In the spring of 1869 we started for White Pine County, Nevada, with Alph and family. My father and brother, George, had been out there for about two years, and John had been out there the year before. The men killed lots of rabbits on the road and they were fine fried in butter. We traveled over the Great American desert mostly at night as it was cooler for the team. John lost his coat on the Desert.

When we got to Fish Creek we saw where the mail carriers the year before had emptied out the mail sacks to get through the mud. It was surely a bad, muddy crossing. The next day at Fish Creek, John and Alph were lying under our wagon in the shade, when on looking up, John said, “Look here, Alph, this tire is gone off the wheel.” Sure enough it was gone. They got up and started back and found it two miles back. That wheel had run two miles on the felloes, and never broken one. Wasn’t that good luck?

My father and brother were coming home and we missed them, where there were two roads around and over a hill. I was very uneasy for fear we would miss them, for I did not know when I would ever see them again. John thought likely they would come over the hill, but for fear we would miss them, I wrote a note and tacked it up on the station door at the foot of the hill where the two roads rejoined. I had heard they were coming was the reason I was so uneasy about them. Sure enough, a short time after we started they came around the hill, saw my note, but did not dare stop and come after us as they were making forced marches to keep ahead of some road agents that thought they had some money. Father had some, and the agents knew it, and by pushing hard, father and George kept ahead of the agents. Later father found that the agents had been after them, but thought that father and George had not left Hamilton so soon. The agents robbed three men that left Hamilton a day or two before Father and George did. A man by the name of Spencer and William Hatfield, but missed father, through father’s diligence in getting ahead of them.

We went to Cold Creek, Nevada, where Heber Orsier kept a mail station, and stayed there a few days. Alph got a station to run a few miles above Orsier’s and we got one ten miles further up the valley at Charles Thomas’ ranch. We stayed there about a year, then bought us a place on Cold Creek, where we built a two room log house. Our second child, Mary Zerelda was born there 20 March 1870. We lived there a little over a year, hten sold out and moved down to Ten Mile Creek, about ten miles south of Elko. We rented a station from a man named Weir, who had a two room front with canvas roof, and three rooms running back, with cedar posts set in the ground, stockade fashion, and with mud roofs. We hired sixteen cows for the season from a man named Crane, whose mother was a Conover. My husband and I milked the cows and made butter, which John took to Eureka, and got fifty cents per pound for it. We did very well that summer.

John had two sisters living in Star Valley, Catherine Hunt and Zerelda Armstrong. We went over to see them, a day’s drive from our place. That fall we concluded to come back to Utah. We came back, to Dragon Hollow, above Silver City, Tintic, where my father had some mining property. He had a house ready for us to move into when we got there. This was the first of October. About the first of November we came over to Springerville to see my mother where my son, John, was born 13 November 1871. When my baby was three weeks old, I went back to Tintic, as my father and husband were both working there, and needed me to cook for them.