A Family Pioneering....

   I always believed that when the year nineteen hundred hit things in America were changed forever. They were instantly different from the eighteen hundreds. That the west was tamed, everyone had a automobile, streets were paved, and all the major cities were built. I don't know how or why I developed these concepts. Perhaps it was the movies or reading about it in school. I don't know. I do know this I was wrong.
  In the year nineteen hundred people were still crossing the plains on their own two feet if they had to. In the west most streets were dirt even in many major cities. Many towns and cities were still tent towns back then.
   What really blows my mind for a loop is, out here in the west I had family. Family living in one of those tent towns. Pioneering and carving out a life for themselves and their family and future generations to come. Family my Great Grandmother would sometimes tell a story or two about because she knew them. My Grandmother she knew a few of them as well when she was a girl. These people have become legends, heroes to me.
  Back then not sure exactly the year. My Grandmother does. My Great Great Grandfather Lee Mecham lived in one of those tent towns called, Duchesne Utah. He was a striking young man, kind and charitable or so I am told. Perhaps he could have had his pick of any young lady in the area if he had a mind to. However it was Jessie Bernice Peterson that somehow caught his eye.
   She was pretty much the only one in the area educated enough to teach the young. So she became Duchesne's first School Teacher. She lived in a small cabin with her parents and two brothers. Her brothers slept outside on a box spring, the cabin being too small to fit them all. I suppose I could see why Lee Mecham loved her. She was quite beautiful and the west had given her a tough spirit. Personally I believe the tough spirit is genetic. Our family history being what it is and all.
  Well young Lee Mecham would court beautiful Jessie Bernice Peterson at her families cabin. In those days that was the way of things. On his way home he would find her brothers had put molasses on his saddle. They didn't approve of him, and he never complained. Eventually they were married and started a family of their own.
  One story I remember being told to me. After they were married they homesteaded along the Green River. Now Her brother's, and parent's each homesteaded a section down river. Can't remember what Lee was doing either homesteading another section or attending the cattle. But she had to tend a section by herself for a time. There was still problems in the area with the local Indian Tribe so she slept with a rifle under her pillow every night. She knew how to use it too! A tough spirit.
  Grandpa Mecham died in the nineteen forties of a massive heart attack. They had company over and were sitting around telling stories and jokes. He through up his arms like he was about to give out a huge laugh but it never came. I hear tell of people who showed up at his funeral thanking the family for him. People no one in our family knew or had only seen around town. People he had done spur of the moment favors for or helped out occasionally. That was just the kind of man he was, the kind of person I would inspire to be.
   My Grandmother told me she asked Grandma Mecham (Jessie Bernice Peterson) years later why she never remarried. She told her that he was the only man for her. I guess when you have had the love of your life No one else can live up to those standards.
   Grandma Mecham died in the nineteen seventies. She had crossed the plains in a covered wagon and had lived to see man walk on the moon. To have seen the things she has seen in her lifetime. To see the world change around her. I have to wonder just what did she think about it all?
  I do know these stories and photos have giving me a whole new perspective on time, life, and change. Thing's may happen quickly like the industrial revolution or things may stay the same like using a plow for the  last two thousand years or more. I also know it wasn't those things that mattered. It was the people and experiences that were encountered as time, life, and change moved things forward. That's what I Visibly Me Maxine Marie know.