Willard Washington Wasden

Willard Washington Wasden

• born October 21, 1876 in Scipio, Utah
• died January 12, 1950 in Rexburg, Idaho
• loved horses 
• was a crack shot with a pistol

This is the history as near as Harold and I could remember it.  Dad was the eighth of thirteen children of John Brooks Wasden and Nancy Arvilla Herring.  Grandpa had three wives, grandma being the first, Sophia Penniston being second and Carolina Savage being third.  Sophia died when she gave birth to twins. One twin died also and Grandma Nancy Arvilla Herring, the first wife took the twin and raised him as her own.  That twin was Uncle James from Cody Wyoming.  Four of the boys left Utah and came north.   Isaac and James went on to Cody country and Dad and Uncle Joe stayed in Idaho.

Dad was born in, I think, Scipio, Utah on October 21, 1876.  Dad was a crack shot with a pistol; He was tempted to shoot a man at one time.  Then decided if he did he would be a murderer so he walked over to the canyon and threw his gun down over the cliff.  He has never owned one since.

Dad and Uncle Joe would come to Soda Springs, one time to establish a sawmill.  Dad got tangled up in a bean and nut cup game.  Dad lost all of their money, so that ended his gambling blood for life.

Grandpa, Willard’s dad, worked for the railroad building fences and building grades for tracks.  He also invented many things, a gate being one of the outstanding inventions.  It was called the “Farmers Handy Gate.”  He had it patented in Canada but not in the United States.  Ralph Huskinson now has the miniature model of the gate.

Mother’s family came from eastern United States.  Harvey Berk Strong was her grandfather.  Savannah, Illinois was where part of the family settled.  Somehow grandpa and the family came to the Midwest Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas.  Mother and her two brothers Earl and George were all born in Fort Dodge, Iowa.  Mother was born June 10, 1876.  George and Earl, the youngest, June 9, 1879.  Their parents are Henry Boylan and Mary Strong.

Grandma had a millinery shop and hired several women at all times.  She dressed mother in the latest styles and made her look very beautiful.  Mom also graduated from high school, which was a feat in those days.  

Mother was a pretty girl and had a lot of admirers.

Mother told me a story about her Aunt Hatie Oberhansly.  Now Hattie, her boyfriend and mother traveled form Payson to Gunnison in a buggy.  They had prepared a lunch to eat on the way.  Hattie and her boyfriend were too bashful to eat, so mother ate all the lunch.  Mother and Dad were married not too long afterward, I think, early in 1898.

Willard Wasden and Myrtle Boylan were married in Payson, Utah.  They lived in Payson, Gunnison and various localities in Utah.  Dad herded sheep for several people and did other jobs.  In some of the records I’ve uncovered they reveal the fact that a city lot sold for 50 cents and water rights were about the same price.

Mother was raised in a very particular home and Grandma had a flair for culture.  Therefore, keeping her own home and doing all of the work a wife was expected to do was a far cry from the fine arts that mother was used to doing.  But she did her best.

After Harold and Fay were born in Utah, a move was made to Idaho.  Harold said all he can remember about being a little child was playing in a sand pile on Canyon Creek.  Dad then started a saw mill and one morning he saw 9 elk a short distance away.  He put ten shells in his hat and attempted his elk harvest.  He shot all nine and had one shell left.  The game warden was on his trail and he knew it.  One of his friends loaded all nine elk in a sleigh and took them to Farnum where Grandma Boylan lived and hurried and buried them in a snow drift.

Dad and Mother and the two little boys lived with grandma that winter, then moved to St. Anthony where Leonard was born, November 25, 1902.

Dad then bought the eighty acres in north Salem from Joe Larsen.  Harold was still a little fellow but he helped Dad and Uncle Joe Clear the Sage brush off the land.  The brush was as high as your head.  Dad made a tamsite out of a spirit level, creating a surveying instrument.  This feat was untold of at that time.  He used this to make dikes and ditches which was rather unusual.

