Henrietta Bird Shumway ~ Index
Henrietta Bird Shumway, 1833-1910. Born at Newtown, New York, daughter of Charles Bird, Sr. and Mary Ann Kennedy. Migrated to Utah in 1850. Married Charles Shumway 1851. Had eleven children: George Albert, Mormon Alma, Spencer David, Hyrum Smith, Samuel Bird, Brigham, Charles Bird, Jedediah Grant, Bradford, William Bird and Isabella. Died at Kanab, Utah 1910.
It is from the green years of life that biographers draw their richest material with which to portray a character; but if Henrietta Bird, Charles Shumway's third wife, ever lived through the droll antics of childhood or knew the sorrow of growing pains, there is no record of it. She seems never to have been young; just a small person who became a larger one. Our first knowledge of her comes from Nauvoo where she was a twelve year old hired girl. At seventeen she crossed the plains and it is likely she walked all those miles from Council Bluffs to Utah.
She was a little thing, Her hair was straight and thin ad of the palest red; her small eyes so light a blue, they were all but colorless between her blonde lashes and neither had her nose or mouth anything to recommend them. But she must have had a good skin for all her sons are supposed to have inherited her rosy cheeks. So it wasn't her looks that won Charles. What then? Elbow Grease! In later years, he would often say, There was never such a worker as Hett!
And why did she marry him? With her plain looks men were not plentiful. And being an old maid was quite unthinkable. Then too, she was used to polygamists' her own father was one. She had been delivering children when almost a child herself and when scarcely nineteen, she delivered her own first baby in a covered wagon somewhere near Payson, Utah with Charles Shumway away from home.
During the first years of her marriage, Henrietta lived here, there and everywhere, in covered wagons, sheds and shacks. But when she moved to Mendon in the early 1860's, it was to an already prepared one room log cabin… a place! There in a small clearing on an autumn day, Charles left her with five children, the oldest not yet seven, a team, a cow and a few pigs and chickens. Charles then went on about his business, saying if she needed supplies before spring she should get them from the bishop. She went to the Indians instead. Once while out hunting rabbits she had run on to a small boy with a broken leg and taken him home to set it. That was all the introduction she needed.
The Indians shared their game with her and taught her to scrabble along the creek bed and in the woods for any growing thing that was not poisonous. The stock actually fared better than her family, for Henrietta managed to procure hay and grain for them from her nearest neighbors in payment for delivering babies and doing their washing. It was a terrible winter, but she and the children survived and in the spring were able to plant a garden as well as a field each of hay and wheat. Looking back, she thought the most hurtful thing she had to endure was to keep the seed potatoes from her hungry young ones.
It was a fertile land and never did a woman take more pride in the greenness of her fields. In time she could do anything on a farm a man could, be it butchering hogs, shearing sheep, sticking bloated cows, shoeing horses or helping the animals birth their young. She recognized the usefulness of the Indian mother's back-cradle and made one for herself. Thus with baby on back and hands freed for work, she tended her fields and stock. With total disregard for her body, she would pit it against the work at hand as tho it were made of steel and when desperation-driven, she could find a solution to almost anything.
Just as the farm was thriving beyond her wildest dreams the fever struck. She could not name it, but not one child escaped the sickness. First the baby, Brigham died, and Henrietta feverish and big with child had to tend both the sick children and the stock. Years later, out in the snow, her only daughter was born and died. The loss of her children was life a raw sore on Henrietta's heart to the end of her days.
During the fight for survival years there was always a baby at her breast and sometimes two. For she lacked the heart to push a sobbing year old infant aside for a new arrival. Charles, catching her on the creek bank sitting on a log with baby at each breast, made much of the scene. The fact that she wore pants added much to the clucking of tongues. She needed them as she was often astride a horse searching for her milk cows and hunting game to feed her children. However riding without a saddle was most unpleasant so she solved her problem by using Charles'.
The fact that Henrietta killed a bear that was raising havoc in her cabin did much to restore her dignity to the countryside. And she had done it with the weapons at hand- a flat iron to stun the beast and a poker to finish it off.
