by Carla Kelly
A rancher in Payson, Utah, Jesse took an interest in the land, in particular the limestone in which valuable ore often formed. He found a promising outcrop of limestone on the eastern slope of mountains forming the Tintic Mining District, and convinced investors to join him.
Tintic wasn’t new. In 1869, George Rust, cattle rancher from nearby Tooele County, founded it, and fortunes were already being made on that western side, which some claimed held all the wealth. Jesse wasn’t convinced, because he had seen limestone outcroppings on the eastern side that suggested otherwise.
This wasn’t Jesse’s first venture in Tintic. He had found ore in his June Bug Mine and sold it for $14,000, which had the purchasing power of $388,967.03 in 2018 dollars. Jesse proceeded to give all of it away to others in need. He was a soft touch, and he knew it. He learned the hard way the necessity of combining wisdom with generosity
Here was his chance to try again on that eastern slope. One possible investor said no, calling the whole thing a humbug and declaring Jesse would never strike it rich. But Jesse possessed a dogged faith that gave him the courage to move forward, plus real skill in locating potential ore deposits. While walking on Godiva Mountain with his son William, he had a vision that if he used wealth to do good for others, he would never lack for his family.
Sure enough, the jokingly named Humbug Mine proved out successfully in 1896 as one of the richest lead deposits in the West. After the mine’s success, Jesse told his family that from now on, he would work with his brains instead of his hands to provide others with honest livings for their families. He had also learned a valuable lesson about how to help people by creating jobs, and not just handing out the wealth, as he had done with the proceeds of the June Bug sale.
As the Knight Corporation, Jesse and his sons eventually formed sixty-five companies, many of them mines delivering lead, copper, iron, coal, gold, and silver. He established canning and woolen mills, more ranches, and a sugar beet factory in Raymond, Alberta, which figures prominently in this story.
In addition to employing many, Jesse’s philanthropy extended to Brigham Young Academy (later Brigham Young University). Timely gifts at opportune moments kept the school afloat and helped it become the magnificent school it is today. I’m a BYU graduate, and I recall a class or two in the Jesse Knight Building.
In the early days of the twentieth century, Jesse furnished equally timely loans to the LDS Church as it struggled to recover from years of persecution at the hand of the federal government. Jesse’s loans were paid in full, as the Church moved forward in coming years.
Through it all, Jesse Knight became known as “Uncle Jesse” because of his many unsung kindnesses to people who struggled and needed a little help to succeed. There is hardly anyone in Utah’s history more deserving of acclaim than the modest man who took his stewardship from the Lord seriously. As his son William wrote in the memoir, The Jesse Knight Family: Jesse Knight, His Forebears and Family: “[Jesse] believed that the surest way to express love for God was by doing good to God’s children.”
Martha Evans Evans Phillips (1872–1923)
No people in both My Loving Vigil Keeping and One Step Enough meant more to me than Richard Thomas and Martha Evans. I felt a certain kinship to Richard Evans because he was the choirmaster of the Pleasant Valley Ward Choir in Winter Quarters Canyon. At the time I wrote Vigil, I was choir director in our congregation in Wellington, Utah. I occasionally wondered what Richard would think of my little choir. Richard had a lovely high tenor voice, documented by many, and was the best friend of my fictional Owen Rhys Davis.
I told Richard’s story in Vigil. Let me add here that nothing I have ever written was harder than writing of his death in the Number Four mine. I probably would have written the sequel to Vigil sooner had I not felt so keenly the loss of Richard. Because I felt it, so did Owen. That’s how novelists work.
I have visited Richard’s grave many times. I left him a Welsh dragon medallion once. I hope it is still there.
But what of Martha? Her story after her husband’s death is the story of many women who became widows on May 1, 1900. She was born in 1872 in Spanish Fork, Utah, to Welsh parents named Evans. At the age of seventeen, she married Welshman Richard Thomas Evans in the Manti Utah Temple. The Evanses were the parents of five children, three of whom were living at the time of Richard’s death. Martha was twenty-seven.
Superintendent/Bishop Thomas Parmley hired Martha to run a miners’ boardinghouse in Clear Creek, located about eight miles south of Winter Quarters Canyon. She moved there with her three children.
On June 20, 1901, Martha Evans married Rees Phillips, a Welsh coal miner from Monmouthshire, located on the English/Welsh border. Also a convert to the LDS Church, Rees proved to be an excellent second husband. Martha’s daughter Catherine said he was a wonderful stepfather. Martha and Rees became the parents of six children. Of the eleven children born to Martha, seven were alive at the time of her death in 1923.
