Son of Abraham Hunsaker and Harriet Vernisha Beckstead

Married Martha Ellen May, 25 Oct 1883, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah

Children: Ruth Hunsaker, Velda Eveline (Ted) Hunsaker, Richard Reed Hunsaker, James Leland Hunsaker, Joseph Ross Hunsaker, Milton Lavon Hunsaker, Ray Luce Hunsaker, Hartman Abraham Hunsaker, Sarah Ellen (Ella) Hunsaker, Martha Vernitia Hunsaker, Enoch Colman Hunsaker, Polly May Hunsaker, William Eldon Hunsaker

Biography: by Martha Vernitia Hunsaker Kiilsgaard, daughter - February 1953

My father, Enoch Hunsaker was born and Brigham City, Utah on 08 September 1860. He was the seventh child born to Harriet Beckstead and Abraham Hunsaker. When he was two years old the family moved to Honeyville, Utah where they made their home. He grew up and attended school until he was probably in the fourth or fifth grade. He worked on the farm and when he was seventeen years old when he went to Dixie where he worked in the mining country of Silver Reef. He remained in southern Utah for some months and then returned to Honeyville. He worked as a freighter driving a four horse team, hauling goods to Montana from Corrinne, Utah. He had many close calls to death during this period. In the spring of 1883 he went to Rockland, Idaho where he worked all summer. He now owned his own team and wagon. One horse was a bay with a white face which he called "Old Bally." He was a splendid, dependable horse. I remember him very well as this horse at one time had a sweenyed shoulder and before this was well; someone put a 25¢ piece under the skin. He must have been 25 years old when he died. I remember father went out to the south field one day in the winter where some of our horses were wintering and found Old Bally dead, so he cut out the quarter and when he came home and showed us the money and told us Old Bally was dead, we all wept as though one of the family had been taken from us. I think my brother, Eldon, has this money even now.

While I am talking about Old Bally, there was one time when he saved mother and father's life. This must have been in the spring of 1884. Grandma Harriet Hunsaker wanted to go visit Uncle Alex and family, up at Washakie where Uncle Alex was the Bishop of the Indian Ward. They had to ford the Malad River, or else it was high water or flood time. They made the trip getting there all right, but the water was rising rapidly and running quite swift and was a good sized stream. They got into the middle of the stream and one horse refused to swim and the water was pulling them downstream. The wagon box had started to swing off the wagon but Old Bally pulled them all out on the bank to safety. Grandma Hunsaker had remained at Washakie but the folks always said had it not been for good Old Bally they would have been washed downstream to their death.

Mother, she was Martha Allen May then; and father spent the spring and summer of 1883 at Rockland or Rock Creek, Idaho as it was called of the time. Mother taught school out there that summer. I think father and mother did some of their courting out there, as after they returned to Utah that fall they had decided on get married. So in the latter part of October, they with Grandma Harriet Hunsaker journey two Salt Lake City, Utah making the trip by team and wagon. They were married in the Salt Lake Endowment House on 25 October 1883 by brother Franklin Richards. After they were married they drove out to West Jordan were Grandma's folks lived. They did not have enough room for them all, so father and mother spent their first night sleeping in the wagon box. They stayed with Grandma Hunsaker for short time, then father had acquired about ten acres of land and a one room rock house. They soon moved into their own home and they lived the rest of their lives on this same land. Soon after they were married, mother said, one day grandfather Abraham Hunsaker came to the door and called her to come out. There he was with an old sow and her family. He had driven them up there and he made them a present of them. Meantime Grandpa James May gave mother a cow so they felt very rich. Mother has often told us of her wedding dress which was gold colored brocaded material. It was trimmed with gold buttons. That is all I ever saw of the dress. She had left the dress at her mother's home where they had more room. Well, one day Aunt Maggie May Bernard, mother sister, who used to wear it once in a while without mothers knowledge, had soiled it so she decided to dye it black. Mother felt terrible about it as I have so often heard her tell about what happened to her wedding dress.

Father worked wherever he could find work until he got more farm land and then he farmed altogether. We always had plenty to eat and clothes to wear. Sometimes not as fancy as some, but always enough to keep us warm and we always had a Sunday outfit including our dress, petticoat, chemise waist and panties with crochet lace on them. We probably had just one pair of shoes, but on Saturday night our shoes polished and set in a so they were ready for us on Sunday morning to wear to Sunday School which we children never missed.

