cover to cover — and to the Contributor, two LDS youth magazines. Joseph received a magazine called Happy Hours, which had "good stories." The adults subscribed to the Scandinavian LDS newspaper, Bikuben. Sometimes Johanna, while doing housework, let her children read to her. During many winter evenings Hannah sat on a low stool by the fireplace and read to her mother by firelight, and, Hannah said, "this is one of the sweetest memories of my life." Fiction was frowned upon by parents and church leaders. One time, however, Joseph bought Hannah a book, the first she ever owned. "Books of that kind were not very plentiful in the country places and I prized this very much," she said. One reason she prized it was "because it had a ghost story in the back." Hannah said she read the Book of Mormon and Bible from cover to cover during her youth.

PLAY

Childhood meant play for the Christensons. However, little is recorded about their playing. Presumably they swam in the Sanpitch River or irrigation canals, sledded in the winter, took pony and wagon rides, and perhaps fished and hunted. Frankie once possessed a picture puzzle of a sailing vessel. Playing cards were not allowed in the family and parlor games were rare. Anna said that she played the usual childhood outdoor games, such as hide-and-seek, run-sheep-run, and piroot (snoop). "We played baseball in Gunnison," Joseph recalled, "and had championship games with other towns. It was soon discovered that I could not throw very well so they made me umpire."

Friends were important to the children. Tilda told a story of ruining her dress one day when playing with the nearby Harris children. For Hannah, school friendships mattered very much:

I had a chum whom I loved very much. We used to dress just alike, and have "tradelasts" — what one had the other must share. And best of all we each had a sweetheart and they were both named John. We used to pass each other notes in school and it was exciting because we had to be so careful that the teacher didn't see. We just couldn't wait until school was out. We four were together during all our school days and vowed undying love.

Pets were part of the children's play activities, too. They grew up with cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and at least one dog. No doubt the family animals had names and personalities and earned the children's affections. One chicken hurt its leg, so Johanna's family took him into the house until the leg mended. The rooster became a favorite pet. One day, Hannah said, the rooster "left his calling card" on her father's workbench:

The rooster jumped down, and Father threw his hat at him. He gave a funny little flop and turned around and gave a lusty crow. It looked so funny I laughed, then I was scared, I thought Father would be angry. But he laughed, too, so everything was all right.

Music, too, fit into the childhood realm of play. The double family had no piano but they liked music. Joseph played a horn in the town's brass band. Hannah owned a guitar and played chords on it while her family sang around evening firesides. Joseph, Hannah, and John enjoyed singing, and the local LDS ward provided some musical training. "Whenever there were songs to be sung in Primary," Hannah said, "we had a very special young lady who used to teach us. One time when she was looking for a song for me, she came across a children's cantata that she thought would be fine to produce, which she did, and I had one of the leads." The bishop, Christian Madsen, thought Hannah had singing talent so he invited her to his home where Hannah and the bishop's wife sang together. Hannah said that Helena Madsen "taught me many of the Church songs." In adult life Hannah and Joseph sang in the Tabernacle Choir.

Family information about holidays is skimpy. Nothing reveals how the three Swedish parents celebrated Christmas with their American offspring. However, Hannah wrote about Fourth of July celebrations she witnessed between ages eight and ten (1879-81). "For weeks ahead Mother would be getting ready," she said, for the girls must have new dresses, shoes, and hats. Johanna's friend was an expert at braiding and shaping hats, called "sun-downs," and, Hannah said, "when they were trimmed with pretty flowers and ribbons I thought I was just about right." Her father started the holiday by shooting off a "big gun" at daybreak. Brother Joseph arose before dawn and helped the town band serenade "all the bigwigs in town." At ten the brass band led everyone in a parade to the bowery, "shaped like a tabernacle with a dome," supported by woven willows. "We always had the Declaration of Independence read," Hannah said, and then came songs, speeches, comic recitations, and children singing. At noon there were ball games for older people and races and prizes for children. Then the children went home to a "grand feast," and Hannah said, "there was not much candy in those days, but Father always had a big bag of candy for us which was a great treat." A children's dance occupied the afternoon and a grown-ups' dance the evening.

