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The above photo is of Harriet Lenora Allen with Francis and his little sister Vera taken in 1898. This is a good illustration of how hard life must have been then. She was 41 years old when this photo was taken. In this story, Francis talks about his childhood from his viewpoint. The story he tells of the dog probably occurred around the time this photo was taken.

As I remember now I loved everything and everyone -- both animal and person -- with whom I was intimate with equal fervor. I never differentiated my feelings between dogs, horses, cows, cats and the members of my immediate family.

I was sentimental, and given to crying easily over small hurts, especially to my feelings. I was called by my father and others, probably with plenty of justification, a ‘tender-foot’, ‘chicken-hearted’, etc. I was very small of stature, with light brown wavy hair, a mouse face. I must have been “A beautiful baby” but to my father, a rugged out-door man, faced with the stern responsibility of wresting a living for a large family from the stubborn soil and other ranges, I was just a little brat with very remote, if any, possibilities of being of any economic value.

I must have been five years of age when, upon seeing a strange man, with a large mustache, making himself at home around the place, I asked my mother who he was and was told he was my father. He had turned the farm work over to my older brothers, Ether, Marion and Joseph and spent most of his time on the range with the sheep and cattle. Also, he had another home and family in Orderville so this was the first time I had ever come to know him or remember him.

My first great sorrow (and to me it was a great sorrow) came when my brother Joseph accidentally cut my dog, Rover’s legs with the hay mower. One leg was completely severed and another left hanging only by a cord. Joseph wanted to do the humane thing but I raised such a fuss that he helped me bind and splint the foot. Rover would not be forced to leave the splints alone until he had torn all of the bandages off with his teeth. I spent all my waking hours with Rover and would have taken him to bed, when I was forced to go, had I been allowed. As I held his head and looked into his big, brown suffering eyes, I remember it as if it were yesterday, that my greatest fear and sorrow was thinking that he would think that we did not love him and had inflicted his wounds intentionally. As he grew worse and odor became offensive, Joseph took him early one morning before I was awake and gave him a proper burial in the low back of the barn.

I grieved so that mother really had to take me in hand. She explained to me that though I loved him and he was kind and good, yet he was only a dog and how much more serious it would be if it were my baby sister or another member of the family. She said that we must expect to have separations and sorrow come to our lives and must learn to make the best of them. She even promised that we would have our animal friends with us in the next life. So, with a prayer that Rover would not think we had hurt him on purpose, some decorations on the grave, I began to be reconciled.

My brother Ether helped me back on the road to happiness by bringing a beautiful little pup, white with a white spot on his breast, home from Carroll’s one evening. He looked and so much like an awkward cub bear that his name was ‘Cub’. Cub was my constant companion except when I was in school and with the exception that he became of use at the sheep herd before I did and was taken from me. I always resented this seemingly unnecessary separation. We were, otherwise, together most of the time, even on my infrequent dates until 1918 when he departed this life at the age of seventeen when I was in the military service.

Another important lesson in my life came when, at the age of seven, the cows destroyed my corn field. I had spaded up, planted and cared for a ‘field’ about twenty feet square East of the house. It was first intended to be a dry land patch but I decided it would be more fun to irrigate it, so I dug up a reservoir, carried it full of water and then broke the dam or opened the gate and regulated the water evenly in the furrow as I had seen my brothers do on a large scale. The corn was well fertilized, watered and surrounded by a play fence made of willows cut from the large grove in the big pasture.

When the corn was more than twice my height and nearly ready for table use, we came home from Church one Sunday afternoon to find that the cows had broken into the lot and destroyed my corn patch. Again my grief was uncontrollable until Mother reprimanded me for making such a fuss over a little corn, then explained that this was the ways of life. We were sure to have failures and disappointments, but the real test was in not giving up but in beginning and trying again and again.