Some of the Mormons, seeing her comely sons at Sunday school each Sabbath with scrubbed faces and slicked down cowlicks, their painfully worn clothes newly washed and patched, were confident that Henrietta's Hersey was mere pretence, and that at heart she was as good a Mormon as any of them. When the boys were off to Sunday school, she would attack her house in a cloud of dust and by the time the boys returned she would have finished the Redding up, and her tattered bits and pieces of laundry would be spread over the current bushes to dry.
As a mother she was never mean. In a flash of irritation she might cuff a child, but there were never any planned punishments. Charles Shumway whipped his sons with a buckled belt, when he thought it necessary, which Henrietta did not appreciate.
Unable to be in two places, yet knowing the frightened loneliness of young ones not within sight of her, she had taken to whistling as she worked in the fields. As long as they could hear her whistle, they felt they were under her protection. Her caresses were apt to be hair tousles. How she needed a daughter. If little Isabelle had not died, there might have been more tenderness in her life. Later she could have cooked them a good meal instead of the usual flapjacks, fried meat and potatoes with greens. Isabelle could have made them clothes that fit properly and did not separate at the seams, unlike Henrietta's big uneven stitches which always burst at strategic places and embarrassed the boys. Most of all they could have talked to each other.
Henrietta had a friend, a Mister Finklestein, who came twice a year in his peddler's wagon. It was he who introduced her to books. Heretofore her reading had been by guess, and consisted of the Bible, Book of Mormon, the almanac and an occasional newspaper. When Mr. Finklestein gave her a dictionary, it unlocked the door to her being. Now she had words of her own. She could answer back. She would never be fluent. Her tongue would never keep pace with her brain but neither would it be halting.
The children too considered Mister Finklestein their friend. There was always candy in Mr. Finklestein's pockets and he taught them how to make kites and stilts. He was full of riddles and jokes and told them of people in far away places. He taught them to play a game that would go on through the generations. "When you don't have a book, then you make one." After which he told a tale, composing it as he he went along. When it reached a nail chewing crisis, he would have a boy go on with it, until they all had a turn. Sometimes it was most unoriginal, but they borrowed happily from the Bible and Book of Mormon, and later from Aesop, Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Gulliver's Travels snd Robinson Crusoe. It was not long until their young minds knew no bounds as they soared on their own.
The babies meanwhile kept coming. By the time she was thirty-six, Henrietta had given birth to eleven children and suffered three miscarriages. At this time Charles Shumway was given his walking papers.
There had always been singing in her cabin even in the roughest times. As she stirred the drably porridge or thin stew. Henrietta would start to whistle or hum, she seldom bothered to learn the words of a song, and one by one the tremulous piping voices would join in. It was almost as though singing had been a substitute for food. Now all the children sang with ease and some with true beauty. Summer evenings she would sit on the stone steps of her cabin, surrounded by her boys, her humming, like an organ holding them to the melody. All Cache Valley seemed to float in a sea of sound as they made their offering. It was as though they had set the sunset to music, and the hurts of the day healed. These sunset moments were so poignant with pain and beauty that her son 'Hyte could never see a summer sun go down without remembering his mother.
It was these young hearts going out in song which more or less reconciled the people to Henrietta's gentile ways. The boys's voices added much to the Ward and by and by Henrietta took to sliding into the back bench of the church to hear her children sing like Meadow Larks.
The hard times were over. The older boys were now able to do a man's work on the farm, and year by year they pushed the fields further back against the wooded hills, until the acreage was almost doubled. They had also added two rooms and a sleeping loft to the original cabin. It was then her sons took the ax and pitchfork from her hands and turned her away from the plough; also hiding her pants so she would have to wear dresses. "Don't you ever want to be a woman, Mama?" They asked. Soon she was putting blue calico curtains up at her windows; making patchwork cushions for the chairs; braiding rugs for heretofore barren plank floors; buying a blue checked table cloth and asking the boys to make window boxes for geraniums and shelves to hold the precious books.
