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History Of Louisa Catherine Metcalf
composed from an interview with her by her son Elmer & his sons
3 May 1981
[When the Metcalfs got to Fayette] there was no homes to get so they went up in the east hills and they built dug-outs in the east hills to hold them over until they could get to build homes. They built open dug-outs but the first thing they did when they got there, father said, was buy a cow and garden seed if they didn't have enough with them. So they bought a couple of cows so they could have their milk and butter. So they built shelves in the east side in their dug-outs to put their milk in pans and raise the cream for butter. After a few nights when they'd get up in the morning their milk had been skimmed and there was no cream on any pan. So them men had to stay up and see what was getting their cream. And first thing that pop saw was these great big blow snakes, come in and licked cream off their milk, so then they had to find a way to kill the blow snakes. So they had to stay up at night to fight blow snakes and they got small pieces of land and planted gardens in the day. Dad said, he had especially brought seed he wanted and he got busy planting him a garden. The boys let the men hunt the blow snakes. So they were going to build homes but they had to live in the dug-outs until they could get them built. So they built log cabins, mostly. They did get a chance to get some adobes. They were some of the folks built adobe homes, but mostly log homes. They were in the dug-outs one summer and that winter they rustled a couple of tents and did have it a little bit warmer in the tents. Well, I been there in Fayette where they built the log cabins and I seen where their dug-out was. Course they had fell in when I seen them. It looked like it would have been so they could have lived in it. Grandpa and grandma built them quite a nice little log cabin.
And they hadn't been there very long until they put grandpa [John Edward Metcalf, Sr.] in bishop of Fayette. Bishop Metcalf and he was an awfully religious man. He really believed the gospel. Do always as good as your great grandpa, then you'd be good boys.
My father was just a boy of thirteen [when he arrived from England]. He had saved his money and he told me he had decided he was going to be a farmer. He had saved his money, so what'd he do but buy a piece of land over in Gunnison. It was a nice little farm there and he had money enough that he figured he could start and pay for it. So he got him a little ten acre farm in Gunnison while he was still a boy. [And after he married Mary Keziah Bartholomew] he moved to Gunnison. And while in Gunnison, he was leader of the choir. Gunnison choir, and I guess he had quite a life there in the church.
My mother [Mary Catherine Dahling] come from Sweden, with two Mormon missionaries when she was twelve years old and she didn't know anybody, only these two missionaries. They were Gunnison boys, so they brought her to Gunnison and found her a place to live and work for a living. And all that was in her mind was to get a job where she could save money and get her mother and brother and sisters over here.
When they come over, why, grandma [Britta Katrina Olsen] bought this little log house and bought her a loom and she weaved for a living. She wove the most beautiful rugs and carpets. She even wove dress skirts. She made a good living that way and Aunt Louisa, the oldest daughter, got married to Anton Jeppson in Gunnison and she lived with grandma for a while and then they bought a home and when her first baby was born Aunt Louisa died and left the baby. Mother had left her work and come home to grandma's to take care of Aunt Louisa's baby. But it only lived two weeks and it died. So there was just Uncle Nels was her brother and [he] went just north here and worked for the railroad. He was working for the railroad when he was killed, accidentally killed on the railroad. Grandma didn't have money to bring him back; the railroad buried him and we never seen no more of Uncle Nels. I thought it was so sad. Aunt Emma lived to be quite a young lady and she never did get married. She used to be awfully good to mother, liked to dress Blanche up fancy and take her out walking.
[Father would] come to Gunnison and I knew my father as well as any kid did. I loved him to death. Father was awfully good to us children. He taught the choir and he was a good singer, a beautiful singer father was. And he'd come home and if any of the kids was playing with us, he'd get us all together and had a choir out of all us kids. I had one of the ladies ask me in church over here at church, "How is it you know all the songs and never look in the book?" Oh, I said, I was blessed with a father that knew them all. He was a good father. Yes, he was really nice, he was a temple worker and so was mother.
