Episode 109: Gulls and the Crickets

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:35)
Life wasn't easy for Monomus Lavina Gibson-Andress.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:40)
I'm going to venture a guess that being named Monomus Lavina Gibson-Andress didn't help.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:45)
Shh, I'm setting the stage.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:47)
Sorry, sorry.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:51)
Life wasn't easy for Monomus What's-Her-Face. She was born in Mississippi in 1842 and was barely four years old when her family converted to Mormonism and took the little girl all the way across the plains. And unfortunately, they didn't make it to Utah because they got stuck in Pueblo, Colorado on their way because Lavina's pa caught the typhoid fever.
Apparently, this was a really traumatic experience for Lavina. Lavina, Lavina, Lavina.
We don't know what happened. We don't know how to pronounce her name. We just knew that she would mention to any person throughout her life that the horrors of her experience during that time resulted because she and her mother and sisters were the only, quote, women folk there among a sea of rough men. But I should point out, though, that she does later recollect that there were Spanish women at the fort that were very kind to her, had very clean floors, made very good bread, but I'm guessing Laveena believed that white women were the only real women folk.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:49)
So check out this story from her family history.
Quote, one night during the Long Puebla winter, several of the men were gambling in a building adjacent to that occupied by the Gibson family when an argument arose over the guard game. One of the men was killed and grandma relates that she could hear the gunfire of the men who pursued the murderer, who was later apprehended, shot to death and, as her father was a carpenter, from some rough logs he fashioned a coffin in which the murderer was buried.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:15)
I gotta say, getting killed in a card game with a pine box coffin is peak old west.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:22)
It kinda seems like this is an old west branded version of Clue.
Where did he get killed? Well see, he got killed in the card game with a pine box coffin.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:32)
I love it, made out of rough hewn logs.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:34)
The dad was a carpenter, he made it happen. So because the family is resting in Pueblo, they then join up with Captain Brown's Mormon Battalion Detachment that's headed back to Utah.
Lavina's family traveled with them and arrived one week after Brigham Young's Vanguard Company had just rolled into the valley.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:51)
So even though she was really young, those first few years in Utah left another scar in Lavina's memory. As we're gonna talk about now, yay, new season. We're out of winter quarters.
Early Utah territory was rough potatoes.
I mean this literally. They grew potatoes and it was rough. Just all of it. A rough time to live, rough time to eat potatoes, if you had potatoes at all. And sadly, they had to devote most of that first crop to funeral potatoes. Okay, fine, not really, but funerals. I feel like that works. Funerals or potatoes, just not together. However, there were a lot of deaths. Why did I even make that joke? That's such poor taste.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:34)
It really was.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (3:34)
There's not even like cheese to make it better.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:37)
There's no cornflakes anywhere in the valley.
Listen, as long as I don't have to talk about babies dying, we can definitely proceed. To make matters worse, Lavina's mother wasn't invalid. The family had an uphill battle from the get-go. They, of course, are some of the earliest Mormons to move into the North for it that we talked about last time.
Lavina's life would be filled with challenges. She first marries Lot Huntington, which is a challenge in and of itself, I'm guessing. Then when he died in early 1860s, she and her sister would become plural wives to James Andrus.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:05)
Wait, is Lot Huntington the guy that Joseph F. Smith hated?

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:10)
Cornelius Lot.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:11)
Oh, okay. That's not too many Lots. But she marries James Andrus, which is not Milo's Andrus, right? Because man, I want to smack that guy in the face with a proverbial shovel. And we'll talk more about James Andrus later on because he becomes a prominent colonizer and pioneer and Juanita Brooks finds his diary and it's really cool.
He would move his family down to southern Utah where he settled, Grafton, Utah.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:36)
Ghost town alert.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:38)
It's not where they filmed like a lot of the Hollywood movies in Grafton.