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Show Gunnison Woman Figures In Sketch ' Mrs. Sylvia E. Metcalf , a Gunnison" Gunni-son" pioneer women, together -with three of her sisters, are prominently mentioned in an article appearing in J the Salt Lake Tribune Monday of this week. In addition to the por-! traits of the four sisters, a brief biographical bi-ographical sketch is given, as follows: fol-lows: j When four girl babies were born in an Illinois settlement more than eighty years ago the average expert in mortality statistics would have guessed their chances to live at about 100 to 1. Their family was poor. They had no free clinics in those days and no . matemiay wards. They were exposed expos-ed to privation, hardship, -cholera, even to bullets. According to the premises on which modern child welfare, with all its care of the infant, is based, none of these girl babies should have survived. sur-vived. Yet they did. They lived. They married. They bore children and the four- all healthy, hearty, happy old women are living in Utah today. The youngest of the four is 81 years old, and the oldest 87. They are the children of Cyrus Sanford, a member of the 1850 Mormon emigration. emi-gration. Their names, ages and homes are: Mrs. Sylvia E. Metcalf, 81, Gunnison; Mrs. Melissa Messenger, Messen-ger, 84, Springville; Mrs. Cecelia Johnson, 85, Springville, and Mrs. Elmira McBride, 87, Hyrum. The father of the quartet was married mar-ried to their mother in DeKalb, HL, in 1836, and was baptized into the L. D. S. church by Simeon J. Comfort Com-fort in 1840. He was at Nauvoo and Morley, and came to Utah with an emigrant train which left Council Bluffs, Iowa, June 14, 1850. The family, fam-ily, comprised at the time of Mr. and Mrs. Sanford . and six " children, crossed the plains' with .William Snow's company of 100 wagons and James. McClellan's fifty, arriving in Salt Lake in October., Fifteen of the emigrants ' died from cholera en route. The family located at Hobble Creek, now Springville. Mr. Sanford San-ford was a school . teacher, Indian agent and commander of the battalion battal-ion against the Indians. He had four wives. - In 1895 sixty-eight of ' Ms grandchildren and ninety-five greatgrandchildren great-grandchildren were living. The four Sanford daughters now look back over their eventful youths and laugh at the petty discomforts which annoy the modern generation. "I hear people talking about the trouble they have driving across to Salt Lake by automobile," Mrs. McBride Mc-Bride said the other day. "They should make the trip by ox team, with cholera in camp and Indians lurking along the road. Then they would know something about real i trouble." i : |