Ebenezer Bryce: Part 5 - The Bryces in Bryce

Ebenezer: Carpenter, Millwright, Shipbuilder, Wheelwright, Cattleman, courageous, honest, religious, determined, independent, cultural, gardener, kind, hard-working faithful, missionary and patriarch.

And Mary Ann: Homemaker, Seamstress, Candlemaker, Spiritual, devoted wife, and mother of twelve children.

- “The Story of Ebenezer Bryce and Mary Ann Park,” essay by Ebenezer and Mary Ann’s great-great-granddaughter-in-law Marilyn Bryce, from The Bryce Book: 1886-1983. (Editor Fawn Smith Bryce, Bryce History Inc., Bryce Box 111, Pima, AZ  85543)

 

…continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 4

  

Bryce Family late 1800sFront row: Hellen, Linn (Melinda), Addie, Sarah, George, Jim, John, Nancy, Dora, MayRow two: Ebb (Ebenezer Park), Bill, Al, Dick, Nell, Belle, Jan, Joe, Hebe, Rube

Bryce Family late 1800s

Front row: Hellen, Linn (Melinda), Addie, Sarah, George, Jim, John, Nancy, Dora, May

Row two: Ebb (Ebenezer Park), Bill, Al, Dick, Nell, Belle, Jan, Joe, Hebe, Rube

In the late 1870s, the weather in Bryce Canyon was not much better than that of Pine Valley, though there was less snow, at only 32 inches per year. Still, it was below freezing at night, and the climate did not facilitate the improvement of Mary Ann’s health for which the family had been hoping. In fact, after Mary Ann had her eleventh child, Heber Brooks, in 1878, she became so ill that she was confined to her bed. In 1879, the family decided that they would need to move farther south for the sake of her health.

At the time, there were several Mormon settlements in Arizona territory and western New Mexico territory. In the summer of 1880, three of Ebenezer and Mary’s sons, David (21), Bill (19), and Alma (18) were sent to scout out possible new Mormon settlements in southeast Arizona and southwest New Mexico. After making a sheep trade deal in St. John, Arizona, the boys split up. David traveled to New Mexico, and Bill and Alma headed south within Arizona. That fall, while her grownup children were out scouting, Mary Ann gave birth to her twelfth and last child, Rueben Adam.

The following summer David and Alma returned home, and Bill headed south across the Fort Apache Indian Reservation with three other men. Later the family got word that Bill had been killed while crossing the reservation. There is no record of their reaction upon hearing this terrible news.

In the fall of 1881, the Bryces sold the farm yet again and, instead of herding their flock of sheep over 700 miles, they traded most of them in Utah for sheep they would claim in St. John, Arizona. The sheep that they couldn’t trade, they sold. They outfitted three covered wagons, rounded up their cattle and horses, over a hundred head in all, and headed for Arizona. The oldest daughter, Ann, was married, so she stayed behind in Utah. The addition of the oldest son, Ebenezer Park or “Ebb,” his wife, their twenty-two-month-old son, and their ten-month-old daughter made a group of fifteen. Ebenezer and Mary Ann’s two youngest were thirty-three months and a year old, so there were a total of four children under the age of three in tow.

The group crossed the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry and arrived at Silver Creek, just south of Snowflake, in November and stayed there for the winter. Much to their surprise, Bill, whom they’d presumed dead, rode into camp one evening. Again, there is no record of the family’s reaction, though we can assume it was a joyous reunion.

In early spring the Bryces headed to St. John to claim their sheep. Ebenezer and David sheared the sheep and took the wool to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to sell, stopping in the salt mines on the way back to get a load of salt for the cattle.

