LIFE OF RHODA PEARL STINGER SAUNDERS
Contributor: Mari Lisa Hebel (46620175)
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I was born the 19th of April, 1879, in Oneida, now Arimo, Idaho. In 1878, when the railroad was being built north into Montana, Father went with them keeping a boarding home for the workmen. The houses were built in sections so they could be taken apart and loaded on a flat car and hauled to the end of the line. In such a house I was born. In December 1879 Father cut his foot severely. The nearest doctor was in Logan, and when the doctor came he sewed up the cut without cleaning it. It did not heal and Mother had to take him to Salt Lake for treatment. My two brothers and sister, Mary, had to help Mother keep the boarding house going while Father was on crutches. Will was nineteen, Harry fifteen, and Mary eleven. My sister Alice was 18 months old the day I was born.
When I was about a month old another sad thing happened. The supplies for the camp were brought in by mule teams. One of the mules wandered close to where a group of children were playing. A little boy tried to drive it away and was kicked in the head. This frightened my 6-year-old sister, Annie, so badly that she was paralyzed from shock. She laid [lay] for six months, unable to move or speak; then gradually recovered. During the summer the family continued going north with the railroad until they reached Spring Hill, now Lima, Montana, where Father took charge of the railroad hotel. My mother was the first white woman, and we were the first children in town. The town was just a hotel, several company houses, a general store, and a saloon or two. The hotel laundry was on the other side of a stream that ran back of the hotel. One day, when Mother was in the laundry, I tried to go to her over a narrow foot bridge. I fell in and was carried some distance before my brother, Harry, pulled me out. It took them some time to restore me to consciousness, and then I cried because the waer had spoiled my curls. My hair was very light and curly when I was small. It grew darker as I grew older. The first home I remember was in Marsh Valley. It was made of logs and built on a slight rise of ground. The hills behind our house flattened out to form a bench and most of the people lived there, attending the Garden Creek Ward; there was no town, just the people form the farms. The same log building served as a church and school, which was a 3-mile walk from our home. My brother, Will, was married in 1883 and Harry and Mary soon after; so there was just the seven girls left to help Father with the farm work. I learned to knit, crochet, and sew. The job we disliked the most was sewing carpet rags. In November 1887, after Father had gone to Pocatello to cook for a restaurant and my brother, Will, went cooking on a work train, leaving his wife, Gwen, and baby boy to live with us, we had an unusually severe winter. The snow storms left us snowed in for quite some time. During that time we were entertained by Mother, making games, singing songs, and making new rag rugs. The coyotes came down, taking some of our chickens. Mother killed the remaining chickens and hung them in the shed, where they froze until we were ready to cook them. We almost ran out of supplies. Not long after Christmas my brother, Harry, brought some more flour and beans, bringing them on a hand sled. We children had a lot of fun on the sled until Ada fell off and broke her collarbone. There was no way of getting a doctor, so Mother set the bone and it healed nicely. In the spring of 1888 we moved to Pocatello in the caboose of a freight train. Pocatello was just a railroad station built on the right of way through an Indian Reservation. There were repair shops, the passenger and baggage depots, and a 3-story hotel surrounded by tracks. West of the tracks was a row of company houses and a schoolhouse; these houses were for company officials. Most of the business houses were on the east side: the general store, the eating places, laundries, and other shops; and of course the saloons and gambling houses. Most of the men working in the shops had no families, and we had about 150 regular boarders. The pay car came through once a month and paid the men. The saloons and the gambling houses were wide open, and the men celebrated pay-day by patronizing them. The town was full of drunken men. The houses were of frame construction and poorly built. The other half of Father’s restaurant was a Chinese laundry. The partitions were made of wide boards, covered with canvas and wallpaper. There was no place for the family to live near the restaurant, so Father bought a large tent. (The Indians wouldn’t let him build a house.) The tent was large enough to provide sleeping rooms and we ate in the dining room. A floor was put in the tent, then gradually, walls were built up inside and a roof put on; so in time we