In November 1922, Martha was stricken with what was diagnosed as stomach cancer. She suffered greatly but never alone. Always with her were her children, her friends, and her husband Rees. She died on March 4, 1923, at the age of fifty.
Like her first husband, Richard, Martha was known for her lovely voice, singing at many church and town gatherings. She could be counted on to tend the sick and needy and help wherever she could.
After her death, Rees carried on, eventually moving his little family to Castle Gate, Utah, not far from Helper, Utah. One of their children wrote, “We were always one big, fun family that looked out for each other.”
Maria Elvina Luoma (1869–1941)
I called her Mari in both books. I knew little to nothing about Maria, except that she was the wife of Heikki Vihtori Luoma (1871–1900), one of numerous sons, brothers, nephews, and cousins—eight Luomas in all—who died in the mine disaster.
This loss of life among so many family members is one of the striking aspects of the Scofield [Winter Quarters] Mine Disaster. The Number One and Number Four mines, among the oldest coal mines in Utah, were considered the safest, to the extent that they were known as “married men’s mines.”
The Luoma story is particularly poignant. The Luomas were mining successfully in the canyon and decided to send for their parents to join them in America. Aaprami and Kaissa Luoma arrived in January 1900, only to see so many of their descendants die May 1, 1900, in the mine disaster. They returned to Finland with a widowed daughter.
The Luomas were among many whose whole families were affected by the disaster. Gatherums, Hunters, Padfields, Davises, Farishes, Evanses, Strangs, and others felt similar loss of life among relatives on a wide scale.
But what of Mari and Heikki? I didn’t really know anything about them, but in My Loving Vigil Keeping, they became the newly married couple who come to Della Anders and ask if Mari can sit in class and learn a little English that way. I also assigned Mari the dubious job of being the new widow who tries to commit suicide by walking in front of a coal train and is saved by Dr. Isgreen and Della. (Incidentally, Emil Isgreen’s descendants think they know who that really was.)
As it turned out, about a year after Vigil’s publication, I heard from Doug Kero, who lives in Oregon and is a descendant of Heikki and Mari Luoma.
Doug was kind. Seldom have I got a story more wrong. According to Doug, when Heikki and Maria arrived in the United States, they already had two children: Rauha, age four, and Juho, age two. Doug is descended from Rauha, also called Ellen. Maria and Heikki are his great-grandparents.
After Heikki’s death, Maria had a posthumous child and named him Vihtori Heikki, after her late husband. She soon moved to Belt, Montana, and lived with relatives. While in Belt, she met Adolph Hill, another Finn, and married him. In 1911, the Hills bought a dairy farm in Menlo, Washington, and moved there. Maria Luoma Hill died in 1941. The land is still in the family. Doug owns five acres of it and has a cabin there.
Emil Isgreen, MD (1865–1945)
Bob had heard about the novel and wanted to meet me on his next trip up from Silver City, New Mexico. Later, I had breakfast with Bob and his son Tom, and daughter Kristina Moody, and learned more about the charming doctor and his life before and after Winter Quarters.
Bob was married to Emil and Minnie Isgreen’s youngest child, Patricia Jane (1922–2012). He knew Dr. Isgreen well and commented that he was a serious man who lived by this precept: “There is always satisfaction in a duty performed and a noble deed done.”
Emil Isgreen was born in Tooele, Utah, the son of Swedish parents who came to Utah after joining the LDS Church. He graduated from Brigham Young Academy in 1887. He taught in the department of natural and physical sciences from 1887 to 1892, when he became president of Weber Stake Academy (now Weber State University) in Ogden, Utah.
After a year, he resigned and went to the University of Michigan, followed by Chicago’s Rush Medical College, where he received his medical degree in 1897. Returning to Utah, Emil was first hired by the Union Pacific Railroad as a resident physician in Helper, Utah.
A year later, he became resident physician for the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, located in Winter Quarters Canyon. It is here that Emil Isgreen became part of my first novel, My Loving Vigil Keeping, as a suitor to the fictional Della Anders. As mentioned in that novel, Emil served on the board of directors for the Winter Quarters School, where Della taught the lower grades. In actual fact, one improvement he initiated was to replace the log schoolhouse with a frame one. At the time of the mine disaster, the Winter Quarters School was one story high. A few years later, a second story was added. By the time the mines closed in 1928, there was a two-story brick building. Emil Isgreen cared deeply about education.
Following the mine disaster, Dr. Isgreen continued as resident physician. By 1907, Dr. Isgreen left the employ of the Pleasant Valley Coal Company/Utah Fuel and practiced medicine in Salt Lake City and also part-time in Tooele. At the age of forty-three, he married Minnie Peterson of Logan, Utah. The Isgreens had five children, two of the sons becoming physicians, as well.