The family continued on, camping in Williams Valley, on the Frisco River in New Mexico, selling their sheep in Silver City, New Mexico, and, on Ebenezer’s birthday, November 17 of 1882, arriving in the Gila Valley in Arizona. The south bank of the Gila River was already settled, so Ebenezer and his family homesteaded the north side, checking the most important job—digging a canal for running a gristmill and irrigating their farms—off their to-do list first. Their cattle grazed on land that was part of the Gila Mountain Range and land leased from the Indian Agency at San Carlos Indian Reservation. The Mormon Church authorities asked Ebenezer and four other men to build a sawmill, planer, and a shingle mill on Graham Mountain, and slowly the homestead turned into a community. The Bryce family applied for a post office and became a town in 1883.

Mary Ann (Park) Bryce died on April 12, 1897, at the age of sixty, leaving two teenage boys at home. Ebenezer Adam Bryce died at home September 26, 1913, at the age of 83. The couple are buried side by side in the Bryce Cemetery, a public cemetery at the edge of their property.

My grandfather and father were born in Bryce, Arizona. In 1910, my dad’s parents, William Carlos (Carl) Bryce and Beulah Bertie (Means) Bryce homesteaded a farm in Ashurst, just a few miles down the Gila River and across the road from the land that my mom’s family would homestead in 1924. My dad, Carlos Howard Bryce, was fourteen and my mom, Louise Herbert, was eleven when they met. According to family legend, my dad was dating my mom’s older sister, Stella, until she left town to go on a Mormon mission. That’s when my mom swooped in. Mom and Dad eloped in 1931 and, two years later, at 9:20 a.m. on Thursday, November 9, 1933, my story began.

herbs mom and dad 1.png
herbs mom and dad 2.png

Ebenezer Bryce: Part 4 - Bryce Canyon National Park

“It's a helluva a place to lose a cow.” – attributed to Ebenezer Bryce

 

…continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 3

 

In 1876, the Bryce family traded their house in Pine Valley for a flock of sheep and moved 160 miles east to Paria Creek. There they would homestead a portion of what is now known as Bryce Canyon National Park. Yes, that park, visited by more than 2 million people every year, is named after my great-great grandfather.

The area is made up of rocky cliffs, horseshoe-shaped canyons, sprawling plateaus, forests of ponderosa pine and fir-spruce, and “hoodoos.” These unique geological formations are the result of the accumulation of flat rocks in the ancient Lake Claron, the same plate tectonics that created the Colorado Plateau, and some long-term weathering and erosion—specifically “ice wedging.” This last step, undertaken over the course of millions of years, transformed a wide plateau into narrower “walls,” carved out “windows,” and finally, whittled the rocks down into spires or “shafts.” (Now, people travel from far and wide to see the creatively named hoodoos of Bryce Canyon, particularly Thor’s Hammer, The Hunter, and Queen Victoria.)

The Bryce family settled in what was essentially sheer desert, at the base of the canyon between what is now Cannonville and Tropic. Not the most hospitable place to set up camp, though archeological evidence suggests that humans have inhabited the area for thousands of years. While traveling through, “Paleoindians” left darts and spear points dated to the end of the last Ice Age. Fremont and Pueblo Cultures set up agricultural communities in and nearby the canyon that lasted for a thousand years, starting around 1000 C.E. Then came the Southern Paiute Indians, who hunted and gathered there for a  few hundred years, called the hoodoos Anka-ku-was-a-wits, or “red-painted faces,” followed by the white men of the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition of 1776, Mexican traders in the 1820s, and frontiersmen after that. A few years before my family arrived in the area east of the Paunsaugunt Plateau, Black Hawk War broke out between white settlers and Native Americans, which led to the Navajo, Ute, and Southern Paiute nations’ resettlement. (As noted in an earlier blog post about my friend Hana, whose family, along with more than 13,000 Japanese Americans, was “relocated” during World War II, this region has a long history of such enforced resettlement.)   

Ebenezer and his sons’ first order of business was to dig an irrigation ditch to channel water from Paria Creek to their land and built a road into the canyon so that they could transport logs to build a cabin, barns, fences, and firewood. People from Cannonville three miles to the south also came to rely on the road, eventually referring to the canyon itself as Bryce’s canyon. On June 8, 1923, this informal title became official when the U.S. Forest Service established the area as a national monument. Five years later, almost 36,000 acres were re-designated as a national park.  

