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The following page was written by Norma Leigh Rudinsky.
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After the death of Samuel’s first wife Ann David of cholera in 1849, he was ill himself for several months. He bought a house and farm in Council Bluffs (Iowa) for his four surviving children, aged two to seven years old. Many of the Welsh contingent traveled on immediately to the Salt Lake valley including Samuel’s brother Daniel Leigh with his family, but many like Samuel were physically and/or financially unable to continue the trip. They had to rest up, recover their health, and work and save for the expenses of the wagon train.
Besides the Morgan David family and son-in-law David D. Bowen, another large Welsh family in the Council Bluffs area became important to Samuel and his children. William Treharne and his wife Ann Richards had sailed on the S. S. Buena Vista with four daughters and young son William. He was listed on the ship’s register as a “limeburner” (Dennis, p. 143) from Pontyates, a village about five miles northwest of Llanelli on the road to Carmarthen. Limeburning was an agricultural trade that produced lime for soil improvement of field crops and as an ingredient of mortar and cement. Farmers often practiced the trade during the winter and off season. William’s eldest son John married Mary Bowen, daughter of another limeburning farm family in the nearby parish of Llangendeirne, where the parish records show numerous Treharnes. Thus this family belonged originally to the established Church of England/Wales, unlike many Welsh converts to the Mormon faith, who most often belonged to Baptist or Methodist chapels. In this original church affiliation the Treharnes were like the Leigh family, not the David family.
The Treharne family could not continue to Utah, and they became a part of the Welsh colony which remained in the Missouri River area. The mother Ann Treharne had died of cholera in April 1849. Like Ann David and her cousin-in-law Elizabeth Bowen David, who died only a month before her daughter Mary and infant granddaughter Ann also died, Ann Richards Treharne too was swept away from her planned new home and church by the horrific cholera epidemic that killed over one–fifth of the Welsh contingent which left South Wales in 1849. The Treharne family was still further decimated. In 1850 the eldest son John Treharne who had remained in Wales also emigrated, but he died with his wife Mary Bowen Treharne and their two young sons before they even reached Council Bluffs. Then the father William died of cholera in autumn 1850 (The Call of Zion, p.120). Thus, the four Treharne girls and their still pre-teen brother William were left alone to make their own way to Utah. The girls found what employment they could and looked after their twelve-year old brother. Samuel Leigh hired the youngest of the girls, seventeen-year-old Sage Treharne, as a nursemaid for his half-orphaned children after Ann David died in 1849. Then on 8 June 1850 Samuel married the eldest daughter, twenty-four-year old Mary Treharne. The story exists among Treharne descendants that Samuel first wanted to marry the middle daughter Jane , but she scornfully refused him, and bad feeling between them persisted on the wagon train to Utah. Jane’s daughter Emma later told this story:
When Mother (Jane) was back in Winter Quarters there was a man who wanted her to marry him. She refused, and said “she wouldn’t marry him if he was made out of diamonds.” He got so mad at her that as they were coming across the plains she wanted to bring the family Bible with her, and when she put it in the back of his wagon he threw it out three times. Each time she would pick it up and put it back, but the last time she didn’t know when it was thrown out, and it was lost on the plains. He married her sister and they helped settle Cedar City.(Thanks to Betty Ventura, great-granddaughter of Jane Treharne, for this account from the recently prepared Treharne Family History.) From Jane’s point of view as a spirited twenty-two-year old girl, Samuel may have been just a thirty-five-year old widower burdened with four children. Jane was intelligent, independent, and already supporting herself by cooking for the students of a boarding school. She probably didn’t yet feel pessimistic about her chance of a more romantic marriage, and perhaps someone else had already caught her eye in Council Bluffs. Reportedly she once told her family, “There is the man I am going to marry” (Treharne Family History). She did in fact later marry him, Edward Ashton -- in contrast to Samuel a young, single, articulate, English-speaking shoemaker from Wales.
The story is repeated (again by daughter Emma) in the family biography of Jane Treharne. There the man is not identified as Samuel Leigh but as the “father of the family” which Jane was traveling with to Utah, and it was the man’s wife who repeatedly saved the family Bible. The man “was possessed of a quick temper and eve[n] several times during the journey he became angry at his wife, and to spite her, he threw the big family Bible away. The wife would pick it up and bring it along, but if he got angry, out would go the Bible again”.
Regardless of the changed details, we can see that the jilted Samuel may have begrudged Jane’s use of his wagon, and he may have felt his help to his orphaned sister-in-law was undeserved and unappreciated. His wife Mary, Jane’s elder sister, may have been the peacemaker between them. These are very understandable human emotions.
