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Show Louisa Maria 265 Lyman This was a period in the lowest fortunes of the John Tanner they had been stripped of everything in an attempt to finish the Kirtland Temple and save the church-owned bank. Nathan and Amasa were under the necessity of hiring Jared Randall, husband of family as Nathan and Maria's older sister to move them the thousand miles. Maria was getting her first lesson in poverty; she would have many more in the years ahead.' Maria's experience in Missouri must have been shocking to a young mother still in her teens. When they arrived at Far West, Amasa and Nathan along with Sidney and John Joshua, felt impelled to find work to buy food to see them through the winter. This they did by going to Fort Leavenworth, some fifty miles away, where they worked for $10.00 a month, $15.00 if they boarded themselves; not a very pleasant situation for men who three years before lived on the Tanner estate in Bolton and were considered wealthy. Maria and the wives of her brothers, in addition to the incon coming face to face with want, were left without the protection and comfort of their men folks in a country full of alarm due to the confrontation of the Mormons with the mobs. venience of As the situation worsened in Missouri, Amasa was selected by on a secret mission to De Witt, a Mormon settlement, with a.message of importance. The assignment was known to be one full of danger as the Mormons' enemies were picking up and examining all strangers who fell into their hands. Left at home while Amasa and companion, William Dunn, made the perilous trip, was Maria with her baby. One wonders how the teen-aged girl kept her sanity under the emotional strain. 9 church leaders and sent History and biography of the suffering of the men, who companion, were captured by a mob, and the to ride the barrel of a cannon as it time narrate the daring deeds like Amasa M. Lyman and his their lives threatened, and forced was pulled through the countryside. easy to describe the scene in a barren cabin where frightened young wife tried to conceal her alarm from a baby not quite two years old as she rocked it to sleep. Probably all of the It is not so a women would have preferred to have been left behind in the danger with their comparative safety of the husbands than the home. Maria's experiences, as well as those of her sisters-in-law, are part of, the history of the Latter-day Saints and much is already narrated in other chapters of this volume. The forced flight from a |