It was about this time that Mister Finklestein brought her a cookbook. She read it and then sent the boys into Logan to buy cooking supplies. That night she baked her first cake and when it turned out just as the recipe implied, she felt like she had performed a miracle. Cheered on by her sons she tried out more magic and soon each day became an adventure in food.
Before Mister Finklestein left, the boys put their heads together with him. When he returned in the fall, he had several dresses for her, one a green riding habit. Her first store-bought clothes! She was like a girl trying them on. The years of peace and prosperity had added much needed flesh to her bones and in the well chosen clothes, she came close to being pretty.
However it was the riding habit she cherished most; especially now that she could mount a horse without being big with child or uncomfortable with every move of the animal. She would ride out in the early dawn when the cows and horses would still be sleeping in the pastures, and only the birds were awake. She would return to make breakfast, rosy cheeked and glowing to hear her boys exclaim, "Why Mama! How pretty you are!"
For the last few years Charles had been little in Mendon. He went up and down the territory, building saw and grist mills, and once establishing a bank in Idaho. Now either the church or his own wanderlust had called him to Southern Utah. Already he had settled his two other families in Kanab. Now he wanted all his households in one place, so he sold Henrietta's farm. First off she could not believe it, nor could she believe the seeming desertion of her sons.
During her fifteen years in Mendon, Henrietta had changed from a terrified often desperate young woman into a self-possessed matron of property, whose opinions on crops and cattle were of value to her neighbors, and whose fields and stock were held up as a model of industry to the countryside. This hard earned position had given her a confidence and even a faith that each year would be better than the next. Now Charles had sold her farm. How could she bear it? That was a foolish question she told herself grimly. Foolish for one who had borne babies in a one-room log cabin in the dead of winter, with a slice of board in her mouth to bite on so she could not cry out and frighten the children. Foolish indeed for her to think she could not bear it, for she had learned long ago that she could bear anything.
Though the boy's siding against her was unexpected and hurt, she understood their hunger for a father's attention. And so they headed South, with Henrietta looking backward towards her home. The boys did their best to console her, pointing out every possible object of interest and singing to her nightly.
Kanab, by then a village of about four-hundred settlers was a sunken canyon on the desert floor, rimmed by red sandstone cliffs. Johnson about seven miles away was encircled by the same red sandstone barriers, with only three or four families there ahead of them. Through it ran a sluggish creek; its meanderings marked by scraggly cottonwoods and willows. The farm, unfenced and uncleared had never known a plough. The only shelter was a deserted trapper's cabin, so small that when all the beds were made, Henrietta could scarcely walk between them to cook the meals.
It was dangerously late in the year to be putting in crops, but they must if they were to survive the winter unaided. Even the halflings toiled like men, digging out the rocks and lugging then away to make fences; while each of the older boys were giants uprooting trees and scrub and sage. Someone was always at the plough. It never ceased turning the soil from dawn to dark. They were lucky in their neighbors. Seeing their plight, the Johnson men came in a body and dug them an irrigation ditch to the creek, and their young ones helped with the planting.
Meanwhile Henrietta had spent most of her time making adobes for the new home, but it was August before the boys could help her. They copied the Mendon house; three rooms and a sleeping loft, thinking to please her. But adores could not take the place of logs and with earth on all sides, she felt like she was already in her grave. Once the crops were harvested the three older boys, George, Mormon and Spence, left home in search of work, as the farm was too small to feed so many mouths. So Hyte, a great husky lad of twenty became the man of the house.
When the older boys left, they never rarely came home again. It was as though they had turned into strangers. Something was separating them. Daughter-in-laws became a problem. Henrietta had had no experience with women and they all seemed such helpless ninnies. But let her try to give them advice and they complained to their husbands. More sons left home for marriage, and they too underwent the transformation. Instead of sons they became judges. But not 'Hyte! Despite all his religious fervor, the umbilical cord between them was never completely cut. But perhaps what bound him to her most of all was his marriage to Annie Johnson, who like all her clan saw the world through a glint of laughter. Annie was Isabelle, the little daughter who had died so long ago.