RELIGION

The children had pious parents. Not only were the three parents LDS converts who gave up homeland and family to come to Utah, but they stayed strong in their adopted faith the rest of their lives. The Gunnison Ward Relief Society minutes contain testimonies by Christena and Johanna that show firm faith. Their expressions praised tithing, priesthood blessings, and support for leaders, and vented joy about being Mormons. Both participated in the Relief Society's work. Both tithed on their home produce. John, never a high LDS authority, was a seventy in the priesthood who labored faithfully as a home visitor — block teacher and block priest — and sometimes as a substitute counselor to Bishop Madsen. John and Chistena gave reports to the ward about LDS general conferences, which they regularly attended. John and Christena converted to not using alcohol, tobacco, coffee, or tea, but Johanna never gave up her traditional Swedish cup of coffee. John taught that the young should "get a testimony for themselves and not rely upon the word of man." He believed that "parents should teach their children while young and set good examples before them," something he and his wives did.

Religious parents do not always produce religious offspring, but these three did. The children participated in whatever programs the LDS church offered. They were blessed in infancy and baptized when about eight in the Sanpitch River. During an 1875 Mormon rebaptism campaign Caroline, Minnie, and Joseph were rebaptized, along with their parents. Three sons received priesthood ordination, but Frankie, who requested ordination upon his deathbed at age twelve, died unordained.

Gunnison is one of those unusual Mormon wards in which excellent minute books were kept, records that detail what meetings were like. The Primary minutes, for example, give a good picture of the Christenson children's involvements. Joseph, Hannah, and Tilda each served as Primary secretaries. Tilda once recalled how impressive Eliza R. Snow was while organizing Gunnison's first Primary. Sister Snow showed the children Joseph Smith's watch which he was wearing when shot in Carthage Jail. "This was a highlight of my life," Tilda said. She and Emma received twenty-five cents from their father and each bought a song book for Primary that day. All her life Tilda remembered a moral verse Sister Snow then taught them:

It is a sin to steal a pin, Much more to steal a larger thing.

The minutes note that Tilda, Joseph, Emma, and Annie gave recitations now and then and that six-year-old Hyrum exhibited beets and carrots in a Primary fair in 1883. The Christenson youngsters were among the forty or so who attended Primary in 1881, one-fourth of the community's sixty-one boys and eighty-nine girls.

Tilda said each child brought one or two eggs to Primary each week to finance it. "Then we took the eggs to the co-op store and the manager gave us cash," from five cents to fifteen cents per dozen. One time Tilda, when asked to sew a quilt block for the Primary, said she did not have time, whereupon Sister Madsen, the Primary president, told her: "If you do not take time to do work for the Church, the Lord will not take time for you when you need help" — a lesson Tilda said she remembered through life.

The children also enrolled in LDS Sunday School. When Joseph was eighteen he became the assistant superintendent. Minnie, as an older girl, taught Sunday School classes. Tilda taught classes, too, before she was fifteen.

The boys attended Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, or MIA, and the girls the Young Ladies' MIA. Joseph noted that "when the MIA was organized, I was permitted to join though only ten years old." Minnie attended YLMIA from age ten also. Tilda, however, had to be fourteen before she could attend. The MIA minutes speak of the Christensons. At an 1887 conjoint meeting of both sexes, for example, Tilda gave a poetry reading and John offered the benediction. From 1888 to 1890 Tilda was the YLMIA president.

The children helped the LDS women's Relief Society too. The ward's women developed a wheat storage project, and part of it involved gleaning wheat after the men finished harvesting. When gleaning, Christena and Johanna took along the children. In 1868, for example, gleaners included Tilda, seven; John, ten; and Joseph, thirteen; and father John drove the wagon into which the gleaners loaded wheat sacks. In other years Minnie and Anna gleaned too.

When Bishop Madsen organized Gunnison's first LDS deacons' quorum in 1877, twelve-year-old Joseph Christenson became the quorum's president. Overly eager, Joseph and his counselors recruited every boy they could find to join the quorum until the bishop restrained them. "We met in my father's house," Joseph recalled, and he said their main duties were to "hand around the bread and water," or communion, on Sundays and to help the poor by collecting "fast flour" on fast days. At fourteen Joseph became a priest and soon was the priests' leader. Four years later, at eighteen, he became a seventy. Young John was a priest by about 1885, and Hyrum was ordained a teacher by his father in 1895.