What is hard to understand in the story is why Samuel would not value the Bible itself. His life shows how deeply religious he was, and how sincere his Mormon faith was, so it is hard to think he might have fallen into the fanatic belief that the Bible was made worthless or superseded by the sacred Mormon books.
Also surprising is the picture of Samuel’s quick sharp temper, which we have not seen elsewhere. The Leighs were (and still are) known as calm, quiet, even phlegmatic and inexpressive. Samuel’s journal has this same sparse matter-of-fact quality. One of his few expressions of personal emotion occurs after he left Cedar City for his mission on 16 November 1875 as he shows his joy at receiving family mail: “… received the first letter from home on the 18th [of December] very glad to hear from them, had rote 4 times home before this” (p.2 original pagination). He answered the letter on December 21 (p.3). In a later part of his journal he repeats the experience: “Received the first Letter from home on the 18th Day of December 1875 I have wrote home 4 times be for this….” (p.23). When he returned home after almost two years abroad, his quiet but satisfied comment was “… on the 12th left Salt Lake City for Cedar City Reich [reached] Cedar City on the 22th of Oct found my family all well” (p.36).
So the story about Jane Treharne remains an unexplained puzzle. If we knew all the details, a psychological novel could be written about these ancestors!
Regardless of such puzzles and speculation, the marriage of Samuel and Mary appears to have been successful, and it resulted in eleven children born within 15 years from 1851 to 1866. Their first child was a daughter Mary Ann, born during the next spring after their marriage. Their second child was born in the wagon train along the Platte River, as Mary was already late in her pregnancy when they started west. Despite this risky start in life, the infant grew up as a healthy firstborn son named for his Grandfather Leigh and given his mother’s maiden name, Daniel Treharne Leigh.
The descendants of Mary’s sister Jane remember Daniel’s birth in a heavy rain storm as the occasion when Jane became further acquainted with the young man she chose and later married, Edward Ashton. They each held a corner of a tent or tarpaulin set up as shelter for the wagon where Mary was in labor. Perhaps they sometimes recalled that experience when their own seven children were being born in an easier, more civilized situation in Salt Lake City, where they spent their long happy married life (Treharne Family History).
We have found almost nothing written of Mary Treharne herself, but we know she must have been self-sacrificing and compassionate in her willingness to marry a widower with four children. Samuel’s journal does not describe either of his wives, and we are aware of no family memoirs written by Mary’s children. The Treharne girls were said to be great readers of the Bible because they were taught to read well, though not to write (Treharne Family History). We found Mary’s name in a list of women members of the Cedar City Relief Society, the Mormon ladies’ auxiliary, in July 1868 (Henry Lunt p.202), but no other reference.
Obviously Mary lived the hard life of a pioneer woman, especially because Samuel could not settle in Salt Lake City but was asked to move to a small town newly founded in the harsh dry southern Utah desert. Doubtless the large number and close spacing of Mary’s eleven babies kept her very tired and very busy. Also perhaps she suffered poor health, because she died on 18 April 1882 at the early age of 55, according to Samuel’s journal (p.38).
Like the children of Samuel and Ann David, the children of Samuel and Mary Treharne who grew to adulthood became active citizens of Cedar City. The eldest son Daniel Treharne Leigh was elected mayor for the term 1906-08 by the narrow margin of ten votes, perhaps because he “was actually a Socialist, but was endorsed on the Republican ticket” (Mayors of Cedar City p.162). He had earlier run and lost in 1901. Surprisingly, the Socialist party was active in Cedar City for a number of years, and the party elected the mayor again in 1911, in part because it championed the popular Prohibition amendment. Daniel ran for mayor again in 1913 and was defeated in the apparent swan song of the Socialist party (Mayors p.2). The second son, Samuel Treharne Leigh, also served in various city positions: poundkeeper, watermaster, justice of the peace, and city councilor for three terms starting in 1891.
OTHER WIVES OF SAMUEL – Samuel also married Mary’s sister Sage Treharne after she was widowed by the early death of her young husband Thomas Jones in September 1862. She was left with five very young sons and a one-year-old daughter while she herself was only thirty. She must have been a very energetic and capable woman. She managed her six children, her household, and a ten-acre farm alone for six years before she was married to Samuel on 9 October 1868, according to the only reference to her in Samuel’s journal (p.20).
