Frank Richard Bentley
“In
1855 I put in fifteen acres of wheat, ten acres in one lot and five in the
other. When the wheat was about six inches high, the grasshoppers came down
like a cloud and devoured everything before them. They commenced at one side of
the field and cleared it as they went.
About this time, Marshal Heywood was ordered
to get up a company of men to go to Carson Valley as guard to the U.S. District
Court, to organize Carson County.
The marshal
proposed that I go along, which proposition I accepted as by this time the
grasshoppers had taken ten acres of my wheat and the prospect was fair that
they would take the other five. The terms were five dollars a day with
everything furnished for a man and his horse. I thought it would be a good
chance to get my bread and other provisions for my family.
We were in Carson about two months. At the
U.S. District Court at this time I took out my final papers of citizenship.
Orson Hyde was clerk of the court.
When I
returned home at the end of two months, I found my family all well, and my wife
had one hundred bushels of wheat stored in the house which was quite a surprise
to me. My wife informed me that after I left she thought she would try to save
the other five acres of wheat which the grasshoppers had not reached. So, she
took the children, the pigs and chickens and went to the field every day to
fight the hoppers, and by that means saved the wheat. That was the only wheat
saved in the settlement.
At the
October conference, I, with about one hundred others, was called to move to
Carson County and colonize that county.
In the
winter, I sold out my possessions in Nephi and made preparations to start for
Carson. In the spring of 1856 with my family and all I possessed, I started for
Carson Valley. I had one wagon drawn by two yoke of oxen and one yoke of cows
with several loose cows in the herd. The company was very large numbering over
one hundred wagons and a large number of loose cattle. We made the trip in
about six weeks. On reaching the Carson River the company was disorganized; the
people locating on the river in Carson Valley and in several small valleys
adjacent. Washaw [Washoe] Valley was selected by Apostle Orson Hyde, who with
his wife Mary Ann was with the company as head quarters of the mission.
A beautiful
stream of pure mountain water ran through the town site and formed a lake on
the south side of the valley. The valley is about six miles long east and west
and about three miles wide and is situated close at the base of the Sierra Nevada
Mountains. I bought a lot at the mouth of the creek and built a hewed log
house. . . . A log school house was built and improvements made and we soon had
quite a comfortable little settlement.
August 14,
1856, my son Frank was born and being the first child born in the new colony
had the honor of having the town named Franktown after him.
I was very
much pleased with Carson and the surrounding valleys also with the climate and
the many crystal streams coursing down the mighty mountains. Mountain trout was
very abundant in the river and small streams emptying into it, so much so that
after the spring overflow on the bottoms had subsided, a great amount of fish
was left in the low places and pools, so the farmers turned their hogs loose
and they got fat on the fish. I bought some of the bacon gut, it was so fishy
that I could not eat it.
In the
summer the white clover grew so high (8–-10 feet) the wind blew it down flat
and in the fall, so I am told, it would rot off at the bottom and the wind
would roll it into wind rows ready for the farmers to haul it off for hay in
the winter.
There was a
great deal of fish in Washoe Lake and in the spring they ran up the creek to
spawn. A few rods above my house the creek forked. When the Indians wanted fish
they put a dam in one fork and turned the water all down the other; and when
the water drained out of the fork they had dammed off, they followed it down
and picked up the fish with their hands that were struggling to get from one
pool to another. My house was not more than twenty feet from the creek and my
children could throw out a mess of fish for breakfast in a few minutes.
(Memoirs of Frank Bentley)
A number of Frank Bentley’s
descendants live in the Reno-Sparks area.
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