Illustrative of the young men's priesthood work is an 1887 meeting that young John attended along with two elders, two other priests, one teacher, and fifteen deacons. The session turned into a question and answer exchange. One asked "How many there were that took the name of God in vain?" None confessed. Another asked how many kept the Mormon health code, the Word of Wisdom? "All answered they did." One asked how many had spoken evil of another during the past week? "There were none." Then came reports showing that two priesthood members had chopped wood for the poor and nine had helped haul it. Young John was the priests' quorum secretary in 1887 and 1888, and in 1888 and 1889 he sat many Sundays at the sacrament table and prayed over the broken bread and large goblets of water during sacrament services.

BOY-GIRL RELATIONSHIPS

During their teenage years the Christenson eight participated in boy-girl socials, mostly LDS dances. John and Joseph sometimes escorted their younger sisters to the dances. "A girl never thought of going to a dance without a partner," Tilda recalled. "Sometimes a boy would take two or three girls to the dance and then each girl would dance with anyone who asked her." In the 1870s round dances, such as waltzes, were forbidden, but by 1890, Tilda said, "they were allowed a certain number of round dances, the rest was quadrilles." She said she never lacked escorts but she never went steadily with any certain boy either. About 1890 the ward sponsored dances every other Friday, alternating them with plays put on by the Gunnison Home Dramatic Club.

The young people also enjoyed buggy and wagon rides and spending a summer day at Funk's Lake a few miles away boating,

kicking footballs, eating ice cream, drinking lemonade, and picnicking.

Although the Christensons did not marry young, romantic interests seemed undelayed. When Tilda was sixteen she wrote a love poem to James Wasden, whom she married eleven years later. One verse of it reads:

Others' eyes may please thee Other lips press thine No other can love thee With such a love as mine.

Hannah was about eighteen or nineteen when she met a young Tribune reporter in Salt Lake City:

We loved each other very much but he was not an LDS and I had been taught the only right way to marry was in the Temple. I told him so and I felt "why must all the things you want most be the things you cannot have in our church?" But we remained good friends.

The three Christenson sons filled missions, but only Hyrum, age twenty-two, had a girlfriend when he left.

LEAVING HOME

"To leave home is the most straightforward of all migration moves," social historian Richard Wall has said, but "very little is known about it." Histories of childhood and families, he said, "have included little information on the ages at which children in the past did leave home." The departure of the Christenson eight from the nest, however, is well documented.

Gunnison could not keep them. Of the eight, only Minnie continued to live there, but even she left for a short time. Hyrum and Anna both returned for a few years but not permanently. None of John's three boys walked in his farmer footsteps. As a result, none of his lands and houses in Gunnison now belong to his descendants, and great-grandchildren today feel little if any attachment to the quiet central Utah town.

The children left home because of pulls and pushes. Aunt Maggie Peterson, John's sister, lived in Salt Lake City, and her home became a magnet for John's children who wanted better jobs and broader experience than Gunnison offered. One of Joseph's children explained that the Christenson children left because, like their immigrant parents years earlier, they wanted new horizons to cross and hoped to better their situation from that which they had known as children. Gunnison gave the children few opportunities to move ahead, so they looked elsewhere.

Within a five-year period, 1885 to 1890, each of the children left home except for Hyrum, still a boy. At first the young Christensons worked around Gunnison. Sixteen-year-old Minnie, for example, did live-in housekeeping work. For one or two dollars per week she did laundry — scrubbing on a washboard, boiling, and scrubbing again — ironing, housecleaning, and cooking in nearby Fayette. Then, she and Anna decided to earn better money, so they went to Salt Lake City about 1885. They established a Salt Lake City precedent, and soon Emma, then Tilda, then Hannah followed them. None lived in the city permanently, at first, and the girls individually or together returned to Gunnison for short periods. When Dr. Ellis Shipp opened her nursing school in Salt Lake City she enrolled Minnie and Anna. They graduated with good marks in June 1887 and then became nurses in the city, usually living with and helping families with new babies.

Tilda's story illustrates the girls' activities. In 1887, when she was sixteen, she decided tojoin her nurse sisters and Emma, who was earning $2.50 a week, for housekeeping. "Wages in Gunnison were $1.00 a week and that meant not only house work but outside work also, besides washing and ironing," Tilda said. John and Christena consented, and John's parting words to his daughter were, "Tilda, always remember the Lord in prayer, then He will remember you." She did domestic work in the city for a few months, then returned home with her parents after they came north to conference. When she returned, Gunnison's Bishop Madsen said: "Tilda, you are the first girl from Gunnison who has gone to the city and come home without cutting your hair and I commend you for that . . .just too much self-will to be led by every fashion."

