My training during the first two years of our settlement of Salt Lake Valley, when we were pinched for food, was of excellent service to me during the days of which I write. I should have thought the meagre diet we had in the valley, rich living if I had had it then.
The people were very poor, and I did not wish to be a burden to them in the least. I avoided eating anything, therefore, that I thought they relished or that they had only occasionally. I have told you that potatoes grew spontaneously there; but the country was too warm for them; this, together with the lack of cultivation, made them very poor. The potato when good was not a vegetable I liked very much. But there I could get nothing else, excepting whortleberries, which grew wild, and which I frequently picked and ate, until one day they made me sick, after which I could not eat them any more.
I might have eaten the potatoes better if I could have had salt to eat with them; but this article they were out of just then. The only thing eatable besides the potatoes was molasses. I have never liked to eat potatoes and molasses together since then.
I well recollect how I enjoyed a meal of “poi” on one occasion during this time. The “kalo” out of which it was made, had been cooked and pounded at some distance from there (“kalo” did not grow at that time at the part of the Kula where I was), and packed in the leaves of a shrub called ki; when thus packed it was called pai kalo. It had been warm when packed, which, with the heat of the weather had made it sour and maggoty. But the people had cooked it over again, and made it into “poi.”
My potato and molasses diet had removed all my fastidiousness about what I ate, and I thought this “poi” the sweetest food I had ever tasted. Some people eat maggoty cheese because they like it; I ate this “poi” because it was the best and most palatable food I had tasted for weeks.
But what I lacked in food the Lord made up to me in the goodly degree of His Spirit which He bestowed upon me. What I had to eat was a matter of indifference to me. I was happy, and I rejoiced as I never had before. Dreams, visions and revelations were given to me, and the communion of the Spirit was most sweet and delicious.
I learned a lesson then, which I trust will never be forgotten: that there is a happiness which the servants and Saints of God can have that is not of earth, and that is not in the least dependent for its existence upon the possession of food, raiment or any earthly thing.
Chapter 10
Successful Meetings—Our Principles Receiving Great Notice—Elder Keeler and Myself Go to Keanae and Have Remarkable Success in Adding Members to the Church
A new native house having been completed by Mr. Napela’s men, it was offered to me as a meeting house. On Sunday the neighbors collected together, and we had two meetings, one in the forenoon and one in the afternoon, at which I spoke upon the principles of the gospel and their restoration to man upon the earth, with the authority to teach them. My testimony and words were favorably received by the people, and they were desirous that I should continue to hold meetings.