Life Story of Christian H. Christensen and Bena Marie Frogner Christensen, Part 2

Here's the second part of the Life Story of Christian H. and Bena Marie Frogner Christensen:

Chris and Bena lived in a one-room log cabin with their five children. The cabin had a dirt roof and board floor with a hole in the floor big enough to crawl through for a vegetable storage underneath. The winter snows were deep and would drift. The plumbing was three to five snowdrifts southwest. They always raised gardens and berries. Bena spent her time with the kids. Irven was the oldest ‘girl’ of the family, so he helped in the house with the kids and Henry helped outside. When they carried slop to the pigs, they sometimes spilled it all and had to start all over. Father’s life was all work. He had livestock, horses, and cattle.

They had house-building teams and everyone would set the logs and they would move in. If the dirt roof leaked, they had to have buckets to catch the water. They had two chairs and a bench, plus a wash bench. They put two chairs on apple boxes a few feet apart with a board on them to seat the kids. Their beds were straw ticks with an old frame with boards across to hold the ticks. These were refilled each fal through a slit in the top. By spring it would become packed down and full of dust, so they would shake it out and get more straw to refill them. They had lots of heavy, warm quilts, both quilted and tied. Their pillows were made with chicken and goose feathers.

Chris bought a cow—a wild range or beef cow—which was giving milk. She laid down out by the straw pile. Bena went out and got a long hay rope, made a loop in it, tied it to a post and dropped the other end over the cow’s head. The cow got up and ran, and when she came to the end of the rope, she stopped. Bena finally got her tied to a post, got another rope on her leg and stretched it out so she could milk, and got some milk. Another time, while Bena was working at her sewing machine in the log cabin, she heard a racket out the front door. She saw a cow fall on the doorstep—it had bloated. She walked through the door with scissors in her hand and jabbed the cow with the scissors, and gas blew to the top of the cabin. The cow went back to eat after that.

Bena did the washing on a wash board with water from the ditch. They hauled water in a barrel from the neighbors for the house. They were close enough to Sand Creek to drive the cows to the Creek to drink. In the winter, they had to cut steps and a hole in the ice for the cattle to drink. Someone’s fat pig slid in and drowned and plugged up the hole. Another white-faced cow fell through the ice, and her horns held her. They dragged her out, but she died.

Bena wanted to sacrifice her first Sand Hills home in Goshen for one in Basalt, where chances for the children’s education would be better and closer. So in about 1905, Chris sold the farm in Goshen and settled on the Benton place in Basalt, on the Goshen Highway, between Sand Creek and the West Branch Canal. They belonged to the Basalt Ward, Shelley Stake, and were only about 1 ½ miles from church, so they walked to Sunday School, sacrament meeting, and Primary. Sometimes in the winter they rode in a buggy or sleigh. They would heat rocks or bricks and put in the bottom of the sleigh to keep their feet warm. They never did own a car, so the children got lots of experience catching horses and putting harnesses on them. They took hay or grain so the horses could eat while they waited for the children.

On April 1, 1905, they received word that Chris’s father had passed away. He died and was buried in Hyrum, Utah.

The Benton place had better soil, so they could raise better crops and the children could each have a cow and pony to claim as their own. All the farm work was done with a team of horses, so they had work horses, too.

Guy Benjamin was born on the Benton place, March 26, 1906. Bena had two other baby boys that were born premature and were stillborn. Lyma remembers her Ma saying that she had been setting out some raspberry plants and had just overworked, so she thought this had started her labor when she lost one of the babies. They fixed a small shoebox and lined it with fabric, and then built a small wooden box, and the baby was buried in the orchard.

Annie May was born in May 1908, but died soon after birth. The next spring, Norman was born, April 12, 1909, and was the last of the family.

Chris and Bena traded the Benton place for the Pope place, which was two blocks west and across the road. It was a 140-acre farm and had 10 acres of orchard. It was joined on the west by the West Branch Canal and on the east by Johnson’s place and on the north by Messick’s. They were a little closer to school and church.

The soil was good on this farm too, and they raised beets, potatoes, seed peas, hay, and grain. They used a different kind of plow. They started with a hand plow and then replaced it with a sulky—a rider plow. It had a moldboard to turn over the soil. Later, they got a disc plow. They would plow one furrow, drop in spuds, then plow another furrow to cover the first. In the early years, instead of cellars, they would dig a V-shaped pit three or four feet deep and fill it with potatoes. They would cover it with a foot of straw and then with dirt. A straw chimney was left to let out the heat. Snow would cover everything and act as insulation. In the spring, they would open the spud pit and sort spuds. The rotten ones went to the pigs, and the good ones put back. They also stored carrots and turnips.

In the orchard, there were black cherries, pie cherries, two kinds of plums, peaches, pears, and more apples than they knew what to do with. There were Wealthies, Golden Delicious, Greenings, Wolf Rivers, and Ben Davis apples. Irven said the Ben Davis were short on flavor and taste, but were plentiful. They also had two raspberry patches, red currant bushes, and gooseberry bushes. Choke cherries and service berries were harvested from the mountains. They raised beef stock, cows, horses, and a herd of 75 pigs. The work was never ending. Later, they had two large potato cellars with about 1500 sacks of potatoes in each cellar, and at least 55 gunny sacks full of apples in the apple bin. These all had to be sorted during the winter and all the potatoes, grain, and apples not used would be fed to the pigs.

During the summer, there was planting, weeding, thinning beets, picking fruit, and canning and drying fruit and vegetables. They would can enough meat in two-quart bottles to last all summer. Wiley Winter, Otto Jorgenson, and Chris’ brother, Willard, worked for them, and in the fall, there were between 15 and 20 threshers, so they had some big meals to prepare every day. With all of the family home and the hired help, they would have to cook large kettles of whatever they were going to eat, and Bena baked almost every day, and she would make pies and cobblers and in large dripper pans. They had lots of whipped cream. There was a lot of work just feeding that many people. Chris and Bena drank coffee, as did the kids until baptized.

Chris was really good to neighbors and any Indians that needed help. He would let anyone dig as many potatoes as they could use, and he would also let them pick what fruit they wanted. The children were never afraid of Indians because Chris and Bena were so good to them. The Indians wanted eggs, sugar, and coffee. They would crack the eggs on their saddle and drink them down. One Indian would tell another until they all knew where to come. One Indian woman came to Goshen and Basalt regularly for many years. Bena always gave her a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs each time she came. Train tramps would mark the fence so others would know they could get a meal. At Christensens’, it was a good meal, but they had to work for it.

In Basalt, they had corrals, sheds, and a barn, where they kept stock and pigs and cattle. Bena knew her way around there. Once she went out in the barn, where the hens would lay their eggs in the manger. She always went over to reach in and get the eggs out of this nest, and the stallion reached out and took her by the top of her straw hat and gave the bob a squeeze and bent a few hair pins out of shape, but she got the eggs. What the hens would do is steal away from the nest and lay a dozen eggs, and when she got ready, sit on them until they hatched and come off with a bunch of chickens. The deal was to pick up all these eggs while they were fresh. The chickens would just run loose.

Bena made the dresses for the girls herself, with never a mention of patterns. She made them, and if alterations were needed, she did it. Chris would take a burlap sack doubled, lay it on the floor, put a handful of hay under his foot, pull the sack up around the foot, and tie it with string or wire for a dry, cold-weather boot. Bena not only sewed clothes, but mittens, hats, or whatever was needed.   

(Click here to continue to Part 3.)