Background Material for Chapter 9

Homesick

from Family Stories …and How I Found Mine

by J. Michael Cleverley

The lore of the Great American Migration West usually depicts energetic, enthusiastic, strong men and women surging West in search of greater opportunities. True to a certain extent, for many women, however, settling and homesteading was hard and demanding, and enthusiasm was not always on the day’s agenda. That was true of Matilda (“Tillie”) Howard Johnson, who suffered loneliness and depression when her energetic husband, John, uprooted his new bride and took her to the harsh Snake River plains of southern Idaho to start a new life. Because of what she went through, and because of how she dealt with it, she remains in my mind the most heroic of all of my ancestors.

Tillie, age 18, just before her marriage

Tillie and John were an attractive couple when they were married in March, 1893. She was 18 and he was 25. Both were the children of Mormon pioneers who walked the plains West in the 1860s. She was settled to city living in the bustling Great Salt Lake area. John was unsettled and craved staking out his own homestead in southern Idaho. A month after they married the couple traveled on the Utah & Northern north from Bountiful, Utah, and got off the train in Eagle Rock (now Idaho Falls), Idaho. She didn’t know what she was getting into. John did. There were still deep drifts of snow on the road as their wagon carried them into the treeless sagebrush covered desert to the primitive log cabin that John had built earlier.

Tillie’s family in front of her childhood home, taken about 1898. Tillie would have been back home with her two children while John served his first Mormon mission to Sweden.

Young, bright, educated for her time, talented, and refined, Tillie’s reaction to the austere surroundings – about which John was less than candid to her beforehand – was emotional and despondent. She missed her home and its trees, her piano, and her family. When her favorite brother traveled from Utah to cheer her spirits, he arrived ill and died from typhoid a few days later. It was a huge blow to her. She worked hard and transformed the cabin into a warm and pleasant home. But on another day, she climbed to the roof to watch the distant train and listen to its whistle as the cars rushed their passengers southward toward Utah, her home.

Tillie’s home still stands in north Salt Lake. We found it after a long circuit under freeways and through oil refinery tanks. It is still colorful, historic, and authentic. There are still trees.

At 16, Tillie played the piano and organ in school and church and graduated from high school a year later. Then the next, she married John, and for the following 15 years she lived in a crude log cabin. By the time she was 40 she was mother of 11 children, Through it all she refused to lose the refinement she knew as a girl. John’s departure in 1898 as a missionary for the LDS church forced Tillie to manage a home and family on her own for two years. His second missionary call to Sweden in 1918 left her with 12 children, a mortgage to be paid off in full one year from his departure, and a farm to manage. When he returned at the end of 1919, she met him in the Model T she had bought, mortgage fully paid, and one of the children married – all done in a place she never enjoyed or wanted. The change in her eyes between ages 40 and 45 perhaps tells how hard it was. Even in her 80s, Matilda’s eyes revealed a long challenging life, but one she knew she had conquered. It was this Matilda I knew as a great-grandmother living next door, no-nonsense and particular, but kind and loving.

John Johnson was the son of Swedish immigrants who crossed the Plains the same summer as Tillie’s father and grandparents. Tall (6’1″), slim, handsome, artistic, bright and outgoing, he refused to become a blacksmith as his father wanted. Instead, he enrolled in college and became a teacher. He did almost everything, teaching school, painting, singing, farming, building canals, running the treacherous Snake River with a cache of logs, engraving tomb stones, and more. His children left admiring portraits of their father in their later writings.

While Tillie struggled to manage alone a large family and farm, a letter he wrote to his daughter, Mayme, in 1916, reveals that John, too, anguished over being away. In another card sent to Mayme in the summer of 1918, he expressed his horror at how many in Sweden were dying from the Spanish flu, perhaps not knowing that the deadly disease had stricken all twelve of his children at home.

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In 1908, after 14 years and 8 children in the log cabin that drenched her with despair and tears that day they arrived in the sagebrush desert, John built Tillie the home she longed for. It was a large stone home, one of the finest around. Along one side were the trees she missed.

One day during my search for Tillie’s stories, her grandson Howard took my wife and me on a tour of the home which is truly old by Idaho standards. The house had seen a great deal of renovation over the years. It was beautifully preserved but modern and functional on the inside. The family had left a cross section of the wall open to exhibit the multiple layers of wallpaper. These layers chronicled the lives and stories of the four generations who had lived inside those walls

It was my first time inside Tillie’s and John’s old house, but I felt once again that this was a place never before visited, but very familiar. It seemed like I knew it, and I even sensed some emotions of nostalgia, but for a memory I could not access.

John and Tillie sat for a portrait with the twelve children sometime shortly after his return from his mission to Sweden during World War I.