Giving it all Away

Netta Anna Furrer Cardon

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What did Netta Anna Furrer Cardon give away?

a.                  Her original copy of the Book of Mormon

b.                  Her Temple Recommend

c.                   Her Ox team and wagon

d.                  Her ship ticket to America

Yesterday’s answer:

A   In the homes of her patients

The following is about two midwives who attended the mother of a little Presbyterian girl in Idaho’s isolated Gray’s Lake Area. The family later moved to Utah where little Alice Creger grew up, married and lived a productive life. In her later years, she joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was from her deathbed at the age of seventy-four that her narration, “Alice and the Midwives,” evolved.

“I don’t remember anything about the birth of Harold-the oldest of my brothers. I do remember when my brother Evan was born. There was this old midwife. She would come into the valley and live with the family that was expecting a baby until the baby was born and everything; then she would move on to the next family. With my usual bad luck, she came to our family about January. We called her ‘Doc Harris.’ She had a daughter named Mildred Mecham; and, of course, they took over the house. That Mildred was a spoiled brat. I had to give up everything for her to play with, even my new Christmas doll.

That midwife was mean to Harold and me, and with my mother so sick for such a long time, there wasn’t much she could do about old Doc Harris. And if Dad was out with the cattle, she was ‘king of the walk.’ It didn’t take long for Harold and me to learn that the best place for us to be was underneath our mother’s bed, especially when that midwife was drinking. And she used to get on some real binges.

Finally, my brother was born, and they moved on. When they left, I just took that new doll I got for Christmas, handed it to Mildred, and told her she could have it. I didn’t even want to touch it after that. I went back to my old tin-faced, tin-headed doll that got stepped on by a horse. Dad tried to straighten her face out with his ball peen hammer, but she still looked a lot like that Heap Skinner who walked behind a pack train of mules and got kicked in the face. Doc Kackley had to put a new jawbone in for him, but his face was always kind of out of shape-like my doll. So I called her ‘Heap Skinner.’”

Lesson Committee, Museum Memories-Daughters of Utah Pioneers, (Salt Lake City, Talon Printing, 2010), 2: 28.