Evidently Tilda went back and forth between Gunnison and Salt Lake City until 1890 when she enrolled, after working a summer in Salt Lake, at the Sanpete Stake Academy at Manti, along with Minnie and John. Tilda was then nineteen. In 1891 she attended summer school in Provo and then taught school in Mayfield, near Gunnison, for a term. When young John left for his mission in late 1891 she wanted to earn money to help him so she moved to Salt Lake City and worked at the ZCMI clothing factory, and then she did domestic work. After a three-year absence she returned to Gunnison. For the first half of 1896 she did housekeeping in Salt Lake City, filling in for her sister Hannah. In September 1896 she became an ordinance worker in the LDS Manti Temple and, after two years there, she married in 1898 at age twenty-seven.

Joseph left home at age twenty-one to fill an LDS mission to Sweden, returned home for a year, taught school, and then accepted a church call to move to Salt Lake City to become a voter to help Mormons try to carry the city's 1890 election. He remained there the rest of his life. John moved to Salt Lake City, too, about 1890, left for a mission in 1892 at age twenty-three, and settled in Salt Lake City afterwards. Hyrum, tired of farm work, moved to Salt Lake City in 1896 at age eighteen, left from there for his mission four years later, and after his mission stayed in Salt Lake City.

In 1894 second wife Johanna Christenson, grieving over the death of her last-born Frankie, moved to Salt Lake City to be with her children. She set up a boarding home there where her working children stayed. In 1897, according to a Salt Lake City directory, Emma, Hannah, Annie, and Hyrum —Johanna's unmarried children — were living with her. When she returned to Gunnison near the turn of the century, her children remained in Salt Lake City. By then only Minnie, of the eight children, still lived in Gunnison.

Life-course historians are interested not only in the age at which children leave the nest but also in the marriage age. When John Christenson, the father, died in 1903, half of his adult children had not married. Seven of the eight finally married. The sons married at ages twenty-seven, twenty-five, and twenty-seven; and the daughters at ages twenty-four, twenty-seven, thirty-three, and thirty-nine. All married in an LDS temple.

ASSESSMENT

According to family experts, "it is nearly impossible to find a period of history during which the younger and older generations have not been at odds with each other over values, standards, morals, and the exercise of judgment and restraint." Although Christenson parents and children undoubtedly had conflicts, no records survive showing major rebellion or rupture of affections. Apparently the children enjoyed their childhoods — Hannah said hers was particularly happy — and love and affection among the family members in childhood and adulthood can be documented.

The consensus seems to be that John, the father, was the stern and silent type who was nevertheless respected and esteemed. When Joseph returned from his mission he genuinely rejoiced to see his father again. When the father died, the children joined in a sad reunion at his funeral. After leaving home, the children corres- ponded with their parents and each other, and parents visited the children in Salt Lake City fairly often.

The half-brothers and half-sisters related to each other as if they were full brothers and sisters. In childhood some were true friends, like herd-girls Tilda and Emma. Minnie and Anna, halfsisters, studied nursing together. In Salt Lake Joseph became a second father to the five other children who settled there, including half-brother John. Joseph, when on church business in Wyoming, visited his half-sister Tilda.

The eight children seemed to retain positive feelings about their parents' polygamous relationship. Minnie grew up believing in plural marriage and became the third wife of Thomas E. Taylor. Joseph, his diary reveals, felt frustrated when the LDS Manifesto in 1890 banned new plural marriages and therefore closed the door on his hopes to become a polygamist. Only Hyrum, who was a boy when his mother, Johanna, had to vacate the duplex and move away from her husband, felt that his mother was treated a poor second best of the two wives. When the father, the common denominator, died, the two families received an equitable division of properties, after solving some minor disagreements. When John died a bit of the family's glue dissolved, but no serious wedge came between the two families.

No assessment of childhood is possible without examining the resulting adult lives of the children. How "well" did the eight Christensons turn out as adults? By any criterion, none were failures. Six of the children received schooling beyond that available in Gunnison. Three attended the Sanpete Academy, two graduated from nursing school, one received cooking lessons, and one took music lessons. Most developed marked musical abilities. Most enjoyed reading and were considered well versed by their associates. The diaries penned by the three sons and the letters and personal writings of Minnie, Tilda, and Hannah show the authors to be intelligent people. Two became nurses, two salesmen, one a cook, one a temple executive, and two worked as housewives. None of the eight became wealthy, but none turned out dirt-poor either. Only John and Emma did not become home owners.

