OCR Text |
Show endless day of sunshine." There was no awareness of any parental strife in a family where mother and father were dedicated to making their children "comfortable and happy" and to grooming them for lives of usefulness and nobility in the "Kingdom of God." At age 14, Ellis got her first rude shock: her mother died. Within the year, her father remarried. This was a double blow to the young woman in that not only was her mother replaced within the household and even "called by her name," but it ended nearly a year of William Reynolds' looking to his eldest daughter for "everything." She was frankly jealous. Three years before these unsettling events, however, a chain of circumstances had been set into motion which would profoundly shape Ellis's life. When she was twelve years old, she frequented a household where pictures of friends left in the East provided diversion and delighted talk. One picture in particular drew Ellis's attention. "It was of a young man about twenty, noble of form and feature," and Ellis was transfixed by his eyes. "How often I used to gaze at it in admiration and jokingly say, 'This is the man I intend to marry.'" Events from that point unfolded as in a romantic novel, an entirely appropriate mode, for she wrote of them early in her life when the pink mist of idealization was still present with her. In the late summer of 1859 Ellis learned with considerable surprise that Milford Shipp, the young man in the photograph, was in Salt Lake City and due to arrive in Pleasant Grove the next day. |