http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/files/2012/10/income-tax-forms.jpg
Back
in the day when men worked for 50 cents to $1 per day, what was income tax set
at?
a.
50 cents per $50
b.
50 cents per $100
c.
50 cents per $300
d.
There was no tax
Yesterday’s answer:
A.
The Muddy Mission
(Nevada)
Of the many stories told by those who settled this
region [St. George], one account captures what is for me a key insight. My
friend Lowell Wood told me this story from the life of his great grandparents
William and Elizabeth Wood. In 1867, Brigham Young called the Woods to help
settle an extension of the Dixie Cotton Mission ninety miles southwest from St.
George along the Muddy River in Moapa Valley, Nevada. Historian L. A. Fleming
wrote that no colonization in any area of North America presented greater
difficulties than those faced by the settlers on the Muddy. To accept this
mission call, the Woods sold their profitable butcher shop and their
comfortable home in Salt Lake City.
Conditions in the Muddy settlement were much like
those in nearby Dixie. As one descendant of that group put it. “Those people
were so poor, they couldn’t even pay . . . attention.” After five years of
frustrating effort, William’s family lost everything trying to settle the
Muddy. The settlement closed in 1872, partly due to the quirky demands of
Nevada tax laws on people who thought they lived in Utah—but that’s another
story. Many of them moved just up the road to Orderville, east of St. George.
The Woods returned penniless and exhausted to Salt Lake City, where they began
living in a dugout with a dirt floor and a sod roof.
One day William and Elizabeth stood looking at the
beautiful home they had sold to accept their mission call. William asked, “’How
would you like such a house now as our old home?’” Elizabeth replied, “I would
rather [live in a] dug-out with [our] mission filled than [live] in that fine
house with [our] mission unfulfilled.’” Why would Elizabeth feel that way? Her
answer says not simply that she was glad she survived the hardships, but also
that she honestly believed she was a different and better person because of the
way they had learned and grown by facing their hardships together. Like the
survivors of the Martin and Willie handcart experiences, they came to know God
in their extremities. And the price they paid to know him was a privilege to
pay.”
Bruce C. Hafen, Pools of Living Water, BYU Studies, Vol. 51, Number 1, 2012,
53.
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