Saturday, December 15, 2018

The Tears that Came from Saying Good-bye to Dad


See the source image
Addison Pratt
https://www.lds.org/bc/content/ldsorg/church/news/2015/02/25/400%20Addison%20Pratt.jpg

How long did one of Addison Pratt’s daughter cry after he left Nauvoo on a mission to Tahiti?
a.                  1 day
b.                  2 days
c.                   3 days
d.                  She cried everyday for the three years he was gone
Yesterday’s answer:
A   Took abused half breed children away from their native father
From the life of Miles Goodyear:   Goodyear left Fort Buenaventura on December 22, 1847, and spent Christmas among the Mormons in Salt Lake. “Then, with pack animals loaded with furs, skins, hides, and buffalo robes, he set out for California, arriving on February 9, 1848. No longer a mountain man, (he) left behind his native wife and children.”
     Goodyear and his brothers invested in land near Monterey and traded horses. His brother Andrew wrote letters home about the good climate and the excellent farming conditions in California. Miles was successful in his search for gold on the Yuba River. It was here that he caught a fever and died on November 12, 1849, at the age of thirty-two. He was buried in Benicia, California, near Suisan Bay.
     His widow Pomona moved from her cabin to the Sevier River where she married Sampitch after the death of Miles. An account from The Home Sentinel, Manti, Utah, August 15, 1889, gives the following account of the widow and her two children.
     “After Goodyear’s death, which occurred soon after the purchase, his widow married Sampitch, one of Walker’s stalwart brothers, and came to Sanpete with the tribe. Billy Goodyear (her son) was a fine manly specimen of a half-breed, but poor Bill and his little sister were treated with such brutality by their stepfather, Sampitch, that President Young, with his customary magnanimity, sent for the children and treated them as members of his own family, sending them to school and extending to them that kindness and generosity for which he was so noted.
     “One day, Sampitch, in a fit of jealous rage and with a consuming desire to exterminate something or somebody, vented his unbridled malignity upon his defenseless wife. My mother, as she frequently did, as they were old neighbors at Sessions (now Bountiful), Salt Lake Co., happened to pay her a visit the next day; she found her lying helpless upon her couch of robes and skins. My mother returned home for bandages, liniment, etc., went back and washed and dressed her wounds she had but partially recovered before the band left; but her life was brief; we never saw her again, but occasionally heard from the children.
     “Andrew Goodyear, their uncle, took Bill with him back to the old homestead in Massachusetts where he the boy received a collegiate course. While we lived at Sessions settlement, this same Andrew Goodyear, when on the eve of moving his camp to pastures new, made my mother a present of a bucket of flour (our diet consisted of hominy and corn dodger straight), and I have many times and quite recently heard my mother say, her heart was filled with more unalloyed happiness, intense gratitude, and sublime joy, at being the recipient of that gift than she would possibly be a the same bucket heaped and piled with shining coins of gold at the present time.”
     Billy Mills and his sister Mary Eliza were raised by their uncle Andrew as his own. Besides a college education, Billy became an accomplished pianist; his sister Mary Eliza was educated at the Young ladies’ Seminary in Benicia were she was know as a “cultured, lovely girl.”
Chronicles of Courage, Lesson Committee (Salt Lake City: Talon Printing, 1997), 8:  238-239.

No comments:

Post a Comment