Grass Hoppers and Frost
[from Ellen Greer Rees, compiled by Helen Thackeray Rees Berger, modern day arrangement by Lynn C. Rees]
On September 22, 1859, Edmund Rees, wife Margaret, and their five children ages 12-18 months (the 12-year old was my great-great grandfather) arrived in Great Salt Lake City, twelve-year old capital of the nine-year old Utah Territory. Edmund and Margaret were natives of Monmouthshire, located in the southeastern corner of Wales. While they’d joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1850s, they didn’t gather to Zion until Edmund developed asthma after years spent cutting coal in the Monmouthshire mines that fueled the early Industrial Revolution.
The Rees family started their journey with $500, the results of selling their home. $100 got them from Wales to Iowa: they left the old country on April 11, 1859, sailed across the Atlantic on the William Tabscott, landed at New Orleans, and sailed up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Council Bluffs, Iowa by steam boat. Another $100 got them two oxen, a covered wagon, a milk cow, and safely across the Great Plains to Utah.
Edmund was unfamiliar with handling livestock: the first time he put the yoke on the oxen, he put it on upside down.
Margaret took over.
Margaret Ellis Rees (1824-1896)
Family history records that Margaret Rees was “well built, quite stout, weighing about 155 pounds”. It was later reported that:
Mother Rees must have been quite a person. Family traditions remember her hiking to and from Salt Lake a number of times. Once in midwinter she made the trip home carrying a fifty—pound sack of flour to feed her family, who had apparently been made ill by some locally ground wheat. She is also credited with carrying two five gallon cans of water simultaneously, one in her hand and the other on her head.
The town the Rees family settled was Coalville, current county seat of Summit County, Utah. It’s “Summit” County for a reason: it’s located in the middle of the Wasatch Mountains, itself only a small part of the greater Rocky Mountain chain. Salt Lake City is 4,226 feet above sea level. Coalville is 5,577 feet above sea level. Coalville to Salt Lake City and back is roughly ninety miles down and back up through Parley’s Canyon. Parley’s is relative broad but the stretch between Salt Lake and the modern ski resort of Park City is “relatively twisty and narrow and had to be dynamited to make way for I-80”. The drive is demanding even with Interstate 80. Snowfall in winter is deep. Car accidents with fatalities are frequent in the snow and ice.
Margaret made the trip on foot without snow shoes in mid-winter while carrying 50 pounds of flour.
That was the future.
In the summer of 1859 Margaret was ten years younger. Taking five pre-teens and an ill husband one thousand miles across the Great Plains was easily within her power. Making the crossing, Margaret even discovered that she could milk the cow in the morning, let the motion of the wagon churn the cream all day, and serve butter to the family at night (unfortunately, after the Rees entry into the Salt Lake Valley, the milk cow wandered off and was never seen again).
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