Father was very stern, strict, parent and we children never dared to ask a favor from him or ask if we could go anywhere but we would ask our mother and she would ask father then tell us his answer. But I think as bark was really worse than his bite. He was also a great prankster. He delighted in playing jokes on us children. I remember one night my younger brother and myself were supposed to get the kindling in for morning and we played late and had forgotten or evening chores. So we were out at the woodpile getting our kindling and it was really dark. All at once we noticed a large white object coming to work just. I tried to tell my brother it was our old white Bleachy cow although I was terribly frightened and as the object came closer, we gathered up our kindling and ran for the house with the white object closely pursuing us. We entered the house only to find it was father with sheet over him. One time my sister Ella and I had to go to Grandma Hunsaker's on an errand. It was real dark and we started home walking right down the middle of the road so we could see all around us. There were so many tramps around and grandma lived right by the railroad tracks. We were just passing Uncle Hite's (Hyrum) place and we noticed a man standing by the gate, looking as if he had his hat pulled down over his face. Then he turned and began walking in the same direction as we were going and he walked just as fast as we did and he kept right on until we were almost home. Then we discovered it was father who had come to see that we got home safely, but we were almost frightened to death.

In July, 1884, mother's and father's first child was born, a little girl and they named her Sarah Ellen, a name she always hated and we always called her Ellie but in her school days she signed her name Ella and that to us became her name. If I was mad at her I would call her Sarah Ellen and that, I assure you, just added fat to the fire and would probably end up in a scrap.

From 1884 on, every two years, sometimes a week or so less sometimes a week or so more, a new baby came to our house. The first five children were born in July. Ella on the tenth; my birthday on the 28th, our brother Hartman on the second and Martha on the sixteenth and Coleman born July 22nd. That is the in the order of which we Julier's came along. Our sister Velda came next on 17 October 1894. Then on 21 February 1897, James Leland was born. This time mother had a longer rest between Velda and James and broke the two year record. Joseph Ross was born 18 March 1899, then came a Richard Reed. He was born 15 February 1901 but he died of blood poisoning 22 April 1901. Then on 01 June 1902 Ray Luce was born and on 01 April 1904 Milton Lavon came along. On 01 October 1905 Ruth was born. The last one in the family was William Eldon. He was born 06 August 1909.

Father was an honest upright citizen. His word was as good as his bond. He was always on hand to help people in distress and share with those who had less than he did. Grandma Harriet Hunsaker gave father twelve acres of land up what we called the North Field. Then he received 25 acres down in what we called the South Field on the banks the Bear River. Then for years we had 160 acres out near Ferry Bend, a little north and west of Honeyville. This was a railroad land, but father thought he owned it when a man named J.P. Tarpey contested. Now we children hated that man Tarpey. After years of litigation father, with several brothers and nephews, who also had railroad land, lost out in this was a sad time for us all.

Father was constable for the Honeyville precinct for years. He never knew the word fear. One time the local store was burglarized and father went after the culprits. He found them, seven tramps. He captured them single handed and here he came home with them in the wagon and he kept them until the sheriff from Brigham City came and got them. He was deputized by the Sheriff so he worked on other cases outside his district.

After father and mother had been married a few years, they built a lean to room onto the rock house. The first six children were born in that house, wee Ella might have been born down at Grandma May's house. In the fall, just before Christmas in 1898, we moved into the new house just up the hill is short distance from our old house and now we had four bedrooms and a large kitchen and living room combined. What a wonderful event that was to us all. Later a large kitchen and pantry was added.

One outstanding or well remembered event in our lives was the year 1904 when most all the family had the dreaded disease, typhoid fever. Our sister Ella had in August, the father and mother took such good care her that she didn't even have a doctor. They would take her to the local hot springs and keep her in that hot water just as long as she could stand it. These hot baths caused her to sweat, and that broke up the fever. Ella got well and went to Plymouth, Utah to teach school in September. I went to Garland to work for a family where that mother also had typhoid but I wasn't there very long before the folks sent for me to come home as mother was down with the fever. Then it seemed like a nightmare as one after another came down until we had mother, Ross and little Ray sick at home. My cousin Jennie came down with it and when our Velda took sick, Aunt Eve said she could take care of her along with Jennie. Then dad's brother Joseph (Uncle Jode we called him) and his good wife, Aunt Emily, took brother Hartman and James to their place when they had contracted of the disease. We kept baby Milton at home but when Martha took it I was left alone, so Uncle Will and Aunt Alpha took the baby and father and I held the fort. He was so good when Martha was so bad. Doctor Pearce Sr. (who had been on the job since mother came down) said she would never recover, but she had notions, she wanted a drink of water from different places and father would get it from where she wanted. Finally she wanted a drink from Stinky Springs up the near the mountains and Dad would go every other day on horseback and get a small keg of water from those springs. Well, they all eventually got well and we were a happy family when we were all together again. Father, my brother Coleman, the baby Milton and I didn't have it but almost every morning father made Coleman and I take a dose of Epson Salts. Our friends and relatives helped us out a lot and Doctor Pearce was wonderful. He made 41 trips to Honeyville, a twenty mile trip with a team and buggy. He also took care of our cousin Jennie on these trips and her father's bill was $150.00, but our bill was only $75.00. But Uncle Jode could much better afford to pay it than our father and that's the way Doctor Pearce did business. We all but idolized him ever after.

