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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY train out but that the wife held me fast to the bargain I’d made.”1 Beckwith had agreed to serve as the cashier of the Delta State Bank, which opened with four thousand dollars, including one two-thousand dollar deposit made by attorney and co-founder James A. Melville.2 The safe did not arrive for three weeks after the bank opened, so Beckwith took five hundred dollars in silver home every night in a “tin can-like affair,” and slept with the currency in his vest underneath his night gown and a revolver inside the bed.3 Beckwith’s salary was seventy-five dollars a month, which he soon learned did not go far in supporting a family of five (their three children had joined them in time for summer), even in tiny Delta, Utah. They lived for a while in the basement of the Kelly Hotel, in conditions that Beckwith referred to as “might raw,” and swept more than one “trantler bug” (scorpion) from their home.4 It did not take long, however, for the Beckwith family to overcome their negative first impressions of Delta.Yes, times were tough, “But, what,” wrote Beckwith, “was the use of complaining. Everybody else was just as poor or even poorer.”5 Their hardships gave the people of Delta a common ground, a reason to connect with and support each other, and Beckwith was impressed that “nobody was stuck up.” Instead, they “were all in the same canoe, paddling or bailing water, and no drones. And all worked right on the same common level, free with the other, no sharp lines drawn…We danced together, without clique or coterie, all one bunch, jolly, free and everybody knew everybody else. …We all sigh and look back to those times and say ‘Them were the good old days all rightee!’”6 It was this second impression of Delta that would be the lasting one—Frank Beckwith would call Delta home for most of the rest of his life, and make many significant contributions to his town, state, and country, not only as a banker, but as a newspaper publisher, writer, photographer, inventor, anthropologist, geologist, and explorer. Considering Beckwith’s life before moving to Delta, it is not surprising it took him a little while to warm up to the town. Beckwith was born in Evanston, Wyoming, to Asahel Collins Beckwith and Mary Stuart Rose on November 24, 1875. He had an older brother, Fred Beckwith (born in Echo City, Summit County, Utah Territory, on December 16, 1873), and two half-siblings from his father’s first marriage.7 Asahel Collins Beckwith 1 Frank A. Beckwith, “Personal Reminiscences: A Gleaning of Thirteen Years in Delta,” 1, typescript in the possession of Jane Beckwith, Delta, Utah. 2 The letterhead for the Delta State Bank on a letter dated June 21, 1917, notes the following: Officers: James A. Melville, President; Frank Beckwith, Cashier; Directors: James A. Melville, Hiett C. Maxfield, William J. Finlinson, John E. Steele, Edgar W. Jeffery, J.W. Jenkins, Joseph Sampson. 3 Frank A. Beckwith, “Personal Reminiscences,” 3-4. 4 Ibid., 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 5. 7 Asahel C. Beckwith was first married to Elizabeth Russel. They had two children Dora Edith Beckwith, born October 2, 1859, in Medina City, Clemens County, Nebraska, and John Asahel Beckwith, born on March 10, 1862, on the Little Blue River, Nebraska. 170 |