Rumor has it that Ebenezer, never one to mince words, said of the canyon, “It's a helluva of a place to lose a cow.”

gloria.png

A few decades later, my late wife, Gloria, and I went to visit the national park. After a couple hours of scenic driving, we pulled up to the fee station at the visitor’s center, where the nice young attendant was ready for us to pay our $30 fee. In the passenger’s seat, Gloria leaned forward and said, “This right here is the great-great grandson of Ebenezer Bryce. As in, Bryce Canyon. We should get in for free.”

           

“Nah,” he said, clearly thinking she was pulling his leg.

“Go on, Herb,” Gloria whispered to me. “Show him your ID.” I took my wallet out of my pocket, pulled out my license, and handed it to the attendant. He examined it closely, looked up at me, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.” Then he let us in for free.

To be continued…

Ebenezer Bryce: Part 3 - Mary, Family, and an Upside-Down Ship

“If a flood should come, it would float and if a wind came strong enough to blow it over, it would never crash to pieces." – Ebenezer Bryce

…continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 2

Ebenezer and Mary Ann (Park) Bryce

Ebenezer and Mary Ann (Park) Bryce

Ebenezer, a burly and skilled single man who would turn twenty on November 17, 1850, had no problems finding work in his new town of Salt Lake City. George A. Smith, a member of the LDS governing body Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, immediately hired him to work on his farm, where he met the maid of George’s wife, Bathsheba. She was a thirteen-year-old Scottish lass by the name of Mary Ann Park, whom Ebenezer would marry three-and-a-half years later.

For the next few years, Ebenezer continued to work as work came, eventually taking a job for Archibald Gardener, the husband of Mary Ann’s sister. The young man built and ran sawmills and gristmills along Mill Creek in Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains, 15 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, and in West Jorden along the Jorden River.

In February of 1855, the couple welcomed their firstborn son and my great-grandfather, Ebenezer Park Bryce. Ann Jeanette arrived in 1857, followed by David Andrew in 1858, William Henry in 1860, and Alma Nephi in October of 1861. That same month, Ebenezer and his family got a “calling” to join George A. Smith’s group to settle the area that eventually became St. George. Smith had personally requested Ebenezer so that he could help to build a sawmill and gristmill in Pine Valley, 40 miles north of St. George, to process lumber for building and provide flour for baking in those two towns. Over the next few years, Mary gave birth to three more children: twins Barbara Ellen and George Alvin in 1863, and Jane Louisa in 1867.

In 1867, former ships carpenter Ebenezer was asked to design and supervise the building of Pine Valley Chapel and Tithing Office. His solid reputation as a carpenter, plus his relation to LDS high official Archibald Gardener, might have had something to do with the request. He agreed, as long as he could do it his own way—using shipbuilding techniques, he built what is essentially an overturned ship.

The 32-foot by 52-foot frame stands independently on a granite and limestone foundation. All lumber was ponderosa pine that had been custom milled locally, in the sawmills Ebenezer himself had built. The crew constructed the walls flat on the ground and raised them into place using ropes, pulleys, and a whole lot of manpower. To make sure that they pulled the ropes in unison, Ebenezer sang a Scottish sea shanty—the end of each verse was the signal to pull. Once upright, the walls were “hung” on the basic structure, jointed in place with wooden pegs and strips of green rawhide. As the rawhide dried, it shrank and tightened the joints. The attic was constructed like a ship’s hull, giving the chapel an oval ceiling.

On any given day, a crowd gathered to watch; kids especially got a kick out of the sea shanty, singing it around the valley for months afterward. When the project was finished, Ebenezer was heard to say, “If a flood should come, it would float and if a wind came strong enough to blow it over, it would never crash to pieces.”