Dad raised alfalfa, oats, and beets, pigs, milk cows, and horses on the farm.  He and mom planted two big patches of raspberries.  As a kid I picked raspberries every day and hated every berry.  Today I can’t eat a raw raspberry to save me.  When I wasn’t picking berries I was herding cows on the road.  They could always find a hole in some fence to get into someone else’s field but they never could find it to get back.

Dad had a horse called Pete and her colt was a male horse, very strong and wise.  Dad named him Billy, Dad use to haul wood from the mountains to burn.  He was going up a grade and had stopped to wind the horses.  When dad said go Pete slammed Billy back against the double trees.  She did that twice and the third time he was ready and beat Pete to the collar.  She never got the better of him again.  Dad had another horse, a big black bally face.  His name was Meek.  He and Billy were a pulling team and I used both as a derrick horse.

About this time 1914, he put one four horse team on a wagon and another one, three horse team, hauling freight from Ashton to Jackson Hole to build the dam.  They hauled mostly cement.  Harold, Fay and Uncle Joe drove the outfits. Harold said he only drove once then the job was given to Fay and Uncle Joe.  They would go with a caravan and everyone took care of Fay.  His feet wouldn’t reach the dash board.  On one trip dad’s lead horse died, so he hooked Billy on lead without a line.  He knew what his job was and did it.  Dad finally put the six horsed together and pulled two wagons.  We younger kids would know about when the wagons should be coming home and lie awake at night listening for them to come the last mile home, as they make a rumbling noise over the dirt toad with the steel wheels.  Whoever was home would go out and tend horses as we knew the drivers were tired and hungry.

When Aunt Olive was old enough to go to high school, dad and mother had her come from Utah.  Mom and dad bought a little horse called Midget.  So the folks sent Olive and Joe to Ricks Academy.  Midget could make it to school in two minutes.  Olive only came one year to Idaho.  It was too rough.  She got a job in Keith O’Brian and never did go back to school. Uncle Joe was called to Chicago on an LDS mission.  Mom and Dad financed that for him.   He didn’t pay his debt back very gracefully.

I can remember when dad and Zeke Holman leased 640 acres of ground three and one half miles south east of Newdale.  Dad and the boys went up there to farm.  Mother would cook for days then she and I would take the little kids, Olive, Lowell and John in the buggy and drive fifteen miles up there with a roast, fresh bread, cakes and everything mom could get together for the dry farm.

Harold, Fay and Leonard were the big kids.  So there were the big kids, little kids, and I was just me in-between.  Dad and Mr. Holman got Leo Jacobs from Hibbard to go to the dry farm and break up the sage brush, the yield the first year was good, forty bushels to the acre.  The next year it was thirty then 20 then it got down to five bushels which broke a lot of farmers dad bought a big Studebaker and a tractor.  We really though were were aristocrats.  Dad didn’t lose anything, but he didn’t make the money he had before and he had to start living differently that was when he built the new house

The new house was surely a pleasure to the whole family.

About that time the Rexburg Standard had a contest.  The one who sold the most subscriptions won a Ford car. Second prize was a graphonola. Alma Larsen won the Ford car and dad won the graphonola.  Not long after that dad developed an enlarged heart and never could work hard again.

The old log house had been moved out in the field and the Japanese people who worked in the beets lived in it.  About this same time dad sold the dry farm to the boys and the wet farm to fay.  Mom and dad bought a house on Center street in Rexburg and they lived there until both passed away.

After selling the farm, dad still wanted to do something, so he kept his horses and mules and brought them to our place.  Ken told him he was welcome to do so.

The horses were forever running away and it was a big job most of the time to get them back home.  Ken also gave dad a piece of ground to use as he wanted to, so he planted potatoes.  He would hook his pickup on the leveler harrow and cultivate his fields at 25 miles per hour.  The dust at 25 miles per hour would just fly.  The payoff really came when he hooked the cultivator behind the Ford pickup. At that speed a good percent of potatoes were dug with each cultivating.  Then dad went in the pig business.

