Armstead Moffett had descendants eventually settle at Star Valley, Wyoming. That’s just one set of big hills east of the Idaho border north of Bear Lake. Among other things, he had been a wagon master leading at least half a dozen companies of covered wagons west from the Mississippi River to the Salt Lake Valley in what’s now Utah. He was my great-great grandfather.
Hans Lars Nielsen seemed to have the good common sense to remain in Denmark until the transcontinental railroad was completed, thus avoiding the covered-wagon era. He settled with his family in Idaho, west of Star Valley, northwest of Bear Lake, which straddles the Idaho – Utah border, at a place called Mink Creek, named for the creek that flows through the valley. The headwaters of Mink Creek is a massive spring. It flows out of the side of a mountain. A couple of decades ago, I asked my mother where the creek flowed from. She looked at me, astonished that I didn’t know, and told me it just poured out from a mountainside.
Just a few years back, I tried to drive to the spring, but it was fenced off and inaccessible. I did see the diversion structures channeling irrigation water to both the upper and lower Mink Creek canals. At 4 or 5 years of age, I remember hiking up the hill from my grandfather’s farm to the construction site as the upper canal was being dug out of the mountainside. I wandered too close, and I remember one of the crew yelling at me, asking if I wanted to get killed. I remember not understanding the warning, but I stepped back from the steam shovel.
Hedvig Jesperson entered the country at age 16, traveling with others but not her family. She had told the story of being frustrated when in New York City, and homesick. Hoping for some familiar food, she entered a butcher shop and tried her best to ask for some head cheese. She said the best the butcher could make out was that she was asking for “old shoes.”
She married my grandfather, Oscar Nielsen (who, with some of his brothers, changed their surname to Nelson, as my father was officially named). When they replaced the log house my dad had been born in, they poured a flat slab of concrete as the foundation of a new house. Not many years later, they discovered that the canal several hundred yards above them was causing the hillside to gradually creep downhill. This eventually tilted the house from level, just enough to be noticed. Dad said that the extended family joke was that his mother was a little “heavy” because the dining table tilted so all the food slid downhill to her.
During World War II, Dad worked at Hill Field airfield by Clearfield, Utah. Every time the draft board called him in for a preinduction physical, his blood pressure shot up so high they classed him as 4-F and left him alone for a few months. He met my mom at a dance. Her family was at Eden, just east of Ogden, Utah. Mom mentioned that one of her grandfathers on her dad’s side spoke with such a strong British accent that “If he had been any more British, he wouldn’t have been able to speak at all.”
Dad and his bride moved back to Mink Creek before the war ended, with the blessing of the draft board, because there was a wartime shortage of farmers, and Dad’s father had written that he could no longer run the farm alone.
Something happened 250 years ago that made a place that most of our ancestors opted to move to. The taste of freedom that the early settlers of the North American continent had was enough that in 1776, they declared independence from the king of England.
During the war for independence, there were far too many coincidences of weather, wind and fog that altered the outcomes of battles to not see the hand of providence in the securing of our freedom.
It would be wise for us all to find out why our families before us chose this land: freedom. Freedom from oppression and tyranny. Freedom of religion. That’s not freedom from religion. It’s forbidding the government from meddling in how I or you choose to worship the God of our choice.
Twice in the last century, this country was dragged into wars affecting the rest of the world. Twice our assistance liberated Europe and once the Pacific. In the history of the world, the victor has owned the lands and properties of the vanquished. The vanquished are now among our staunchest allies. The only real estate we requested was a place to bury our dead.
When our Constitution became the law of the land in 1788, one of the architects of it was asked what form of government had been created. His reply was, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Without the burning desire for liberty and the willingness to obtain and protect it like the founders of our country had in 1776, we will not keep it.