I'll never forget, we were all in Testimony Meeting. They'd had some lovely testimonies and Diantha Reed got up and bore her testimony. She was a real nice lady and she bore a good testimony. And she was about to sit down, her voice changed and she spoke louder. She just nearly scared you. And then as she spoke on she got calm and she spoke in a different tongue and you couldn't understand a word she said. Us kids was kind of frightened. And when she sit down, another sister got up and bore her testimony to the truthfulness of the words that Sister King had said. She said, Sister King spoke from the mouth of the Lord. And she told you that this Mormon Church was the true church and the only true church on earth with the Latter-day Saints. And she told us to read the scriptures, study hard and go to all our meetings. It was all of God. So we figured we had really heard something that day. Like kids you know when you got out of meeting, we went and told the kids that had started to go to the Presbyterian church what had happened in our church that day and boy the next fast Sunday, our church was just full. There wasn't an empty seat. All the kids had come back and all the grown people that had heard come to church. It had really woke Manti up. And that next fast the same thing happened, Sister Guymon got up to bear her testimony and she was a woman us girls really loved. She was a woman who baked cookies and then ask us to come over and then she'd tell us Mormon stories. She got up and bore her testimony and she bore a good testimony. And when she went and set down her voice changed and she just looked like she was lifted off the floor. I remember moving closer to mother. I wanted to get ahold of mother. Mother took ahold of my hand and she spoke in a loud voice, I can hear her yet, and she spoke in tongues. And when she stepped down a man got up and interpreted what she had said. He said, she spoke the word of God. She told us the same thing, that this was the only true church on the earth. And told us to study the scriptures, they were all true. Then Brother Maven...told us that we were blessed to have the privilege of hearing the Lord speak to us. He said that was the word of God.
I was baptized in Gunnison but they didn't take me to the Manti temple. Gunnison had built a place up in the old mill stream. There was a big mill, flour mill, out east of Gunnison and there was a big creek come down right past the mill out in the bulrushes as we called it. They had fixed a hole so that the water would come quiet and stand kinda in that, and they had fixed it real nice and fixed benches out to the est so that the parents could sit on the benches while we were being baptized. That's where I was baptized in the old mill stream.
When I was a kid, father took me up to Henrietta's, that's Frank Metcalf's wife. [Frank was Louisa's half brother] Henrietta was an invalid and she had five children. I wasn't very old [probably about nine], but he took me up there to take care of that family, and I was just a kid in school. Henrietta was a lovely woman. I did like her. She run a millinery shop and trimmed hats and she just had to sit in bed to run her shop, what I didn't do she did. The door led right from her bedroom, the living room it was, into the shop and the shop door right out on Main Street. She had a good business and she was a wonderful trimmer. Course I had to keep the shop up and keep the shelves lined with hats and trimming and trim the windows. And tend her five kids.
Aunt Mary [Mary Keziah Bartholomew, Louisa's father's 1st wife] had taken all her family and moved to Oregon. There was a great lumber business and they all got good work there. And father he went to see them, went part way and took sick and come back and died. Never got to see them. When father died, they all come to the funeral--they all came up to Frank and Henrietta's to stay. And there I was having to wait on the whole bunch of Metcalfs. I wasn't very old at that time doing it.
[In 1908] when Henrietta went to Oregon, she wanted me to go with her and so did the children. They clung to me and cried. In fact, Grant had to take Willie and Gene, the youngest ones, and pull their little arms and take them and put them in the hack to go to the depot. As long as I could hear, I could hear them crying, "Oh Louie, Louie."
I kind of was mad at father and mother for sending me up there and spoiling my school years so when the hack left I packed my suitcase and clothes and went down to the hotel on Main Street. I knew Mrs. Harman there had been after me before to come and work for her.
I said, "You don't want me anymore do you Mrs. Harman?"
"Oh" she said, "I sure do, you come to stay?" She hugged me, set my suitcase down. So I worked there until just before school started.
So when I lived at the hotel, here come Mr. Reed, that was the superintendent of the schools, just before school started. He wanted me to go home, get ready and go to school. No I told him. I'd never go back home. I wasn't going back to school, all my school mates was two years ahead of me, and I didn't want to go back. So what'd he do but go down to mother and talked to mother. I don't know what he told her but up there mother come, and she says, "I've come up to get you to go home so that you can get ready to start to school." So I got ready and went home and left my job. And school started in just a day or two. I never graduated from the eighth grade, Willie got sick and I stayed out of school to take care of him and he was sick so I didn't get to go back so I didn't graduate from the eighth grade.
So when school started the next year, who should pick me up but Mr. Reed, the superintendent. He says, "come and go with me."
"Where we going," I said.
"Well, I'll show you. You've done that work in the eighth grade and you was one of the best students in there. You don't need to do it over." So he started me in high school. So I went to high school and, oh, I had lots of good marks in high school because I had learned to sew and in my sewing class I had 100 in everything. So Henrietta had learned me something!
We played ball a lot. I was on a school baseball team. Heady Alder was pitcher and I was catcher and we had a dandy school teach. I could throw that ball and put them out every time.
The next year I went to school again--the second year of high school, and I got me a job that summer after I got out of the second year of high school. I worked in a bank, taking care of club rooms, and different places that needed help I worked. When school started I just decided to keep working and not go back to the third year of high school.