He built a pen out by the river on a high spot in the field.  Spring came and the snow melting caused a flood. The flood covered the whole field.  The pigs mostly stayed on the high spot and in the pen.  Some swam down the river and were lost.  Ken and dad decided to get a boat and give the pigs a boat ride to safety.  This was a riot, as a pig wasn’t to cooperative about getting caught, not to mention holding them in the boat after getting them in it.  Needless to say he didn’t have a very big pig herd when the water went down.

I just can’t forget to take time to talk about how many times Ken took dad fishing.  I think that was the only time dad really took time out to play.  Ken gave dad the best times of his life.  We never did go fishing without him.  He would always sit on the front of the boat and never give up.  We would fish all day Saturday and send him home with a gunny sack half full of fish.  I told him if the game warden caught him they would put him in jail for years.  He said, “For this many fish I’d be glad to go to jail.”  There was a deep feeling for each other between Ken and my dad.  Dad told Ken, “If May was my wife I’d soon straighten her it.”  I really was a renegade in his eyes.  On Sunday he always went home for church.  Mom really had the high sign on him.

In 1946 ken and I told the folks if they would accept Harold’s invitation to spend the winter in Huntington Beach we would repaint their house.  They accepted the proposition and dad spent the winter on the pier fishing and at the spit and chew club spinning yarns and trading experiences with the rest of the old men.  Dad was so smart and insulting to mother that Harold told him to straighten up and be descent to mom or he would send him home.  The threat had the desired effect and dad stayed until spring.

He then had a prostrate operation when he got home and was never well afterward.  He also had sugar diabetes.  I had to go down each day and give him his shots of insulin.  Dad died in January of 1950.  Effie Mortenson said she read an unusual character in his face.  This was true; he was a very different man.

Mother was often called a prissy little old lady, and a lady she was.   Such a lovely cultured person.  She also had heart trouble and a gallbladder problem and diabetes.  I also gave her shots.  She couldn’t take medicine alone, so I came to town to be with her to take her medicine.

Dad was born a Mormon but mom was a Methodist until after fay was born.  He was a very sick baby and mother prayed for his life and said if god would let her baby live she would join the Mormon Church and never drink tea again.  She kept her promise.

She was president of the primary, young ladies mutual and also Salem relief society, and always a visiting teacher.

Dad and Uncle Johnnie Huskinson were made partners in the fourth ward taking care of all the widows and they really enjoyed this and did a fine job.

Mom had a heart attack the Sunday after Beverly’s wedding and we took her to the hospital where she died the next day.  It was May 1957.  The same day Emma had a malignant breast removal.

There is yet one name that has to be remembered in this family.  In 1906 a baby by the name of Virgil was born to the family, but died at birth.  This was the year before I was born in 1907.

Written by,

May Arvilla Wasden Huskinson

Pioneer Valley Resident Dies

Willard Washington Wasden, early pioneer of the Upper Snake River Valley, died Monday morning at the family home at 124 South Center Street in Rexburg, after a lingering illness.

Mr. Wasden was born at Scipio, Utah, October 21, 1876.  In March, 1886, Mr. Wasden spent the summer helping build roads in Yellowstone National Park.  He returned to Utah in the spring of 1898 and was united in marriage with Myrtle Boylan.

In the spring of 1900 they moved to Salem, where they engaged in farming and stock raising which they pursued successfully until they retired in 1939, moving to Rexburg.

Mr. Wasden was active in the LDS church all his life holding the office of high priest.  He worked as chairman of the genealogical organization of the Salem ward and later worked on the welfare committee in the Forth wad of Rexburg.  Surviving are his widow and five sons, Fay, Lowell, John of Rexburg, Leonard of Idaho Falls, Harold of Huntington Beach California, two daughters, Mrs. Ken Huskinson, Rexburg, and Mrs. Leslie Bailey, Wellsville, Utah; 23 grandchildren, 6 great grandchildren, twelve brothers and sisters.  An infant son preceded him in 1906.

Funeral services will be Thursday at 1:00 p.m. in the Fourth LDS ward chapel.  Burial will be at the Rexburg cemetery under the direction of the Weiser mortuary of Rexburg.