HISTORY o f t h e FUTURE
Our role in the
by Brooke Williams I’m sta n d i n g o n a sm a l l k n o l l somewhere between Rock Springs, and Lander, Wyoming, facing west. The wind dies and the huge quiet replacing it blends silence with balance, deep breath and heat. A cairn of black stones is the tallest form. Of the free moments in my life, I’ve spent most of them in the wild. Wild places rugged, steep and barren. Places carved by big weather and time. Places where beauty goes beyond sight. Places where natural systems are the antidote for the spreading rash of civilization. Places in which civilization has yet to find something useful. I usually go to these places to rediscover a simpler, more serene part of myself and of the world. I am here now in the high desert of southwestern Wyoming for a different reason: to look for my great, great, great grandfather’s grave. Wi l l i a m Wi l l i a m s , my great, great, great grandfather, was born in Shrewsbury, England in 1808 and died in 1863, of mountain fever, within 10 miles of here, near one of the nine places where the Mormon Trail crosses the Sweetwater River in this high desert of southwestern Wyoming. At the time of his death, he was traveling with his wife, Mary, and youngest son, John George. They were part of the Mormon migration that took place between 1846 and 1896, during which 85,000 people made their way in large groups from Europe to Salt Lake City, Utah. The Williams family, like most of their traveling companions were poor and perhaps could not read or write. No journal or record of their journey exists. I discovered William Williams and his birthplace, Shrewsbury, England, as part of a process to determine where I came from. Knowing this information, I felt, was the first step necessary to more fully explore my biological connection to ‘place’ – something I hoped might provide the foundation for understanding the importance of preserving wild places. Without records and with little detail from my personal genealogical information, I was easily distracted from my main goal of connecting to my lineage. I’d barely begun to explore where it was I came from when I discovered that Charles Darwin, my hero since high school when I first read of his voyage on the Beagle, was not only born in Shrewsbury, but within a year of William Williams. This discovery was the seed for an obsession that has lasted nearly a decade. Did William Williams and Charles Darwin know each other? Could they have been friends? What meaning, if any, exists from joining a personal and public history? William Williams was born in a one-roomed house in the Frankwell neighborhood, not far from the center of Shrewsbury, England. I can still see the word, “Frankwell” in the blue glow of William Williams’ birth record through the lens of the microfiche reader in Shrewsbury’s Family history library. When I asked the attendant what that meant, she referred me to a town map showing the Frankwell neighborhood separated from the Shrewsbury town center by the Severn River. My great, great, great grandfather was born there, I told her. When?, she asked. I told her. Poor lad, she said. At the top of the main road transecting the neighborhood, the word “Mount” was printed. Dr. Robert Darwin built the Mount estate in 1797, where his son, Charles was born in 1809. I discovered that William Williams and Charles Darwin were born in houses within a five minute walk of each other. According to the two page biography my grandfather wrote of
his grandfather, Thomas Valentine Williams, William Williams’s oldest son, the family was too poor to send its children to school. Thomas was trained as a button maker, and his father supported his family as a ‘joiner’, who, as near as I can tell, is the person skilled in joining pieces of wood during the furniture manufacturing process. In a small pamphlet written to educate tourists about the Darwin family, I found the sentence, “Dr. Darwin was a generous man who would treat the poor people of the Frankwell neighborhood for free.” In the book, Shrewsbury, A Pictorial History, the author, Tony Carr describes the neighborhood. Frankwell, the western suburb, has many fine 16th century buildings in its streets. The name has not been explained. Though originally grand, most of the homes had become over crowded tenements by the 19th century and the alleys behind them were dirty and unhealthy as they lacked sanitation. Frankwell, it seems, was the slums. My ancestors were poor people living in slums. Charl es Darwi n’s five-year, around-the-world journey formed the basis for his theory of natural selection – survival of the fittest – as the prime force in the evolution of life on earth over the past three billion years – a slow process of trial and error involving random mutations. William Williams and Charles Darwin represent two different historical dimensions. I’m sure if I looked hard enough I could find a ‘family tree’, showing William Williams as the trunk, his children as the major branches. Somewhere at the far edge of the crown, I would find my own name hanging on some minor twig. Darwinism suggests that my family tree is not a separate entity, but actually one tiny branch of a different tree, the one including all life going back billions of years to those single-celled animals moving freely in that first primal soup. In 1855, th e Mormon Missionaries came knocking on the Williams’ door. I imagine William and, his wife, Mary, pulling the few chairs they owned around the table – the table that was used for everything from sewing and washing clothes to eating. William chose the broken chair because he knew how to sit in it without falling. Since all the houses were built in back-to-back rows divided by a common wall, I can hear a neighbor baby crying, along with hungry dogs and the buzz and drone of the neighbor’s struggles. I can smell the combined smoke from a dozen street-side fires cooking – the same smoke I’ve experienced in LaPaz, Bolivia, San Juan, Costa Rica and Lima, Peru. Mormon missionari es in the nineteenth century in Europe were responsible for converting individuals and families to the faith and then arranging their emigration to Utah. It is plausible that, especially in cases involving poor families with little or no opportunity to change their situation, the promise of a new beginning was used as incentive to convert. For 30% of the Saints who emigrated to America between 1852 and 1887, this included loans from the Perpetual Emigrating Fund which Brigham Young set up in 1849. The Ten Pound Plan transported a person from England to Salt Lake City for what today would be $1,000. I imagine that while the Missionaries told the Mormon story (about Joseph Smith’s vision of Christ in America after his resurrec-
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