John Tanner and his family

Page 208

198 John Tanner and His Family towns owe their existence to the Santa Fe Railroad and their favorable any crops, and the whole country trading locations. Neither produces is forbidding in appearance. The people who settled Joseph City, which incidentally is the oldest Mormon settlement in Arizona beyond the Colorado River, did not do so because of the favorable opportunities it afforded. They were called there as "missionaries" by Brigham Young, who felt this country presented an opportunity for extending the curtains of Zion. Without the call and the constant watchfulness of church officials, there would never have been a Mormon settlement in the. area. And it is doubtful if the church would have been much poorer as a result. In 1877 a second Tanner family arrived in the area Henry Martin Tanner of Beaver, Utah, with his wife Eliza Parkinson. They had been recruited for the mission by James S. Brown and considered their call as valid as any missionary call, the difference being that - it was for a lifetime.' Henry age twenty-four, and Eliza his bride of a month, age nineteen left Beaver in February, went by way of St. George, crossing the Colorado at the mouth of the Grand wash near the boundary of Nevada and Utah, and after hardships equal to those endured by the original pioneers of Utah, reached Allen's Camp, now Joseph City, May 3, 1877. These, then, are the two families largely re­ sponsible for the early Tanners of Arizona, Seth Benjamin of north Ogden (son of John and Elizabeth Beswick Tanner), and Henry Martin Tanner, of Beaver (son of Sidney and Julia Ann Shepherd Tanner). of the most difficult of the early pioneers to follow. He is mentioned in everyone's diary and journal, but to secure a connected account of his whereabouts is quite impossible. After his scouting in Arizona in 1875 with James S. Brown, he re­ turned to Utah in 1876 and married Anna Maria Jensen, who assisted him in raising his seven motherless children. She must have been a wise and devoted woman, as the children turned out well in spite of the fact Seth was gone much of the time, and the family moved about a great deal. Seth Tanner is one Seth built a home on the Little Colorado River a few miles 'above the present Cameron Trading Post, where he kept "open house" for travelers passing back and forth between Utah and the colonies.