The two-story chapel served as a community meeting house, church, and school until 1919 when the school was moved elsewhere. The school occupied the ground floor, while the second, or main, floor was a multi-purpose room with a stage at the east end. On Sunday, the townspeople gathered for worship; during the week, the pews could be moved to make room for potluck dinners, parties, town meetings, and dramas. The main floor was heated by a 6-foot-long by 4-foot-high stove, which was large enough to burn pine logs, giving off a pleasant pine fragrance. Brass kerosene lamps, four on each of the two brass chandeliers and two in each of the eight windows, created a soft glow on dark Utah nights.

chapel.png

When I visited the chapel in 1997, I was amazed by the pews, wood paneling, and pulpit. They were made out of local knot-free yellow ponderosa pine, yet the surfaces had been painted in such a way that you would swear it was oak.

The Tithing Office (now known as the Bishop’s Storehouse) is a well-preserved red-brick 16-foot by 27-foot warehouse east of the Chapel. Like many religious institutions, the LDS Church asked each member to tithe 10 percent of their earnings. Those living on subsistence farms did not have much cash, so they paid in-kind with farmed goods that were then redistributed to those in need, a tradition that lives on. When I was seventeen, in 1951, I worked for my uncle Grant, who owned the biggest bee farm in Arizona. We extracted hundreds of gallons of honey from the combs and stored it in 5-gallon cans, 60 pounds of honey each, until needed for bottling. One of my jobs was to load 10 percent of the 5-gallon cans onto a truck and take them to the Bishop’s Storehouse, where I had the additional privilege of unloading them. Volunteers would bottle the honey for distribution to those in need.

Pine Valley Chapel

Pine Valley Chapel

The Pine Valley Chapel, reminiscent of New England churches, stands today, at 152 years old, as the oldest LDS meeting house in continuous use. The Chapel along with the adjacent Tithing Office, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.                                               

Back in the late 1860s, the powers-that-be were impressed with Ebenezer’s work and proposed to him an even more important project: The St. George Temple. Because it was to be the first official temple, and therefore the most holy building, in the proposed LDS state of Deseret, the founders of the new temple wanted premium wood for its construction. Such lumber came from Trumbull, Arizona, on the north side of the Grand Canyon. Ebenezer moved there in the fall of 1873—we can assume that he assigned his eldest son, who was by then eighteen years old, to the man-of-the-house role while he was away—and bought a steam engine sawmill to more efficiently process the lumber. When they reached their goal a year later, he returned to Pine Valley.

During that time, Mary became very ill or, as Ebenezer put it, “My wife’s health entirely broken and bedridden.” She was advised to move to a warmer climate, relatively easy advice to follow given that the average annual snowfall in Pine Valley is 90 inches. That, combined with the altitude of nearly 7,000 feet, the fact that she’d given birth to eight kids, and the incredible work required to maintain a homestead, contributed to her waning health.

Usually histories of families in the pre-twentieth century tend to overlook the roles of girls and women. Obviously, female pioneers worked just as hard as their male counterparts, and without them survival would have been impossible. (Mary Ann would go on to have four more children, Mary Isabelle in 1870, Joseph Walter in 1872, Heber Brooks in 1878, and Reuben Adam in 1880. All of her children lived to adulthood, quite a feat and a stroke of luck in those days.) On top of raising twelve kids, the Bryce family matriarch’s responsibilities included but were not limited to: planting, caring for and harvesting the kitchen garden, canning for the winter, churning butter, making cheeses and pasta, rendering lard from pig fat, making candles and soap, sewing clothes, spinning yarn and knitting sweaters, quilting, washing the laundry by hand, and on and on and on…

 To be continued…

Ebenezer Bryce: Part 2 - Voyage to America

“When the landlady of the boarding house in St. Louis died of cholera I moved to Paduca, Kantuca [Paducah, Kentucky] to find work to make enough money to go to Salt Lake City.” – Ebenezer Bryce

 
Figure 1 Port of New Orleans, 1841 engraving. | Photographers, A, Mondelli and William J. Bennett. - Public domain

Figure 1 Port of New Orleans, 1841 engraving. | Photographers, A, Mondelli and William J. Bennett. - Public domain

 

Continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 1

One of the many histories written about Ebenezer claims that he was a stowaway for the long ocean voyage from Scotland to the United States, the evidence being that his name is not on the passenger list. But would a person whom acquaintances, friends, and family members later laud for his righteousness travel without paying?

