John Tanner and his family

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332 John Tanner and His Family on the Missouri River outdoor life, and an oc­ cattle, horses, casional visit from the hungry and not always friendly Indians. David Dan would be among Indians the rest of his life. The nearly were more two years at Winter of the same Quarters an - It was at Winter Quarters that John Tanner tended the cattle of the Camp of Israel, and here David Dan was given his first import­ ant task." A boy of eight can guide a horse and drive cattle to feed and watch over them to see that they do not stray. He could bring in the milk cows in the evening and take them to pasture during the day. Everyone in the John Tanner family had his assigned work, even eight-year-old David Dan. Stories of the David Dan family state that he walked barefoot much of the way across the plains in 1848 and assisted in driving the sheep and the loose cattle. Rather young for this wearisome work as he was only ten and a half years old when the family reached Utah in October of that year. David Dan received little or no notice in the contemporary diaries and journals. He was the baby and was either ignored or treated in a patronizing way. His next older brother, Joseph, was five years his senior and the next, Freeman, eight. Being the youngest of five brothers has its drawbacks. It is unknown whether he developed inferior feelings as a result, but if so he came by them honestly. younger brother with four older ones to push him his only problem. His mother Elizabeth was thirty-five old when he was born, an age most feel is about the upper years limit for desirable motherhood. But John his father, was sixty years old when he was born. What kind of relationship does a man in his sixties have with an infant son? When the Tanners entered the Being a around was not valley in 1848, John Tanner was seventy and David Dan was ten.' Two years later, April 13, 1850, Dan was left fatherless with the death of John. What were his thoughts and emotions as he gazed upon the lifeless form of the careworn old man who has his father? How much personal attachment was there between father and son? But in the Tanner clan there were others beside father, mother, brothers, and sisters. Half-brothers Sidney, John Joshua, and Nathan, as well as half-sister Maria had numerous posterity who actually