Annie was clever. Henrietta knew she was being managed and out-maneuvered but she did not mind. When she complained to the girl that she spent too much time babying her children and prettying her home instead of being out in the fields helping Hyte, Annie had laughed and caught Henrietta in her arms, saying, "Hyte recalls how you were neglected and how you slaved, and that is why he takes such good care of me. So it's you I have to thank for it all. And I only hope when my children are grown that they will love and respect me as much as Hyte does you."
By now Henrietta's sight was so poor that she could no longer read without getting leaden headaches, so she gave Annie all the books that Mister Finklestein had given them, which she had treasured through the years. Hyte's farm which he had at first rented and then bought from his father-in-law, joined Henrietta's, and the two women had only to cross the creek to each other's cabins. So when Annie read aloud to her children, Henrietta could listen as her hands mechanically knitted small caps and sweater.
Now at last she had grandchildren who loved and trusted her. Hyte and Annie's children tumbled through her house as though it were their own, making her think of Mendon and her boys growing up there. And almost every day it was, "Tell us about Papa when he was a little boy." Never had she dreamed she had so many good and beautiful things to remember. It was Henrietta's job to see that the cookie jars in both cabins were never empty. She was a part of Hyte's family, tending to Annie when she came to her time, and putting the newly born in their fathers' arms. She was there on Sundays, birthdays and holidays and especially when Santa came. Now that Henrietta had another woman to talk to, it was as though her once halting tongue would never cease. Annie listened and could not forget, and later in the Bighorn was able to keep Henrietta's memory green for her children. As one by one the boys went their own way the ritual singing as summer sunsets had ben transferred to Hyte's front steps. Henrietta would relax and feel peace entering her worn body still struggled to do the work of a man.
The years in Johnson had brought Henrietta from an agile plump middle age into a clumsy fat old one, and how she hated it. Heretofore her body had been a well run machine which obeyed her will and now it refused to. Then one day while scything lucerne, she had tripped over a tangle of roots and so torn the ligaments of her knee that she would be lame for the rest of her life. But stumping about on a heavy cane, she still managed to direct the working of her farm.
Charles seeing her after a passage of years had not been able to recognize her. Spruced as ever, he had driven over from Kanab in a black paten-leather buggy with dangling fringes and brassbound lamps. Never had Henrietta seen such a fancy contraption. With him were his two other wives, cool and neat though they had been driving through miles of dust. Annie had ran out and completely captivated Charles. They must stay to dinner and they had.
At the noonday meal, Henrietta was her old silent and awkward self, Hyte was even more ill at ease and quiet than his mother. However Annie had kept the meal from being too uncomfortable, meeting Charles' raillery with sprightly banter. He had enjoyed himself so much that it was not until he was putting his ladies in the carriage that he told the purpose of his visit. Another call had come. He was needed in Arizona and they would all be moving soon. Did Hett want to come along? He looked so relieved when she refused, that it was Henrietta's turn to chuckle.
Almost every other family in Kane County in the spring of 1901 had trek fever. It raged amongst the young folks hottest of all, and Hyte's three eldest, though none of age, were afire to go. It was Bighorn or Bust. At first Hyte and Annie had said what sounded like and adamant "No," but gradually their children wore them down and they agreed to set forth. The news came like a physical blow and almost felled Henrietta. "But you are coming with us," they said. "You can't think we'd ever leave without you." Henrietta might have made the effort if Annie's mother hadn't been going. That dainty Conradine with not even the fight of a rabbit in her. And over a half century out of Denmark and looking like she just arrived that morning in her lace frilled cap and apron! Doubtless Henrietta's dislike was prompted by jealousy, for she envied the tiny foreign woman for her high-hearted daughter.