had a 3-room house. About 1890 the government bought a town site from the Indians and sold the lots at their appraised value, which was very low. Father bought a lot on the west side and built a brick bake oven for the first bakery in Pocatello. There was sagebrush five feet tall that had to be cut and lava rocks that had to be blasted out before we could build. For some time, Pocatello was a town on wheels, as the houses were put on rollers and hauled to their new locations. My father stopped taking boarders after they started the bakery. I helped in the store, selling bread and cakes. I also cleaned pans, fried doughnuts, and did other chores around the shop. We ran a delivery wagon and had a large number of regular customers, which we served every day. The wagon had cupboards in the back to hold the bakery goods. When we didn’t have a man to run the wagon, my sister Alice and I ran it. I went to school in the little 2-room school house and sat at a desk for the first time. After the town was established a larger school was built. I was a member of the first branch of the church organized in Pocatello. Most of our entertainment was in the church or school. My father moved his family to Salt Lake City in January 1893. We had a bakery at 472 East Second South for about six years. That year I went to the 8th Ward school on Fourth South across the street from the City and County building. I finished the sixth grade there, and in September I went to the Lowell School. The next year I went to the Oquirrh School. I graduated from the 8th grade (first graduating class). In the fall of 1897 the bakery was not doing very well, so I got a job doing housework for two dollars a week. Later it increased to three. In 1898 Father lost everything he owned in a business deal and returned to Pocatello, where he again ran a bakery. My sister, Florence, and I were both working, so we remained in Salt Lake. In 1897 I met my future husband, Lou Saunders, at the wedding of Edith Braby. He walked home with us that night and soon we were “going steady.” He gave me my engagement ring for Christmas 1898. It was three opals surrounded with small pearls. Only the well-to-do could afford a diamond and Lou was making eight dollars a week. Lou bought a 50 ft. lot from his mother and started building a 3-room brick house. In the spring of 1899 I went to Pocatello to spend the summer with my family. While there my mother made my wedding dress and temple clothing. The dress was white brocade trimmed with chiffon. It was still in good condition, and Virginia was married in it. We were married n the Salt Lake Temple on September 21, 1899. We had a small reception that evening. A florist friend of Lou’s had a large patch of pansies, and so we decorated our table with pansies. We had two wedding cakes. My father made a large 3-layer decorated cake and Scrace’s Bakery gave us a smaller one. We had neither time, nor money, for a honeymoon. Lou went back to work the next day and I settled down to housekeeping. In the summer of 1900 a smallpox epidemic broke out in Salt Lake. People hadn’t been converted to vaccination, and it spread rapidly. The county had an isolation hospital or “Pest house.” About the middle of July Lou, his brother John, and Daisy Saunders were taken out there. They were there about two weeks. Lou came home on Friday afternoon, just in time to welcome our first son, Mervin, who was born early Sunday morning, August 5th. Almost two years later on July 27, 1902 Leon was born. In the meantime Lou’s wages had risen to 8-10 dollars a week. About ayear later Mr. Scrace wanted to retire, so Lou and the head baker, Charles Rosell, took over the business. In the spring of 1904 we started to build the house we now live in. It was finished in August. It was modern with a bathroom and electric lights. We later added a sleeping porch. The kitchen has been remodeled and new fixtures put in the bathroom; otherwise, it is just as it was when we moved in. The next ten years I did very little but raise a family and care for it. Rhoda was born November 29, 1904; Owen Barwell, July 27, 1907; Leslie George, December 20, 1909; Louise, July 4, 1912; Merle, September 22, 1914. (She was born premature and lived 13 days.) Virginia was born September 21, 1915. They were all born at home. In November 1917 I was appointed Counselor in the Relief Society Presidency, and for the next 30 years my name was no the officer’s roll of that organization. When I became an office in the Relief Society, I also became a member of the Old Folk’s Committee. Our first car, which we bought in 1912, was a Cadillac touring car with curtains. Our second car, also a Cadillac, was a 7-passenger car. We made many trips after that to interesting places. Lou passed away March 20, 1951. Since then Rhoda and I lived together in the home. (Rhoda Pearl Stinger Saunders died May 22, 1966 in Salt Lake City.)