I believe that a skilled, strong young man who had ample ship carpentry experience simply got a job onboard as a way to make the trip. He wrote as much, claiming that he joined the thirty-fifth “company” of converts in the UK, called the John Sharp Company after its leader, and boarded a ship to serve in its crew, though I cannot find any historical evidence to confirm or deny such a claim.

The HMS Erin’s Queen left Tullibody, Scotland, and landed in Liverpool, England, where it stayed two days to wait for a good tide. On September 7, 1848, the ship set sail with 248 passengers, 232 of whom were Mormon converts and missionaries returning home, travelling second class. For seven weeks and two days, the ship crossed the Atlantic Ocean, meeting wind, rain, and waves. Perhaps in some ways it was a blessing that the provisions on board were subpar, given that likely many passengers were seasick due to the storminess of the voyage.

The ship docked in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 28, 1848, and the 232 converts disembarked. Can you imagine what Ebenezer might have felt, having left behind the cold and constant precipitation of Scotland to find himself in a semi-tropical climate on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico? Whatever his feelings, he didn’t report them.

The John Sharp Company kept going, boarding a river steamboat and continuing up the Mississippi River to winter in St. Louis. Ebenezer stayed behind long enough to earn the $2.50 required for the steamboat ticket and some extra to pay for housing once he landed, then followed them 700 miles north to work as a carpenter and wainwright. Soon after his arrival, however, a terrible cholera epidemic broke out, killing an estimated 10 percent of the city’s population in the spring and summer of 1849. When the landlady of the boarding house in which he was living died from the bacterial disease, Ebenezer decided it was time to move on.

He was one of many LDS converts to make the arduous journey west in stops and starts. For years, LDS Church members had been moving in that direction, often driven from their various settlements by persecution from non-LDS locals, from Fayette, New York, to Kirtland and Hiram, Ohio, to Far West, Missouri, to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Prophet Joseph Smith had been the mayor. Smith’s practice of polygamy, among other LDS practices, had incited not just people from outside the church but his fellow practitioners, some of whom used the media to air their grievances. In response, he called out a militia, which didn’t win him any favors from the Illinois authorities. He was arrested and incarcerated in nearby Carthage, where an angry mob found him and his brother Hyrum. A few years before my ancestor stepped on American soil, on June 27, 1844, the mob murdered the two men, what many consider an assassination because of its religious and political implications—Joseph Smith had just announced his bid for the United States presidency. 

In 1846, Brigham Young took over the LDS Church, with the goal of establishing a theodemocratic state called Deseret on a swath of land twice the size of Texas between the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west and the Rockies to the east, the Mexican-American border to the south and up into southern California and Oregon Territory. The Salt Lake Valley was located in Mexico territory but, after the Mexican-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, the entire southwest became U.S. territory.  

With that, Brigham Young began to call on prominent LDS leaders to lead groups of families to establish strategically located settlements though out the proposed state of Deseret. To name a few: San Bernardino and Port San Pedro in California; The Meadows (later renamed Las Vegas) and Truckee Meadows (later renamed Reno) in Nevada; Boise, Idaho; and Snowflake (settled by Erastus Snow and William Flake), Mesa, and Gila Valley in Arizona; and St George in Utah.

It was during that time that Ebenezer joined the migration. From cholera-ridden St. Louis he ventured 175 miles southeast to Paducah, Kentucky, where he earned enough money to join up with the James Pace Company, a Mormon wagon train of one-hundred wagons, in March of 1850. The group departed from Kanesville (now Council Bluffs), Iowa, on June 11 and arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, on September 16, three years behind the original LDS pioneers who settled the Salt Lake Valley.

To be continued . . .

