Pioneer Stories - The Goble Family

   

William and Mary Goble, future great-grandparents of Marjorie Pay Hinckley, joined the Church in November 1855 and immediately began preparing to emigrate. Six months later they sailed for Zion with their six children, ages 2 through 13. A seventh child would be born on the trail. The Gobles were among the Saints on the Horizon who joined the Hunt wagon company, which traveled near the Martin company for most of the journey. The Gobles's oldest child, 13-year-old Mary, explained: "We had orders not to pass the handcart companies. We had to keep close to them to help them if we could."

Mary's account of the journey includes this tragic event in Iowa City: "My sister Fanny broke out with the measles on the ship, and when we were in the Iowa campground, there came up a thunderstorm that blew down our shelter, made with handcarts and some quilts. . . . We sat there in the rain, thunder, and lightning. My sister got wet and died the 19th of July 1856. She would have been two years old on the 23rd. The day we started our journey, we visited her grave. We felt very bad to leave our little sister there."

Sadly, other tragedies would soon follow for this faithful family.

The Hunt wagon company arrived at the last crossing of the Platte River right after the Martin and Hodgetts companies. Their 2-year-old daughter had died in Iowa City, and another daughter had been born during the journey across Nebraska. Their oldest daughter, 13-year-old Mary, had the following recollection of crossing the Platte for the last time:  "We traveled on till we got to the Platte River. That was the last walk I ever had with my mother. We caught up with the handcart compan[y] that day. We watched them cross the river. . . . It was bitter cold. The next morning there were fourteen dead in camp through the cold. We went back to camp and went to prayers. We sang the song 'Come, Come, Ye Saints, No Toil Nor Labor Fear.'" Although Mary's mother did not die that day, she apparently became so ill that she was unable to walk again. Mary did all she could to attend to her mother's needs: "We had been without [fresh] water for several days, just drinking snow water. The captain said there was a spring of fresh water just a few miles away. It was snowing hard, but my mother begged me to go and get her a drink. Another lady went with me. We were about halfway to the spring when we found an old man who had fallen in the snow. He was frozen so stiff we could not lift him, so the lady told me where to go and she would go back to camp for help, for we knew he would soon be frozen if we left him. When she had gone, I began to think of the Indians and looking in all directions. I became confused and forgot the way I should go. I waded around in the snow up to my knees and I became lost. Later when I did not return to camp, the men started out after me. It was 11:00 o'clock before they found me. My feet and legs were frozen. They carried me to camp and rubbed me with snow. They put my feet in a bucket of water. The pain was so terrible. The frost came out of my legs and feet but not out of my toes."

During the first week of November, tragedy twice again struck the family. On November 3 their infant daughter Edith, who was born in Nebraska, died "for the want of nourishment."  13-year-old Mary, recalled her feelings at the grave: "I felt like I couldn't leave her, for I had seen so many graves opened by the wolves. The rest of the company had got quite a ways when my father came back for me. I told him I could not leave her to be eaten by the wolves. It seem[ed] too terrible. But he talked to me and we hurried on." 

That same week the Gobles' four-year-old son also died. Mary recalled: "When we arrived at Devil's Gate, it was bitter cold. We left lots of our things there. . . . While there an ox fell on the ice and the brethren killed it and the beef was given out to the camp. My brother James ate a hearty supper [and] was as well as he ever was when he went to bed. In the morning he was dead.  My feet were frozen, also my brother Edwin and my sister Caroline had their feet frozen. It was nothing but snow. We could not drive the pegs in our tents. Father would clean a place for our tents and put snow around to keep it down. We were short of flour, but Father was a good shot. They called him the hunter of the camp, so that helped us out. We could not get enough flour for bread as we got only a quarter of a pound per head a day, so we would make it like thin gruel. We called it skilly."

    

