Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons (1849-1932) Part 5—Arizona

Lee's Ferry Crossing with Livestock
National Park Service Photo

Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons (1849-1932)

Part 1—Childhood

Part 2—Santa Clara
Part 3—St. George and the Muddy Mission
Part 4--Glendale and Marriage
Part 5--Arizona
Part 6--St. Johns

By Andrew Smith Gibbons, III, Ph.D.

ARIZONA 

While this child [Lovina Ella] was still of nursing age, perhaps in the summer of 1883, A.V. and his young family decided to move. Tantalizing stories of the year-round farming afforded by the warm Arizona winters appear to have drifted north and attracted A.V. to the point where he decided to move himself and his family to the Salt River Valley. Several LDS colonies were existent in the area and, besides the extended agricultural year, had the pleasant feature of considerably less difficulty with Indians, water rights, insect hoards, and outlaws. To the average LDS colonizer the Salt River Valley must have appeared as an opportunity too good to miss, and A.V. decided not to let the chance pass to go there. 

Packing all the belongings they would keep into three wagons, two drawn by ox teams and one by horses, the Gibbonses set out with their stock in a caravan with three other families: James W. Watson, Lorenzo Watson, and Jim Blazzard and their wives and children. A.V. drove an ox team, Elizabeth drove the horses, and it is uncertain who drove the second ox team. Perhaps it was Ella, but she was still not far removed from having had a baby. To insure a successful start in Arizona, A.V's wagon contained stores of one and a half to two years of food and clothing. 

The trip to the Salt River Valley offered a pleasant bonus: the opportunity to visit all of the parents and brothers and sisters who had moved to St. Johns. The trip to St. Johns would take three months, and the trip to the Salt River Valley would take only weeks after that. Since there was no time deadline imposed on arriving in the valley because of crop planting, due to the year-round climate, the St. Johns visit could be made in a leisurely fashion. 

The route of the trip was well marked because of the heavy flow of Saints toward Arizona. There was at the time a massive movement of missionaries south to Arizona called in the same way A.V.'s father and father-in-law had been. Though there had been in previous days much difficulty with Indians while travelling through northern Arizona, the practice of travelling in caravans, the large number of travelling caravans, and the pacifying of the Indians by the Mormon missionaries, Andrew Smith Gibbons among them, made the trip less hazardous. 

No report is known of dangers encountered during this trip other than the usual difficulties attendant to transporting numbers of people and animals over desolate and difficult terrain. At Lee's Ferry, A.V. did encounter some difficulty in transporting his cattle across the Colorado River. One cow lost the spirit of rafting and jumped off the ferry into the river. All of the other cows, probably for the same reason, followed and all swam back to the shore from which they had just embarked. The cows did cross the river, but only on the second try. 

Though the Gibbons family was provisioned not only for the trio but for a year or more following the trip, there were some provisions which could not be stored. Fresh milk for the children was one of them. It is told that on the trip Elizabeth pressed the need for milk to A.V. to the point that he agreed to find some and set out to procure the milk. Disappearing one morning, A.V. returned shortly with a pan full of warm, fresh milk. This was a surprise to the women, who knew that none of their cows were at the time giving milk. Nor could they learn from others in the caravan that their cows were supplying the milk. Yet morning after morning, A.V. supplied it as requested. Elizabeth was curious to find the source and spied on A.V. as he made one of his daily runs. She followed him as he left the camp and watched in amazement as he milked one of the caravan's mares and returned to camp with his prize, proud of his resourcefulness. 

The arrival in St. John's was no doubt a great relief after three months on the trail, and the grand parents must have been very pleased to see the growth in children they had not seen for a year and new children they had never seen. Even more significantly, there is little doubt but that the Saints in St. Johns were very pleased to see outsiders arrive, for it meant the chance to persuade them to join the growing, if beleaguered, settlement and add much needed numbers and strength to the yet tender and vulnerable colony. 

A.V. was aware of the desire within the St. John's Saints for comrades to help them in their struggle for settlement. As a youngster in the Muddy Mission and in St. George he had been a witness to the continual visits of outsiders to those villages and the decision made by each of them either to stay and build the area or to move on in search of a more likeable location. Certainly there was a great deal in St. Johns to appeal to A.V., for many of the settlers there were old associates—co-workers with Andrew S. in the missionary labor. The settlement was also a highly progressive one, and there were already organizing efforts underway for irrigation projects, schools, cooperative mercantile establishments, and cultural projects. 

To put proper perspective on the events of A.V.'s visit to St. John's, and to build a better background for understanding the conditions of the times, it is necessary to digress for a historical sketch of St. John's from 1873 to 1883. 

To be continued . . .

Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons, (1849-1932) Part 3—St. George and the Muddy Mission

Pah-Ute County, Arizona, with Mormon pioneer communities of
Callville, St. Thomas and St. Joseph
Showing original extent of County, and Portion ceded to Nevada in 1869-1870

Biography of Andrew Vinson Gibbons (1849-1932)

Part 1—Childhood

Part 2—Santa Clara
Part 3—St. George and the Muddy Mission
Part 4--Glendale and Marriage
Part 5--Arizona
Part 6--St. Johns

By Andrew Smith Gibbons, III, Ph.D.

ST. GEORGE

The flood had further effects upon A.V.'s family. It occasioned a move of the entire family from Santa Clara to St. George, where the one-year-old Cotton Mission had begun to assemble a city. The move came quickly upon the heels of the flood, and by May 9, 1862, it was complete, a house had been built, and a baby, Joshua Smith Gibbons, had been born in it. 

The work load A. V, and his growing band of brothers and sisters must have born in setting up a new home and beginning to produce food must have been heavy, but by now familiar. In addition to their share of the work in getting established, it is possible that some amount of extra work fell to A.V. and the other children as their father assumed the duties of Sherriff of Washington County, which involved duties of keeping the peace among white men and dealing with Indians as well. 

