In Memory of My Wife, Tamar.
More than four thousand years ago the Lord said to the children of Israel, "Honor thy father and thy mother," and thou shalt inherit a blessing; and today, among Christian or heathen nations, the child that gives love and obedience to its parents is in return loved and honored by his fellow men.
In 1869, I was laboring in President Young's cotton factory at Washington, Utah. Joseph Burch, the superintendent, sent me with a four-horse team loaded with factory goods, to Beaver, with orders to exchange the goods for wheat. I was to store the wheat in the Beaver grist mill, then come home with a load of flour.
One day, when working at the Beaver grist mill, I received a note from Sister Black, stating that her daughter Tamar wished to go back with me to Washington to see her father, who was then running the Washington grist mill. I declined to take her for the reason that it was stormy weather, and that I was heavily loaded.
The next day Sister Black came to see me. She told me her daughter had an offer of marriage from a man of wealth, the owner of a good home. It looked, from a worldly point of view, like a splendid offer; but the girl doubted the man's profession of faith in the Gospel, and she wanted to counsel with her father. I told the sister that without doubt the trip would be muddy and disagreeable, but if the daughter could put up with the inconvenience, she was welcome to go. She went. We were eight days wallowing through the mire and snow.
Tamar was young and bashful, thinly clad, and I know she suffered from the cold, but she did not murmur, for she was going to see her father. Her appreciation of his counsel was supreme. Her devotion and loyalty to her father made her companionship sweet to me.
When I was a boy of sixteen I received my endowments in the old council house. President Heber C. Kimball made the most impressive talk on virtue and chastity that I have ever heard, and purity became, in my mind, an ideal more precious than gold or silver. It was my practice of this ideal that led to the winning of Tamar's love, and that gave me unreservedly her father's blessing.
A few days after returning from Beaver, I walked with Brother Black over to St. George, seven miles, to attend a priesthood meeting. On the way, I asked him what answer Tamar had given the man who wished to marry her. He replied, "I advised her to decline his offer, and she did it." As events turned out, our trip proved providential. Eight days of companionship under such trying circumstances could not fail to awaken a mutual admiration. I too discovered in Tamar a high and lovable type of womanhood, a type that no outward vicissitude of life would daunt or weaken. Perhaps her first appreciation of me was in the nature of perfect trust, and indeed her virtue had been as sacred with me along this lonely road as it would have been with her father or mother.
Fifty years ago, we of Utah had no railroads, nor automobiles, and not even brakes on our wagons. I got my Brother Joseph W.'s big mules, loaded up with cotton yarn, then with Albina and her children, and Tamar, I hiked to Salt Lake to be married. As we got into the wagon Father Black put his arms around Tamar, and said, "My daughter, you are going to marry into a large family. Many trials will come to you; and I want you to remember, 'It is better to suffer wrong, than to do wrong.'" This was splendid counsel, and the daughter never forgot it. The following incident illustrates Tamar's presence of mind in sudden danger.