Ebenezer Bryce: Part 1 - Childhood and Conversion

“I am going to go to America, if you stop me from going now, I will leave the day I become of legal age.”“If you will swear that you that you will be responsible for your own sins, you can go.”  

– Ebenezer Bryce in conversation with his father, Andrew

Ebenezer Adam Bryce

Ebenezer Adam Bryce

A few weeks after my memoir, Me and the Cottonwood Tree: An Untethered Boyhood, came out, I received an email from a reader. In it, she asked, “You wrote about why and how your mother’s family moved to Ashurst, Arizona. What about the Bryce side of your family?”

The whys and hows of the Bryces’ settling in Gila Valley, Arizona, and how this ultimately led to my birth in November of 1933, is a long and winding story. Which reminds me of a joke:

Johnny asked his mother, “Where did I come from?”

“Oh no!” Johnny’s mother thought. “How do I tell a seven-year-old boy about the bird and the bees?”

After waiting a good long while as his mother mulled over her response, Johnny grew impatient. Finally, he said, “Billy told me that he’s from San Diego.”

Many histories have been written about my ancestor, in whose honor a national park and two cities—Bryce Canyon, Bryce, Utah, and Bryce, Arizona—were named. Still, I’ll do my best to keep my answer closer to the “San Diego” side of the spectrum.

In 1981, one of Ebenezer’s great-great grandsons, Mark Smith Bryce, was doing genealogy research in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints headquarters in Salt Lake City and found a brief handwritten autobiography by Ebenezer Bryce, dated November 1st/97 (November 1, 1897). According to the man himself, Ebenezer Bryce was born in Dunblane in the county of Perthsire (now called Stirling) in Scotland, on November 17, 1830, to Andrew and Janet (Adams) Bryce. The family moved to Tullibody to be closer to the shipyards when Ebenezer was eighteen months old and, at the age of eleven, he began working as a ship’s carpenter and millwright. This skillset is what ultimately brought him across the North Atlantic Ocean to the United States.

After a six-year apprenticeship, Ebenezer met a group of converts and missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—commonly known as the “Mormon Church” though the preferred nomenclature is “LDS”—a religious institution founded by Joseph Smith in the United States the same year as Ebenezer’s birth. Seven years earlier, in 1823, Joseph Smith claimed that he had a vision in which an angel named Moroni instructed him to excavate engraved golden plates from a hillside near his home in western New York State. His translation of these plates tells the story of an Israelite family’s migration to America hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. 

A foundational tenet of the LDS faith is grounded in the Great Commission, God’s commandment to “go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20; see also Mark 16:15–16). Joseph Smith emphasized the importance of missionary work from the beginning, and so we can imagine that this LDS group, who was waiting in the Tullibody shipyard to make passage to America, proselytized to Ebenezer and others. We don’t know any specifics about that auspicious encounter, other than it prompted the seventeen-year-old to become interested in the LDS faith.

This caused some trouble. His family were devout Covenanters in the Scottish Reformed Presbyterian Church, and held views so prejudiced against the new religion that Ebenezer’s father, Andrew, went so far as to lock up his son’s clothes to prevent him from attending the meetings. Still, the teenager begged his father to allow him to immigrate with the 232 converts—he needed his father’s signature because of his status as a minor—and Andrew eventually agreed, after Ebenezer swore that he would be responsible for his own sins.

Ebenezer converted and was baptized in the LDS faith in the spring of 1848. Andrew promptly disowned him. The young man never saw his father again.

To be continued…

 

My Friend Hana: Racism 80 Years Ago & Today

“We have no one to go to for help. Not even a church. Anything goes, now that our President Roosevelt signed the order to get rid of us. How can he do this to his own citizens? No lawyer has the courage to defend us. Caucasian friends stay away for fear of being labeled ‘Jap lovers.’ There's not a more lonely feeling than to be banished by my own country. There's no place to go.”

― Kiyo Sato, Kiyo’'s Story: A Japanese-American Family’'s Quest for the American Dream

 

In 1942, my good friend Hana and her family were given less than two weeks’ notice that they were going to be relocated to a relocation center. I, like most other fourth graders, had no idea what that announcement meant. Then, suddenly, she was gone.

