singing and dancing school. Sarah Potty was the first school of Ma'am. In the winter of 1850-51, school was taught by Jesse W. Fox. In 1850 he was elected Alderman.

O.S. Cox married Mary Allen about 1854; he served many years as the first counselor to Bishop Lowry; and he was captain of the Militia. He was very energetic in the performance of his duties, especially through the protracted period of the Walker war. He married Eliza Losee about 1857-59. He served under Major Higgins, and old Battalion veteran.

To be sure, nobody appreciated more he did a liberty pole, and all that it typified, so he was commissioned to find one at the earliest convenient moment for Manti; this he did in 1850. Ten years he labored faithfully for the upbuilding of Manti, and then like Boon and Crockett, "he wanted more elbow room" and moved to Fairview, Sanpete County. He also moved part of his family to Gunnison (Hog Wallow, it was called then) and raised two crops there. In February 1864, he moved part of his family to Glenwood, built a cabin there and raised a crop. He sold out and moved elsewhere to engineer ditches. He engineered over forty ditches in Utah and Nevada, as near as his children can remember in 1910, as well as doing all other kinds of pioneer work.

In 1865 he was advised by Lorenzo Snow to move to the Muddy, a branch of the Rio Virgin, a stream running through Moappa Valley, to assist in surveying and making irrigation ditches there. The soil was very rich, but there was so much quick sand that it made it almost impossible to build a dam that hold or to irrigate without washing away the soil. So he went south into southeastern Nevada. He thought that was the route the saints would travel going back to Jackson County, so he was that much nearer the final home. He labored here for six years, and engineered a number of dams that would hold against the floods and treachery of quicksand. They had only poor home made plows and a few other tools to work with, and no cement or modern building material. He also built cabins and cleared and tilled the land there. In clearing the land, the "Mesquite" brush root was the hardest digging they encountered. St. Thomas, St. Joseph and Overton, the 3 towns in the valley were partly of his building. The first trip, he took with him his third wife, Eliza, and her one child, a little two year old girl; and Walter, a 14 year old son of the first wife, Elvira. The following year, after crops were in and the spring work done, he returned to Fairview after another section of his family—Mary, the second wife, and her five children. From that time on O.S. Cox's life is a volume of tragedy and hardship. The life in the burning desert is always more or less unpleasant, and pioneering is excessively hard. And he was past fifty years old.

During his absence, Eliza's little girl Lucinda, took her little pail to the creek to get some water; the quicksand caused her to slip and she was drowned. They took her out not very far from down the stream, but could not resuscitate her. The poor mother, among strangers and homesick, was unconsolable in her sorrow. Walter, seeing his little pet companion stricken in all her robust beauty and health, was wild with grief, and could not be comforted. After a time the neighbors concluded that Walter would die if some change did not come to get him to sleep and eat. They told Eliza of their fears for him, and so the disconsolate mother tried to hide her own grief and comfort him. It is said it was the saddest thing the woman there ever saw, to see the brave mother and the boy trying to comfort each other in their loneliness. Fifty years later, it was a nightmare to Walt.

Almer, Laun and Walt all went to the Muddy in 1867, the year Mary was moved. In 1868 Philmon, fifth son of Elvira, a very promising lad of thirteen, died of appendicitis, at that time called inflammation of the bowels. Then Mary lost a little daughter, Lucy for whom she grieved many years.

Financially the prospects were more promising than ever before. They had