Father always cut and hauled all our wood every fall, some from local canyons and sometimes he hauled cedar from out to Promontory. This trip usually took three days and mother always fixed him plenty of food but sometimes he took his Dutch oven and cooked some of his own. He had a wooden grub box and when he came home we kids always ran to see what he had left in the box. One thing we looked for was cookies as mother always baked a lot of sour cream cookies for him and they were so good, never got hard but kept nice and moist so none ever went to waste.

We used to go out to the Little Mountain west of Corrinne and to the hot springs for a bath. They were supposed to very good for one. These trips were our vacation, but just for one day. Father always took us to the cave where his mother lived at one time. Grandfather Hunsaker use to take his sheep and cattle out and around Little Mountain for pasture during the spring and summer. Grandmother lived in this cave where she cooked and took care of her sons and others who watched and herded the cattle. There was also the painted rock out there where the Indians had painted pictures. They were queer looking caricatures. Some represented horses, sheep and cattle all painted in red paint or whatever the Indians used for their war paint and father always took us up to see that rock.

Father was at one time president of the Y.M.I.A. and was a ward teacher for years. In his later years, he went into the cattle business and did very well. In 1914 he had our home modernized. One part of the old house was pulled down and a modern kitchen, dining room and bathroom were added downstairs and a large bedroom added upstairs.

Our brother, Coleman went on a mission to the eastern states. Left home in January 1916, but we never saw him alive again as he passed away in the mission field in Brooklyn, New York, on 27 September 1917 after having contracted typhoid fever and then pneumonia set in and he could not fight it and was taken from us.

Our brother, Ross filled a mission in Australia during 1919 through 1921. Father was very proud of his missionary boys. In 1924 our brother Ray received his call for a mission. He was supposed to leave in the fall that he took down with pneumonia in June and then he had an abscess on his lungs and was sick all summer but his health improved. The winter was a bad one and he tried to help father feed the stock and tramp a road through the snow so the team could get through the two haul feed, Ray over did his strength and he came down with meningitis, then pneumonia set in and he passed away on 29 December 1924. My father took the death of his sons very hard.

I think we children had almost every childhood disease known. Anyway we had mumps, whooping cough, measles and chickenpox. When I had chicken pox I was certainly six; just about like smallpox. Milton had pneumonia, I had erysipelas and Ted had rheumatic fever. We all had that diphtheria one spring and when we had any of these diseases are cousins Jennie, Lavon, and LeGrande always had them too. We were about like one family. The time we had diphtheria, our brother Hartman was out to Rockland, Idaho for a visit but he came home before the house of fumigated and of course he got the germ and came down with the worst case of all. Mother isolated herself with him a nursed him but he grew worse. We called the doctor and he gave Hartman anti-toxin but the disease had developed too far and it didn't do any good. This doctor told some of the neighbors, "That boy I will never live." Finally, we sent for lady doctor, sort of a quack I guess you would call her: Mrs. Buchanan, who had a reputation for being very good with diphtheria cases. She and her husband (he helped her nurse her patients) came. Hartman was almost choking to death. She looked at him, washed her hands and quickly dug the stuff out of his throat with her finger. They never left the house for two and a half days but they certainly saved his life. It was months before we could understand a word he said, the back of his throat was so eaten by cankerous sores of this horrid disease that for a long time, when he tried to drink water or milk it would come back through his nose.