Gila River internment camp, AZ Public domain, National Archive Identifier: 536000

Gila River internment camp, AZ

Public domain, National Archive Identifier: 536000

It took me a while to get any answers. Over time, I learned that Hana, her family, and everyone else with Japanese lineage had been forced out of their homes, forced to leave everything behind except what they could physically carry, and move into a rudimentary internment—concentration—camp. In an example of history repeating itself, Executive Order 9066 called for the relocation of  Japanese Americans to the Gila River Relocation Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation, which had been established almost eighty years earlier, in 1859, by Congress to contain the native Maricopa and Akimel O’otham tribes.

While I continued with my fourth-grade education, 13,348 interned Japanese Americans lived crowded in rooms that were 20 feet by 25 feet and with no running water. There was one latrine and shower building for every twenty-eight families, one laundry building for every fifty-five families, and one mess hall for every fifty-eight families. They shared the desert with rattlesnakes, scorpions, and Gila monsters, which kept Butte Hospital busy. The lives they had before—the kids’ schooling, the adults’ jobs, the community projects and budding relationships and well-tended gardens—were frozen, stolen, for three years, until the end of World War II.

When I found out that Hana and her family had been interned and learned what internment meant, I was confused, angry, and sad. It did not make sense to me. It still doesn’t. There was just no way I could ever be convinced that anyone thought nine-year-old Hana was a Japanese spy or saboteur. Nor her dad, who was working at the Goodyear Aircraft factory alongside my dad, making airplane frames to fight the Axis Powers across the ocean.

I brought my confusion to my mom, hoping a trusted adult would be able to shed some light on what was happening. After a brief discussion, I asked if Germans were going to be interned, too.

“No,” she answered simply.

“Why not?” I asked. Inside my head, I was hearing my grandparents’ oft-repeated saying, What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If we were scared that there might be Japanese spies in our midst, wouldn’t we be scared that there were German spies, as well as Italian spies, too?

“Well, it would be hard to tell who are Germans and who aren’t,” my blue-eyed blonde mother said, “because they look just like us.”

I wasn’t too young to understand what her answer meant, though I couldn’t quite articulate it. Looking back, it’s obvious: race was the real reason we were stealing from and imprisoning Japanese Americans. At its core, no matter what euphemisms they used, the actions of the United States government were motivated by prejudice, greed, and fear.

Hana’s internment so devastated me that it woke me up. She was my friend, had sat beside me in school, read the same books, ran around the same playground. She wore bows in her hair just like the other girls, laughed at jokes and ate lunch and did her homework just like the rest of us. This injustice and my own helplessness in the face of it, plus my personal loss of a good friend, planted the first seed of discernment in my mind, showed me just how silly and terrible it is to judge a person based on a general classification, not by who they are.

These days, I like to quote Afghanistan War veteran, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and one-time presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg when he called out Vice President Mike Pence for his opposition to Pete’s same-sex marriage, saying, “If you have a problem with who I am, your problem is not with me—your quarrel, sir, it is with your creator.”  

In the 86-plus years I’ve been on this planet, I have seen glacial changes in racism and “scientific” bigotry. The American Jim Crow laws, established after the Civil War in order to maintain a racially oppressive status quo, were not abolished until the mid-1960s, and only after the enduring efforts of activists in the Civil Rights Movement. As the summer of 2020 begins, after a long, difficult spring in which much of the world sheltered-in-place to contain the Covid-19 virus, we as a nation, and global community, are at a major crossroads, one that looks different but is very much the same. Bigotry and racism are not new, nor are the Jim Crow-inspired inequities and abuses of the criminal justice system. Now, however, 90-plus percent of people carry a camera on their person, and with a couple taps they can upload videos and photos on social media (a technology that few of us alive during World War II could have ever imagined).