I had a brother Verne that was working with a fellow from Gunnison and they were getting out logs and they were coming down and he was holding the brake. The brake broke and it throwed the logs all over, onto the horses and Verne was buried under the logs. Killed him right there. That was my older brother.
[Later that same year} I was with my grandma when she died. Grandma Dahling, mother's mother. When we moved to Manti the last time. We went back and got her and sold her home and brought her up to live with us. So she was with us when she died. Blanche and I would take turns with mother, sitting by her bed. Blanche had just laid down and I was sitting holding grandma's hand. It seemed like she like to squeeze on your hand. She changed and breathed funny and scared me. I woke Blanche up, she was asleep. I said, get mother down here, grandma's sick. She's too sick for me to be left here alone. Blanche went and woke mother up and grandma died before mother got down. Grandma was such a, oh, she was a sweet woman. [That was] Christmas morning, one o'clock. There I was holding her hand.
[in response to a question of how she met Rowland Denison] I had gone to a dance with Ed. I had been stepping with him now and then. He'd always get stewed. He'd get drunk and I'd go to the dance with him and he wouldn't be able to take me home. So Rowl' was just a good friend and he'd see that I got home. And by darn, I fell in love with the darn kid. He was so good to me. It just seemed like that had to be.
He went sheepherding when we first got married and we lived in part of mother's house. Two of our children were born there and then we moved to Sterling. Grandpa Denison come and said he couldn't get help on the farm and wanted Row to come out and help him get up his crops. We moved with them in part of their house for that summer and then Row bought a home up in Sterling and we moved up there and that's where Elmer, Mary and Bert were born.
Dad bought a farm in Gunnison. We decided we'd plant sugar beets. But that only lasted for two summers and the Gunnison sugar factory went busted and didn't make sugar any more. He was getting pretty sickly anyway. He didn't feel a bit good, so he decided to sell Raleigh Products again. So we went back to Manti.
In Gunnison, Mary was a good sized girl when we lived there. she was three years old. I remember one day the school kids were coming home from school and there was a couple of boys. I noticed them stop Mary. Mary had her doll buggy out in front, wheeling it back and forth. The two boys hollered, "girls, come and see this little girl's doll."
"Ah," they said, "we've seen dolls before."
"Well, come see this doll."
So the girls stopped and went over to see Mary's doll. Mary had her cat in her doll buggy. The cat had a bonnet on it and a little dress on it and its paws was sticking out.
[Belva and Ned were born in Manti.] Now Manti was just full of smallpox. All of the kids at school was getting smallpox and of course mine got it too. Vernon died. He was 9 years old and then Belva died. She was 9 months old. Within two weeks of each other.
And then when Ned was born, then just after that Rowland died. He was sick for many years. He laid in bed for a year, couldn't get up. Me and grandma, we used to kneel around dad's bed and the kids would take their turn and pray for dad. And we did that for so long. We always prayed. When dad died, why, the kids broke down and just screamed. And Elmer said to me, he said, "Well, mom, God don't love us anymore, what we gonna do?" I had never thought to tell them, "Thy will be done" when we prayed. I just prayed that he might get well. That's one thing I think I was slow in. I had such a lesson to teach the kids. It just took me forever to prove to them that God did love us. That He needed their dad on the other side, it was just killing me. I don't know if they ever got over it or not.
He died in 1934 just before Christmas, and we didn't have anything to live on. I had to work and I just had to trust the children to tend their dad in bed. We had 100 head of sheep to take care of and four cows and 200 chickens and the kids had to take care of them.
All my life I worked. At the school, at the bank, at the factory. I was cleaning lady at all of these places. At the factory I worked in the peas--put up peas. I worked in the temple veneering and dusting. When they had that big hail storm, all the west windows on our screen porch broke. Mind you, I was in the temple, cleaning. And hail, oh, I never, great big hail as big as dollars. And I thought it would break all them hall windows at the temple. And it never even cracked one. I never was so--I thought well, there was something to that.
I knew Wilf all my life from the time I was a little girl. I've known him all my life. They lived right over the fence in the home east of us. I used to take vegetables and things to her. Sister Domgaard was a sweet old lady, alone, Wilf was off herding sheep and sheering and one thing or another. She was a good neighbor when she could get out and move around. So I did all I could for her. And I don't know, Wilf when he'd come home from herding sheep he seemed like he looked after me. He was awfully good to me. He had never married, he was an old bach. He was a sheep shearer, in fact he was the best one. Wilf was a good man, a real good man. We got married in '41, seven years after Rowland died.
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