Marvelous Pigs in Satin

Henry B Eyring said this about John Bennion (his great-grandfather) in April 1996

He was a convert to the Church from Wales. He, his wife, and his children came into the Salt Lake Valley in one of the early companies of pioneers. We know something of his life because after that time he kept a journal, making a short entry nearly every day. We have the journals from 1855 to 1877. They were published in one bound volume because his descendants hoped to transmit that legacy of testimony. My mother was one of them. Her last labor before she died was to transform the day books in which he’d written into a manuscript for publication.

His short entries don’t have much preaching in them. He doesn’t testify that he knew Brigham Young was a prophet. He just records having answered “yes” every time the prophet called him on a mission from “over Jordan” to the Muddy mission, then on to a mission back to Wales. He also answered “yes” to the call to ride into the canyons to track Johnston’s army and the call to take his family south when the army invaded the valley. There is even a family legend that the reason he died so close to the day when Brigham Young was buried was to follow the prophet one more time.

The fact that he wrote every day makes clear to me that he knew his ordinary life was historic because it was part of the building of Zion in the latter days. The few entries which record his testimony seem to appear when death took a child. His testimony is to me more powerful because he offered it when his soul was tried.

Here is his record of one of those times. His daughter Elizabeth died in his arms. He reported her burial and the location of her grave in a few lines. But then the next day, November fourth of 1863, this is the entire entry:

“Wednesday. Repairing up the stable my little children prattling around me but I miss my dear Lizzy. I pray the Lord to help me to endure faithful to his cause to the end of my days, that I may be worthy to receive my children back into the family circle, who have fallen asleep in Christ in the days of their innocence Ann, Moroni, Esther Ellen & Elizabeth, blessed & happy are they because of the atonement of Jesus Christ.”

All the elements are there. He taught the truth. He testified that it was true. He lived consistent with his testimony, and prayed that he might endure faithful until he could be united with his dear family.

Alma 5:6 “ And now behold I say unto you, my brethren, you that belong to this church, have you sufficiently retained in remembrance the captivity of your fathers? Yea, and have you sufficiently retained in remembrance his mercy and long suffering towards them? And moreover, have ye sufficiently retained in remembrance that he has delivered their souls from hell?”

John Bennion was born in the little village of Hawarden in Flintshire, Wales.  His father had little chance for education in school and had to earn his living from about age 12. He went into the employ of farmers by the year for a livelihood until grown, when he married Elizabeth Roberts. After his marriage, John’s father changed his labors from a servant hired by the year to a day laborer at which he continued two or three years, until he had saved a little money, after which he took a small farm to rent in the township of Moor in Hawarden Parish where he procured a comfortable livelihood on about twelve acres of land for raising hay, grain, vegetables and pasture, besides a garden and orchards.

As John grew to be a teenager, going to Sunday School and to hear preaching became burdensome to him and he choose rather to spend the Sunday with his friends. One Sunday, he with two others were rambling through the fields with a dog chasing rabbits when the dog caught one. A watcher came upon them and declared they were poaching. Next day he was summoned to appear before a justice for trial, but determined not to submit to such proceedings, he ran away to Liverpool.

In Liverpool, John worked for a boilermaker. There he heard two elders preaching the gospel in its fullness; namely, John Taylor and Joseph Fielding. After much study, he became convinced that what they were teaching was of God and was baptized by Priest Robert Reid.

John and his brother Samuel came to America with their families and joined the saints in Nauvoo.  Then driven from Nauvoo by the mobs, they crossed the plains to Utah.  In 1849, Samuel and John Bennion and several other families moved south crossing the river Jordon on the ice in January. There was little in the way of building materials, so the families dug into the bluffs of the Jordan River for shelter. The tiny settlement, the first “over Jordan,” was called Harker’s Settlement, and they began the difficult work of digging ditches to move water out of the Jordan River and onto the land on the west side. The soil was hard to work and they kept looking for better land to farm. The infamous crickets destroyed much of that year’s crop and so the group moved farther south to where Big Cottonwood Creek flowed into the Jordan River about 4800 South known then as Field’s Bottom. By working together eight families managed to bring in the first successful crop in 1851 using water brought down from Bingham Creek by what was later called Gardner’s Millrace. John and Esther Bennion’s daughter, Rachael, was the first pioneer child to be born in Field’s Bottom. Despite the struggle to get food and shelter in those early days, John Bennion described Field’s Bottom in these words:

“If peace dwells upon this earth it is here and here are the happiest and most prosperous people in the world, enjoying free soil, pure air, and liberty to worship our God just as we please.”

In his later years John Bennion was called on a mission to Wales. He visited Hawarden, Wales, to gather genealogy and visited with William E. Gladstone, then Prime Minister of England, at his home, Hawarden Castle, who expressed wonderment at the development in knowledge and understanding of affairs of one who had started out as the son of a tenant farmer on the Hawarden estate.  He asked Elder Bennion how he, being so poor, seemed so educated and to know so much. John Bennion replied, “My education was in the kingdom of God and its priesthood.”

Henry B. Eyring, relating this meeting of  Wm. E. Gladstone and John Bennion at the Nauvoo Temple dedication said:

“Our belief is that within these temples we are taught things that lift us and give us a perspective on life as it will be in the worlds to come, and as it can be here. Everything that happens in these temples is uplifting and gives people hope for this life and for the world to come.”

50¢ corndogs day at Sonic is something we can totally do and still be #socialdistancing

Blasting Disney music in the car was a required element.

#summerfun2020