In May, a seventeen-year-old girl showed great courage when she stood approximately five feet away and filmed the slow, torturous murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers. That video sparked demonstrations around the world, which have gotten the attention of elected officials and the police—in Seattle, a few miles away from where I live, protestors created the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” shutting down the police department’s East Precinct and building upon a global conversation. For me, it also raised the question: How far away are we, really, from the Japanese internment, a government-organized terrorizing of a group of people based on race, of almost eighty years ago?

Not far enough.

How will parents explain George Floyd’s murder, as well as the ongoing systemic racism and violence against people of color, to their kids today? However much I love my mother, I hope that their explanations are better than hers was. I hope that we come up with better answers, like reallocating funds from the police to social services that lift struggling people up and help those under duress, rather than criminalizing them. And, for this year’s fourth-graders, I hope that, eighty years from now, they will be able to tell their own kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids that they did something different, that they and their families and communities brought about real and lasting change.

 

Recommended Reading and Watching

Kyuhoshi, Top 10 Books About Japanese American Internment Camps

Daisaku & Kaneko Ikeda Library, Soka University of America, Japanese-American Relocation and Internment: Films

Oops! Wrong Book Cover

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How do you feel when you see a photo of a child holding a gun? Does it depend on your age or where you grew up, urban or rural? In 1942, when this photo was taken, it was not uncommon for teenage boys raised on a farm to own guns. Yes, the boy in this photograph is not a teenager. I was nine years old when “Santa” gave me a .410 shotgun and a .22 rifle. I know I was too young; I will admit that. The guns had a major effect on me, but more about that later.

Attitudes have changed since 1942. A photo of a young boy with gun was acceptable then. However it is deemed inappropriate now. This photo of me holding a shotgun was selected to be the cover of my book because it represents the era of the book’s contents. The photo has been judged unacceptable because of all the gun violence occurring in the twenty-first century, which I totally understand.

Dad liked to hunt and fish. His joy was not in the kill, rather it was his way of relaxing, gaining solitude, and enjoying nature; it also put food on the table. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck, so extra protein was always welcome. I was a failure as Dad’s fishing partner as a kid. I was more energetic than the Energizer Bunny. Dad loved to sit on a boulder for hours at a time, his only movements were to reel in the fish and cast out for the next one. After trying to sit still for fifteen minutes, with a fishing pole in my hands and not catching fish, I was up running around, jumping from rock to rock, skipping rocks across the water or swimming. Anything but sitting sill and fishing. Dad would yelling, “You’re scaring all the fish away!” The guns were to see if I could be his hunting buddy. Ol‘ Energizer Bunny here did not make that goal either. I did make it through the lesson on handling, safety, care, and cleaning of the rifles. Then and only then, I was allowed to fire the guns.

Being as untethered as I was, when I wanted to go get some target practice, I got one of my guns and told Mom that I was going to the river to work on my target practice. I filled a cloth flour sack with cans—we were saving for the war effort—and tied it on my bike rack. I laid my gun across the handlebars and biked down to the river. I can hear you thinking, What the hell was his mother thinking? As an adult, I would have thought the same thing. I would not allow my kids that liberty. But! It was 1942.

One day when I went target practicing, I came across a large flock of doves. I thought I would surprise Mom and Dad with doves for dinner. With my first shot, a dove hit the ground—I was devastated. I felt so bad that I took a Spam can out of the flour sack and used it to dig a grave. That was the first and last time I ever pointed a gun at any living creature. No, I am not a vegetarian. I can’t explain why it doesn’t bother me that someone else killed what I eat, not even to myself. I assume it was growing up on a farm and witnessing all kind of animals being butchered. It was a part of a subsistence farm life.

When I received a draft notice for the Korean conflict, I joined the Navy because I knew that in the Marines or Army I would be expected shoot the “enemy” and I knew I could not do that. Besides, four years in the Navy with three hot meals a day, a hot shower, and a clean bed every night was better than two years in the Marines or Army sleeping in a foxhole, eating cold C-Rations, and bathing when it rained hard. 

Both guns had the firing pins removed and they became theater props.