It seems like during winter time, mother was always doping some of us kids for sore throat, earaches, toothaches, or Lagrippe. My those old remedies: fat bacon strips with black pepper and turpentine the put on a rag around our throats and then our home knit woolen stockings (mother knit all of our stockings) wrapped around our throats and put to bed and we all had to gargle a mixture of vinegar, water, salt and pepper and have our throats swabbed with a clean white strip of cloth dipped in turpentine or carbolic acid. If we had a cold coming on, our feet were soaked in hot water and we had onion syrup, we like that, and then we always had to take a huge dose of nasty Epsom salts. For a fever sometimes we had to drink tea made from garden sage. When we had a canker or a sore mouth we always had to take a homemade canker medicine made from honey, burnt alum and a liquid made from boiling peach tree leaves. Then for sore throats, mother made a funnel out of paper and put powdered sulfur inside the funnel and blew that down our throats. About choked us to death and to disinfect the rooms sulfur was burned on top of the stove until we all but choked on the fumes. The fumes were pretty and sometimes we sneaked a bit of sulfur and put it on the stove. Then we caught the dickens. If we had a cold on our lungs, mustard plasters were put on our chests. Almost blistered us, sometimes it did. These were made of four parts flower and one part dry mustard mixed into a paste with water and spread between two pieces of thin cloth and then put on our chests and we hollered that they were burning, but we had to keep them on a while longer until we knew we would be blistered and then consecrated olive oil was rubbed on a piece of flannel put on for a day or two. And how we howled and bawled toothache and earache. Laundumn was put in our ears and stuffed with wool or cotton and cloves of carbolic acid on a piece of cotton for our toothache. If a contagious disease was about, little sacks were made and filled asafetida and tied around our necks on a string so we couldn't catch the disease.

Father always put us through some new medical fad. One time he got a huge bottle of Native herbs. A terrible physic or laxative and we all had to take it, then he went and told our teacher, who was a bachelor, to be sure and let Ella and I leave the room as soon as we raised our hands for permission to go. That was so embarrassing to us, especially to Ella as she was quite a young lady by that time. But trust father for doing things up in great style. In the springtime father saw to it that the family all took a tonic. At first it was sagebrush tea and later we had to take a tablespoon of a concoction made of Epsom salts, cream of tartar, lemons and hot water and believe me we took the stuff every morning either before breakfast or before family prayer. We hated it too. Well anyway, father and mother relied on home cures for most all of our illnesses and we got along fine. Our youngest brother, Eldon was I believe, the only one to break a bone and when he was ten years old he fell off a horse and it stepped on his leg and broke it, a bad break between the hip and knee. After eight long weeks he got up and tried to walk and fell and broke his leg again right in the same place. So it was eight weeks again before he walked and he got so sick while lying with his leg hung up with a weight on it. Oh yes, Ray broke his arm out there Rockland. A mule kicked him and Dr. Logan fixed it but did a very poor job and his arm grew crooked and the next spring Dr. Pearse had to break it over again and sawed off the ends of both bones and put in a silver plate where the bones didn't meet but it finally was a strong as ever before. Oh my, those old time remedies, but they must have been good because we all lived.

Father was a great reader, and in spite of his not getting far in school he could hold his own in any conversation, on most any subject and he could do most any mathematical problem in his head faster than most anyone could do it on paper.

Ours was just an ordinary family, nothing spectacular or particularly outstanding about us. We lived a simple country life, but with father at the head and mother at his side, we never got far out of line and grew up to be among the best families in the community.

Father was a great advocate of education. Even in the grades, we were always in school, and no dilly dallying and no playing hooky, nor ever any tales about our teachers doing this or that. Father wouldn't allow any of these things. The entire dozen of us, except one, had the equivalent of a high school education. Some of us went to college. Two of the boys, Milton and Eldon, had two years of college and would perhaps have continued if father hadn't been stricken with that fatal illness. Four of we sisters were schoolteachers.

Father was like an elder brother to mother's younger brothers and sisters. Always looking after them and helping Grandma May whenever she needed help or advice. About the time he and mother were married, Grandfather James May with his plural wife and family went to Canada to make their home as the law was after all polygamists in Utah. Grandma's health was poor so mother and dad did all they could to help her.

Our home at the time, though small was always open to everyone and it seemed to me father was always taking is lantern and escorting friends or relatives down to the midnight train, as there wasn't any railroad station in Honeyville in those days.

In his later years, after acquiring cattle, father did a lot of riding on horseback and being a heavy man he might have bruised himself. Then in May, 1929 he was stricken with cancer of the bladder. He didn't know just what was wrong and his mental suffering was harder on him than the physical suffering. He passed away on 24 July 1930 after a year of illness.

We were so happy to see him released of his suffering but it seemed such a shame to see father cut down in what seemed to me to be the prime of life as he wasn't old and could, it seem, have spent many more years with us. Anyway he was spared the passing of our youngest sister, Ruth, who died just four days after he did. She also died of cancer or gall trouble on my birthday, 28 July 1930. Mother had to go through these sad ordeals so close together alone. It was very hard on her but all her family was at her side and helped her through this very trying time.

These are some of the events I remember about my father. Besides what I've already written, he was always interested in civic affairs having served as a school trustee, president of the town board and also as councilman for years and as town constable.