By March of 1863 the conditions of the Gibbons-Dart marriage had arrived at a state where divorce was the only solution. The problems of plural marriage must have been considerable, and those pressures now returned the Gibbons family to almost its former size. A.V., by now 14 years old, no doubt had some experiences during this period as he tried to understand the complexities of the adult world. Also during this period, he was acting head of the house again as his father accompanied Jacob Hamblin for three months to visit the Hopi villages and the Colorado River country. The anxiety and work brought on by these trips must have been considerable but the rewards in and interest must have been great as the Elder Gibbons returned home with stories of unbelievable adventures. Also, the knowledge of having done well in their father's absence must have inspired confidence and pride in the Gibbons children. 

MUDDY MISSION 

The children of Andrew and Rizpah Gibbons
Standing: William, Richard, Joshua, Leroy
Seated: Martha, Andrew Vinson, Eliza

Nearly a year of hard work turned the Gibbons family fortunes to the good. At the end of it, in March 1864, A.S. Gibbons resigned his duties as Sheriff, as if to free more time. It was short-lived freedom, however, because in October he was called to be President of the Muddy Indian Mission. For the Gibbons family, which contained by now six children (Martha Sarah, 18, and married; A.V., one month short of 15; William, almost 13; Eliza, 11; Richard, 6; and Joshua, 2) it was a characteristically timed call, since Rizpah was eight months pregnant when it came. Of course, the call was accepted. 

The call took A.S. Gibbons from home on January 1, 1865 for a period of perhaps nine or ten months. As their mother was incapacitated, a good deal of the family responsibilities fell to them once again, particularly A.V., who was now not just the oldest boy but the oldest child in the home. In the autumn of 1865, the family was reunited in St. Thomas, buried today under Lake Mead, a town to which their father had led the citizens and helped to locate, design, and build. In St. Thomas the family, along with a small number of other families, was living in an arid desert somewhat different from their St. George home. St. Thomas, at first the sole town in this desert, was soon joined by other towns, St. Joseph and Simonville, as new settler-missionaries arrived in the area. 

For A.V. Gibbons and his brothers and sisters, none of them quite adults yet, the experience of living in the Muddy Mission must have been a memorable experience. Not only were there relations with sometimes angry Indians to be observed, but there was the necessity of making acquaintances with new hosts of young people. Years after he had lived in St. Thomas, Richard Gibbons related in his journal the meeting of an old friend whom he has known as a youth in St. Thomas. The entry carries with it the feeling of enjoyment Richard experienced: ". . . I met Mary McFate who was the wife of F. Burke. We were children together in St. Thomas on the Muddy. We had a good talk about old times." Behind the entry can be imagined an absorbing story of the two childhood friends, pioneers in a forbidding land, who had had many experiences to recall and share together. 

For A.V., now nearly the age of a man, there must have been interest not only in making friends, but in courting as well. The St. Thomas population was by no means stable or stale. It consisted of a core of permanent citizens and a continuing flow of prospective citizens, as new arrivals came and either were assimilated into the community or moved on. 

This ebb and flow of settlers continued for the years that the Gibbonses were in the Muddy Mission—1865 to 1870. A.V.’s important late adolescent years were passed in St. Thomas, and it was there that he grew to be a man in years and stature. He also at this time began to accumulate goods of his own, looking toward a dav of marriage. We can expect from his breadth of experience at he had reached manhood in other ways long before this time. 

Andrew Smith Gibbons (b. 1825)
Arizona Territorial Legislator
From Pah-Ute County

During the St. Thomas years, A.V.'s mother bore three more children: Charles Rudolphus on June 15, 1866, and twin girls, Evaline and Adeline on May 4, 1869. Between these two events, in November 1868, the Gibbons children must have been proud to see their father elected to the Arizona Territorial Legislature in Tucson. A.V. and his brother William drove their father and the other Pah-Ute County legislator, Octavius D. Gass, south to the junction of the Virgin and Colorado Rivers to launch a boat into the rapids on a trip that would take Gibbons and Gass to Yuma, from which point they would travel nearly three hundred miles to Tucson cross-country. It was the best Gass mileage Gibbons ever got. 

The river trip was only one of several encounters the Elder Gibbons had with the river. It was a part of his daily environment, and no doubt the Gibbons boys received a liberal education in boatmanship from their father in St. Thomas as well as learning the other necessary lessons in farming, herding, Indian pacifying, and desert survival. We may be tempted to pity youngsters pressed into such demanding experiences as the Gibbons children encountered—far from the refinements of the larger society—but we should keep in mind that their education was by no means lacking. Their tutors were of the highest and proven quality. They rubbed shoulders with great names out of history: apostles and prophets, Indian chiefs, politicians and explorers. Most importantly, they daily associated with pioneers of the caliber to tame wildernesses and thank God for the opportunity. 


To be continued . . .

NOTES

To read more about the fascinating history of the Muddy Mission and the families who lived there, see:

Monique Elaine Kimball's Master's Thesis, "A Matter of Faith: A Study of the Muddy Mission," (University of Nevada-Las Vegas, 1988);

Susan Lyman-Whitney's archived Deseret News article on the Muddy Mission;
The "Muddy Mission" entry in O.N.E., the Online Nevada Encyclopedia;
The 1991 unattributed, archived Church News article, "Muddy Mission Settled in a Forbidding, Lonely Area"; and
Helaman Pratt's notes on the Muddy Mission.

Also, listen to the 2000 Sunstone Symposium presentation by Lois F. Worlton, Jack Worlton and Melvin T. Smith, "The Muddy: A Mission Too Far?"