This family that had started the journey with six children and expecting a seventh had now lost the three youngest children, including the one born on the trail. This would not be the end of their losses. As the family neared the Salt Lake Valley, their mother slipped away also. Mary recalled her mother's death, as well as subsequent efforts to save her own frostbitten feet: "My mother had never got well; she lingered until the 11th of December, the day we arrived in Salt Lake City, 1856. She died between the Little and Big Mountains. She was buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. She was 43 years old. She and her baby lost their lives gathering to Zion in such a late season of the year. . . . We arrived in Salt Lake City [at] nine o'clock at night the 11th of December 1856. Three out of the four that were living were frozen. My mother was dead in the wagon. Bishop Hardy had us taken to a house in his ward, and the brethren and the sisters brought us plenty of food. We had to be careful and not eat too much as it might kill us we were so hungry. Early next morning Brother Brigham Young and a doctor came. The doctor's name was Williams. When Brigham Young came in, he shook hands with all of us. When he saw our condition, our feet frozen and our mother dead, tears rolled down his cheeks. The doctor wanted to cut my feet off at the ankles, but President Young said, 'No, just cut off the toes and I promise you that you will never have to take them off any farther.' . . . The doctor amputated my toes using a saw and butcher knife. The sisters were dressing my mother for her grave. My father walked in the room where mother was, then back to us. He could not shed a tear. When my feet were fixed, they packed us in to see our mother for the last time. Oh, how did we stand it? That afternoon she was buried.  We had been in Salt Lake a week when one afternoon a knock came at the door. It was Uncle John Wood. When he met Father, he said, 'I know it all, Bill.' Both of them cried. I was glad to see my father cry. . . . Instead of my feet getting better they got worse, until the following July I  went to Dr. Wiseman's to live with them to pay for him to doctor my feet. But it was no use. He  could do no more for me unless I would consent to have them cut off at the ankle. I told him what Brigham Young had promised me. He said. 'All right, sit there and rot, and I will do nothing more until you come to your senses.' One day I sat there crying, my feet were hurting so, when a little old woman knocked at the door. She said that she had felt that someone needed her there  for a number of days. When she saw me crying, she came and asked what was the matter. I showed her my feet and told her the promise Brigham Young had given me. She said, 'Yes, and with the help of the Lord we will save them yet.' She made a poultice and put it on my feet, and every day she would come and change the poultice. At the end of three months my feet were well. One day Dr. Wiseman said, 'Well, Mary, I must say you have grit. I suppose your feet have rotted to the knees by this time.'  I said, 'Oh, no, my feet are well.'  He said, 'I know better, it could never be.' So I took off my stockings and showed him my feet. He said that it was surely a  miracle."

Although William Goble's wife and three of his children died during the journey west, he still had four relatively young children when he arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in December 1856. That same month he married Susanna Patchet. The next spring William moved his family to Nephi.  Like many others, William Goble became discouraged during his first months in Zion. In his case the discouragement was so severe in the summer of 1857 that he told his children he would take them home to England as soon as he earned enough money. Those plans changed, however, through the influence of his deceased wife. One day he came home and told his children, "I have seen your mother today, and she wants us to stay here. Everything will be all right."

William bought some land in Nephi and farmed it for the rest of his life. Eventually he gave part of it to the Church for the building of a meetinghouse. He died in 1898 at age 81. His descendants remember him as "a man with great faith and healing power."

Mary stayed in Spanish Fork when the rest of her family moved to Nephi in 1857 and then rejoined them in 1859. In June of that year she married Richard Pay. He was a 38-year-old widower who, like Mary, had sailed on the Horizon and joined the Hunt wagon company. His wife and baby daughter had died during the trek west. "The baby died October 4, 1856 at Chimney Rock," Mary recalled. "Bro. Pay could not get anyone to dig the grave, so he started digging it himself, when my father came and helped him." Later, Richard Pay returned the favor, helping Mary's father dig a grave when Mary's baby sister Edith died at the Sweetwater. 

Mary and Richard Pay had 13 children, three of whom died very young. After 22 years in Nephi, they moved to Leamington. There Mary served as president of the Primary for 12 years and also in the Relief Society. Richard died in 1893, leaving Mary uncertain how she would provide for her children. "It looked pretty dark with nothing coming in," she wrote. "I had to depend on my boys, [but] they did not get much work, so I started to nurse the sick. In this I had good success." Mary's oldest son had died the year before her, and another son died the next year, making three very trying years. 

Mary returned to Nephi and lived another 20 years as a widow. Her autobiographical account of these years covers just two pages but tells of attending three handcart reunions. One of these was the 50-year reunion—the handcart jubilee, as it was called. While in Salt Lake City for this reunion, Mary visited her mother's grave for the first time. "No one knows how I felt as we stood there by her grave," Mary wrote. "I thought of her words, 'Polly, I want to go to Zion while my children are small, so they can be raised in the Gospel of Christ. For I know this is the true Church." Although Mary's mother did not live to raise her children in Zion herself, Mary concluded, "I think my mother had her wish."

One of Mary Goble Pay's grandchildren was Marjorie Pay Hinckley, wife of President Gordon B. Hinckley. After telling Mary's story, President Hinckley said:  "[This] is representative of the stories of thousands. It is an expression of a marvelous but simple faith, an unquestioning conviction, that the God of Heaven in his power will make all things right and bring to pass his eternal purposes in the lives of his children. We need so very, very much a strong burning of that faith in the living God and in his living, resurrected Son, for this was the great moving faith of our gospel forebears. . . . With faith they sought to do his will. With faith they read and accepted divine teaching. With faith they labored until they dropped, always with a conviction that there would be an accounting to him who was their Father and their God. Let us look again to the power of faith in ourselves, faith in our associates, and faith in God our Eternal Father. Let us prayerfully implement such faith in our lives."

Have a great week! 

Sister McHood