But Hyte was not the only son she was losing to the Bighorn. Where Hyte went, Charley Bird was bound to go. It had always been so. She recalled how she had placed in the six year old Hyte's arms the newly born Harley Bird, saying, "This is your baby and you must take care of him, for all the older boys have to help me in the fields." Hyte had taken this job seriously and never did a baby brother get better care. And later when they had married sisters, the bond had been strengthened between them. Yet of all her sons, these two were least alike. Charley Bird resembled his father both in lean wiry body and beaked nose and he also had Charles' wit and clever tongue.
There was a gathering of all the boys at Henrietta's the night before the trekkers left. For well they knew the odds were great against their ever seeing Hyte or Charley Bird again. They sang the sun behind the red sandstone cliffs and the moon across the sky, bringing back memories of Mendon. Charley Bird would interrupt the songs now and again by tossing out mirthful aspersions at the shirtless brothers who would remain behind, so that finally one of the boys would have to pay heed to his hilarious insults and there would be a rough and tumble.
They had brought Henrietta's rocker out to the yard and Hyte had sat on the grass at her feet all evening just as he used to do when he was a small boy and she was ill or bowed down with worry. "Be our organ as you used to be, Mama," he kept urging, but she was afraid to hum; any sound she made would come out a croak of grief.
At night Henrietta had lain awake, dreading the coming of the worst of days. Hyte was her mainstay. How could she force her hands to let go. Nick, her big red dog that had been a comfort for years had recently been poisoned with coyote bait. So Hyte as a going away present had given her another dog much like Nick. Only the new dog was slow to make friends.
Soon the farm that had begun with nine boys was down to only Brad. Jed and even her baby, Bill were now married. Brad was a good boy, earnest and willing but he just did not have a head that could make plans or decisions. And Henrietta wore herself out plodding after him, telling him what to do. So it was much better that Bill take over the farm and that she and Brad move in to Kanab where he could work in the grist mill winters and go saw milling summers. The Kanab town lot was encircled with hickories and sycamores and at last she was back again in a log cabin. There was both a flower and a vegetable garden and a few apple and plum trees to look after if she could scrape up the energy.
It was an easy life, a peaceful life, but for one who had known only struggle, ease and peace did not make for happiness. There were no rackety hobbledehoys in and out of the house, no tussling, no greedy hands to smack as she dished up a meal, no scalawags in mock ferocity to tell her to smell of their first and tremble when she scolded them for their mischief. And worst of all, there was no singing. Brad was too shy to sing in town. Never was there such a backward boy as Brad when it came to folks. She wondered if he'd ever have the gumption to find himself a girl, and hoped his brothers would one day get around to doing it for him.
At first merry and lengthy letters came from Annie along the way, pleasing her mother-in-law with news. But after they reached the Bighorn, the letters grew fewer and shorter and all the fun and gusto were gone. Then came the bitter admission, "Oh Granny, how we wish we were back in Johnson with you!" She should have gone with them! No matter what they were enduring in the Bighorn, she had lived through twice over in her life. Oh how her staunch old frontier heart longed to be with the Bighorn pioneers.
Her mind fled from the present to the past. She brought back the baby faces of her children, then the halfling and the stripling. She remembered all and called to mind the droll capers and precious blunders of each age. Sometimes she even thought of Charles, her old adversary who had been dead for years. But now she did not quarrel with him in her thoughts. She was beginning to see the whole of his life and to appreciate it. If only there was someone to read to her. Now even the blue of the sky and the green of the earth faded. Only her fat flourished.
But if she thought things could not be worse, she was wrong. Brad was killed. The circumstances of his death were always puzzling. He had been found dead at the foot of the red sandstone cliffs. Some had claimed Brad was so absent minded that while out for wood, he climbed on the limb of a tree which stretched over the bluff and hacked himself off. Others, not comedians, explained that he had been climbing and slipped. Whichever it was, Brad was dead and Henrietta was alone.
Then it was decided amongst the boys that their mother could no longer live alone and the lot of giving her care fell to Bill and his wife, Lillie. Her good sons were determined to do their duty by her. And so Bill and his growing family moved into her home. And thus she lived the last seven years of her life. In 1910 she died and was buried in Kanab.