The eight lived long lives. Their average age at death was seventy-eight. The sons turned out to be taller than their five-foot, seven-inch father. The daughters were medium to short in stature and were usually taller than their mothers. Johanna's children and descendants have had some hereditary problem with diabetes. Minnie bore but one child. John, Joseph, Tilda, and Hyrum reared large families, and Anna's late marriage and Hannah's divorce explain their small numbers of offspring.

None of the children left the faith of their childhood. All three sons filled LDS missions. The seven who married married in a Mormon temple. Only one divorced, and she later remarried, again in a temple. The eight participated in their local Mormon wards. One became a bishop, one a Relief Society president, two were Primary presidents, three were home missionaries, and several were Mutual presidents. Joseph became a counselor in the Salt Lake Temple presidency and associated with LDS general authorities. All eight died in the faith and received Mormon funerals.

The parents felt little desire to pass any Swedish heritage to their offspring. Sweden, with its poverty, lack of freedom, and "apostate" religion, was considered inferior by the parents who had turned their backs on her to enjoy America's prosperity and liberties and Mormonism's "true Gospel." Parents and children came to understand that some people equated being foreign with being backward, and "Dumb Swede" was a popular slur they did not want hurled at them. Father John became an American citizen in 1873, and his children did not grow up to be bicultural persons.

The parents learned English and spoke it in daily life, although some Swedish was spoken at home or when visiting Swedes. Swedish lullabies were sung to babies, and Swedish books and newspapers were read in the home. But the eight children did not learn Swedish very well. When Hyrum reached Sweden on his LDS mission, for example, he could not communicate with Swedes for many weeks.

Six of the seven children who married did not marry Scandinavians, which accounts in no small measure for the Christensons' loss of Swedishness. Swedish language and customs continued only in son John's house due to his Swedish wife and her mother. The three Christenson immigrant parents in time had grandchildren who had no taste for Swedish foods and no token Swedish vocabulary. Only a handful of Swedish objects survive today as family heirlooms.

That the eight's childhood experiences were decent is evidenced by the fact that in their lifetimes none became rebels, dropouts, criminals, or social or psychological deviants. The eight became healthy, responsible, religious, kind, hardworking, middle-class Americans.

In terms of life-course data, this group biography of childhood shows that the eight Christenson children attended school from about age four to fourteen. The males left for missions at the average age of twenty-two. The seven who married did so at the median age of twenty-seven. The daughters began leaving home by age sixteen and the sons nearer to age twenty. This childhood history supports Joseph Rett's conclusion that nineteenth-century adolescents passed through stages not determined by set ages. No age seemed to determine when the Christenson children started to work, attended school or the academy, left home, or married.

Historians are discovering that great mobility characterized the late nineteenth century and that Utah's overpopulation spilled into surrounding states. Seven of the Christenson eight might be labeled mobile because they left Gunnison permanently, but after their one move from Gunnison, they stayed put like their parents. Six moved to Salt Lake City and stayed there (although Hyrum and Anna spent a few adult years back in Gunnison). Minnie lived out her days in Gunnison. Only Tilda left Utah, and she and her husband homesteaded in upper Wyoming and spent their lifetimes there.

"If we define a community as the people inhabiting a townsite at a given point in time," historian Dean May has said, "we find that they disperse quickly, slipping like mercury from our grasp." The "extreme fluidity" of a community's population, he said, makes the task of writing community histories difficult. 66 This Christenson study and others like it, therefore, will be helpful by providing data for community histories. In Gunnison, for example, there were a handful of other families who stayed put like the Christensons. If the group childhoods of those families were also studied and added to this one, a reliable analysis of what childhood was like in Gunnison for the late nineteenth century could be penned. Then, if similar studies of selected families in other communities for the same period were obtained, historians could say with assurance: "Here is what childhood was like in Utah in the 1870-90 period." Other periods could be similarly studied. Youthhood would be understood better, community histories would be improved, and historians could better evaluate biographically and historically the people, movements, events, and decisions important to Utah and LDS history.

"Two other Gunnison families that could be similarly studied are those of Austin Kearns and Hamilton Garrick.

For full citations and images please view this article on a desktop.