This ceremony was allowed as a plural marriage, but there is no evidence that Samuel and Sage ever lived together. She certainly remained on her own farm, and she often if not always signed herself Sage T. Jones, e.g. on a petition to grant city lots for a school on 4 March 1881 (Mayors, p.68). In fact, Samuel’s marriage to Sage may have been only a financial arrangement to help her in a period and place where single women and widows had very restricted rights. She had earlier received similar help from Samuel’s family. Relations of the Leigh and Treharne families with each other and with the Jones family were apparently close for the first decades of their life in Cedar City.
Samuel’s second son by his first wife Ann David, Henry, apparently did not live much with his father Samuel and stepmother Mary, because in the custom of the time he was “hired out” to other families. First, he lived in the family of John Higbee but then in Sage’s family, probably during the long crippling arthritis of Thomas Jones and after his death in 1862. Henry was ten years older than the eldest Jones boy and thus almost able to do a man’s work around the Jones farm. Such an extended family was truly a valuable asset of pioneer life.
As Henry grew up, his help changed to more than physical labor. For example, to support her family Sage tried to obtain the franchise for the Pony Express route from Cedar City into the prosperous mining towns of western Nevada, so that her sons would have employment riding with the mail. York Jones (great-grandson of Sage and Thomas Jones) and his wife Evelyn summarized the situation and the help that came from Samuel Leigh’s son Henry in their biography of Sage’s eldest son, Lehi Willard Jones:
"Uncle Henry Leigh had been very helpful in obtaining this [Pony Express contract] for them. The man named Salisbury, who owned the franchise, refused to let a widow take such an important job unless a man of reliability was willing to sponsor her in this undertaking (p.xi). It was an eventful day when, with the help of Henry Leigh, the contract became entirely theirs, and Sage assumed the role of postmistress. (p.41)
Possibly Sage and Mary may have also taken care of their young brother William Treharne in Cedar City. He had traveled to Utah with Sage and their sister Sarah in the wagon train of Sage’s employer. At once after she arrived in Salt Lake, Sage married Thomas Jones on 28 October 1852, but no Treharne family records give William’s location until much later when he joined the Fifteenth or “Welsh” Ward in Salt Lake City as an adult. There he met and later married Ann Hughes on 26 March 1864 (Treharne Family History). Until that time, however, he may well have grown up in Cedar City with one or both of his sisters and their families.
It seems very likely that he is the “William Treehorn” who was listed in October 1857 as a private in the Iron District Militia, serving in the Fourth Platoon of the 3rd Battalion under Sgt Francis Webster, 2nd Lieutenant Martin Slack, and Major John M. Higbee (Roster list, in Morris A. Shirts and Kathryn H. Shirts, A Trial Furnace Southern Utah’s Iron Mission, Brigham Young University Press, Provo,Appendix 11). Certain officers and men of the Iron District Militia participated in the notorious Mountain Meadows Massacre, but we are very happy to say there is no evidence that William was guilty and every reason to believe that his brothers-in-law Thomas Jones and Samuel Leigh protected him from involvement in the Massacre. Part of the sad aftermath of that event was closure of the Iron mine and consequent loss of employment, as the town population dropped two thirds to only 301 people in 1860 (Mayors p. 494). This may well have been when and why William Treharne moved to Salt Lake City.
It is interesting that Samuel also had a fourth marriage. A half year after Mary Treharne’s death and while Sage was still alive on 28 December 1882, he was married to Mary Lewis, “late from Swansea”, according to his journal (p. 38). She had previously been married to a man named Rowe, and had at least four children by him. Samuel’s journal outlines temple work they did in St. George (pp.38-44). She apparently died in Cedar City on 10 August 1891 according to Samuel’s journal (p.40). Samuel had outlived her as well as his second wife Mary Treharne when he died in 1894.
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According to William R. Palmer, Samuel Leigh built his home and workshop on Main Street, just north of the Tabernacle. The building later was used as the Cedars Hotel.
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| Samuel Leigh's house
on Main Street Just north of the Cedar Tabernacle |
The original Cedar's Hotel on Main
Street Formerly home of Samuel Leigh |
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Photographs courtesy
Special Collections,
Sherratt Library, SUU Click photograph for a larger view |
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The Cedars Hotel was later expanded into a larger building, and, according to William R. Palmer, the new building was built around Samuel Leigh's home, and the home formed some of the inner rooms of the Hotel. The following pictures show the new building and the Tabernacle a short distance south.
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| The new Cedars Hotel |
The new Cedars Hotel The Tabernacle is in the background |
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Photographs courtesy
Special Collections,
Sherratt Library, SUU Click photograph for a larger view | ||
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