Bob Johnson gave ample testimony to the upright character and innate goodness of his father-in-law. What touched me the most was the pledge of lifetime free medical care Dr. Isgreen made to the many widows and fatherless children of the Number Four and Number One disasters. That Emil Isgreen honored this pledge I have no doubt.
Acknowledgments
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I owe a massive debt of gratitude to R. Craig Johnson, Salt Lake City attorney with his own interest in mining and mining disasters, about which he has written too. Craig kindly arranged for us to visit the Tintic Mining District, long-fabled in Utah mining lore, and located in and near Eureka, Utah. The Johnsons were the perfect hosts.
On a brisk spring day in 2017, Craig, his wife Nancy and son Robert met me and my friend Kemari Rawlings for an ATV tour of the area, guided by Nick Castleton, mayor of Eureka. We all learned a lot during those two days.
Mayor Castleton has a vast knowledge of mining lore and is an unabashed booster of his little town. He took us all around the Tintic Mining District, entertaining and educating us with wonderful stories about the mines that employed many hard rock miners and made the owners wealthy. Nick’s grandparents came to Eureka/Silver City in the early 1900s, and he has spent years in this interesting historic area.
Roaring around on ATVs, we saw a number of boarded up mines and the foundations of Knightville, Jesse Knight’s community built for his Mormon miners and their families. As far as anyone knows, it was the only mining town in Utah with no saloons. Uncle Jesse understood what his co-religionists wanted. He also knew how to treat his miners, working them six days a week and paying them for seven.
Nick took us to one of the headframes near Eureka, several of which dot the area. And yes, they do look like gallows. The headframes, the hoists, and the various mining buildings still in place outside of Eureka stand as mute testimony to the vigor of Utah’s late nineteenth-century mining community and the great wealth found there. Eureka’s museum and other historic buildings told their own stories of life both above and under the ground. Nick was a most helpful guide, and I’m pleased to count him and the Johnsons as friends.
Nick also read this novel in manuscript form. His comments on the Tintic Mining District strengthened the narrative. I know a fair bit about historic coal mining, but hard rock mining is not within my comfort zone. Thanks, Nick. I owe you dinner. Ditto to you too, Doug Kero and Craig and Nancy Johnson.
About the dedication: Elam Jones, son of Derk and Julie Jones, died in Rhino Mine in Emery County, Utah, in 2013. He left behind his parents, a wife, Jaqlynn, and two sons. Elam has been on my mind for years, partly because I was allowed inside Rhino when I was researching My Loving Vigil Keeping. I knew if I ever wrote a sequel to Vigil, I would dedicate it to him.
And Darren and Verena Beazer of Cardston, Alberta? There is good-natured joking between Cardston and nearby Raymond that Cardston grooms find their brides in Raymond. Well, it happened with Darren and Verena. Justin, Ryan, Cameron, Michael and Madison Beazer are pleased, I am certain! Thanks, guys, for being good friends to the Kellys.
Carla Kelly, 2018
About the Author
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Carla Kelly is a veteran of the New York and international publishing world. The author of more than forty novels and uncounted novellas for Donald I. Fine Co., Signet, and Harlequin, Carla is the recipient of two Rita Awards (think Oscars for romance writing) from Romance Writers of America and two Spur Awards (think Oscars for western fiction) from Western Writers of America. She is also a recipient of Whitney Awards for Borrowed Light, My Loving Vigil Keeping, and Softly Falling.
Recently, she’s been writing Regency romances (think Pride and Prejudice) set in the Royal Navy’s Channel Fleet during the Napoleonic Wars between England and France. She comes by her love of the ocean from her childhood as a Navy brat.
Carla’s history background makes her no stranger to footnote work, either. During her National Park Service days at the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, Carla edited Friedrich Kurz’s fur trade journal. She also wrote a short history of Fort Buford, where Sitting Bull surrendered in 1881.
The Kellys have lived in Idaho Falls, Idaho, since 2014 and have no particular plans to move again. On a clear day, they can see the Tetons from their neighborhood and enjoy proximity to Yellowstone National Park. Carla enjoys speaking at book clubs, visiting friends and family, and writing, always writing.
She owes a tremendous debt to Miss Jean Dugat, her English and journalism teacher at A.C. Jones High School in Beeville, Texas. “She was a dragon,” Carla remembers. “She made us work hard to find the right phrase, the correct sentence, the accurate footnote.” Carla also remembers her epiphany at the end of her sophomore year. “I decided that if I worked hard and listened to Miss D, I might be a writer some day. What a teacher.”