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(The spelling of Shadrack's name has variations of Shadrack, Shadrach, and Shedrick)
Story of the Life of Shedrick Holdaway
The information we have on the early life of Shedrick Holdaway is very limited. He was born 15 October 1822 in Hawkins Co., Tennessee, son of Timothy and Mary Trent Holdaway. His parents moved from Tennessee to Indiana about 1833 as their youngest son, Daniel Webster, was born in Greencastle, Putnam Co., Indiana, 14 July 1834. His father died in 1835, probably in Illinois, as we know his mother married William H. Lunceford 2 Nov. 1837 in St. Clair Co., Illinois. Mr. Lunceford was a widower with a large family.
Shedrick joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints 30 April 1843 and that fall went to Nauvoo, remaining there until the Saints were driven out by the mob in 1846. While in Council Bluffs the call came for 500 men to volunteer for the War with Mexico and Shedrick Holdaway was one of them. He filled the position of teamster for Company C of the Mormon Battalion under Captain James Brown and Lieutenant Rosencrans. He was with the Company during the entire campaign until they were discharged from service 16 July 1847 at Los Angeles, after which time he spent six months working for Dan Williams.
He bought a team and wagon and had made preparations to join the saints in Utah when the news of the gold discovery was brought to Los Angeles. On his way home he stopped for a little while at the Forks of the American River where he did a little mining and took out about three thousand dollars worth of gold dust. From books and the reproduction on the screen of life in California during the gold rush, we gain a rather perfect idea of the lawlessness that prevailed. In the camp where he stayed he said that a night seldom passed without a man being killed either in a drunken brawl or by one of the few Spanish women who were in camp. Because he would not mingle with such a group but was sober and decent, he was disliked by some, especially a Spanish woman who resented his indifference. He had boasted that she would get him yet. He said that one night he awoke from a sound sleep as he heard his mother call "Shedrick, Shedrick, Shedrick." He interpreted that to be a warning as his mother was still in Illinois, and he immediately arose and left the camp and started for Salt Lake. He arrived in the valley 24 October 1848 with three thousand dollars in gold dust and was the first man to pay his tithing in California gold dust.
On 24 December 1848 Shedrick married Lucinda Haws, daughter of Gilberth and Hannah Whitcomb Haws in the Endowment House. The Haws family had arrived in the Salt Lake Valley 23 September 1848.
Soon after their marriage Shedrick and Lucinda went East, but let us get the story of the trip from Lucinda's autobiography written when she was 79 years old. Having told of her marriage she goes on --
"The following March, 1849, my father and family, together with thirty other families, were called to go south to Utah Valley to settle up that part of the country. I did not go as I intended going back to the States with my husband in May to get some machinery for making woolen goods. We left Salt Lake City in company with thirteen others, among them Brother Lorenzo D. Young and wife and Doctor Bernhisel who was going to Washington, D.C., on business. Ten men of the company intended to stay at the upper crossing of the Platte River to run a ferry to help the emigrants across the river. Brother Young and wife went with us. One day our little company stopped for noon at a place called Independence Rock east of Fort Bridger. After we left this place we found that one of the men had left a lasso at our camping place. Two of the men went back for the lasso and were followed by seven Indians in full chase. When the Indians saw our company they fell back behind a ridge, coming up one by one. They rode along with us for awhile and seeing some buffalos feeding some distance away tried to make the men understand that they wanted them to chase the buffalo. They did so and succeeded in killing one. The Indians camped with us over night. During the night our horses stampeded and in the morning all of them were gone. Sister Young and myself had to remain in camp with those Indians while the men went in search of the horses. But the Indians did not molest us except to try to scare us. One of the old men came up to me and caught hold of me as if he would pull me out of the wagon. I picked up a hatchet and shook it at him and would have hit him if he had not gone away. Soon the men came back and we were very glad to be safe again. When the Indians left us they pushed one of the men off his horse and stole it, saddle and all.
"We journeyed on to Green River. Previous to leaving Salt Lake City we had prepared a watertight wagon box. We ferried ourselves across the Green River with oars in this wagon box. It served a very good purpose. We reached Platte River which we had to cross on a raft. Here ten men of the company stopped to help ferry Saints across the river. Brother Young and wife, Doctor Bernbisel, my husband and myself went on to Fort Laramie which was then an old government station. The second day after we left the company we began to meet train after train of gold seekers going to California.
"We traveled along alright, until my husband and I took sick with cholera. I came very nearly dying; but he was able to drive. We didn't dare stop for a day on account of Indians. When we arrived at Fort Laramie Brother Young made arrangements to take a wounded man down to the Missouri River. One evening after the man had got able to walk, he got out of the wagon and walked awhile. He came upon a camp of gold seekers who no doubt asked him all about the gold mines. He knew my husband had been to the mines and when we reached the camp they halted us but we drove on. One of the men called after us, 'That fellow has got his load and is going back to spend it.'
"We went on and camped about a mile from the camp we had just passed. After supper, when we had put our camp fire out, which was always did for fear of Indians finding us, there came a man from the gold seekers' camp and asked my husband if he would take a lot of letters for their camp over the river. My husband said he would take them if he would get them ready before he left in the morning. The man started back to his camp. Suddenly he came back all excited and said that there were Indians all along the road and that he was frightened to go back to camp and wanted to know if he couldn't stay all night. My husband asked what kind of Indians he had seen. He said they were Crow Indians. We knew that there were no Crow Indians in that part as it was the section in which the Siox Indians lived. He then told him that he had no place for him to stay and no bedding except a buffalo robe; but the man still insisted on staying all night. He took the buffalo robe and laid down under the wagon. There was a storm coming on and we told him that he had better go on to the next camp, which was about a half a mile ahead, and he could get in a tent. Finally he consented, when he found what a terrible storm had come on. My husband, fearing that this man had planned to rob us, took his gun and sat down in the front of the wagon. I wanted him to let me take the sacks of gold out of the wagon and drop them a little way from the wagon. It was so dark that no one could have seen them; in the morning I would have got them again. He would not consent to this, so he and Mr. Young sat up all night and waited for an attack which did not come. Doubtless the storm had helped to protect us from being robbed. By morning the storm had passed, and all was quiet. We resumed our journey again."
From then on the possibility of being robbed was a constant worry. At the Missouri River Brother and Sister Young and Doctor Bernhisel left and Grandfather and Grandmother went to Kanesville where they remained for about a month to rest, starting for St. Louis about the first of September.
When the business arrangements in St. Louis were concluded, they went to Lebanon, St. Clair County, Illinois, where Grandfather's folks lived. Here their first baby, a boy they named George Bradford, was born on the 26 September 1849. He lived only four months.
On March 3, 1850 they left Lebanon and arrived in Kanesville, Iowa about May 15th, where they received a shipment of woolen mills machinery to bring to the Salt Lake Valley, this being the first machinery of its kind to enter the Valley.
In the early part of June they left Kanesville in William Pace's Company. It was divided into two sections, with fifty in each section. Continuing let me quote from Grandmother's autobiography again: "Richard Sessions was at the head of our division. (Richard Sessions was Grandmother's Uncle) Everything went well until the cholera broke out. We could not get a bit of good water anywhere. The water in the Platte River was thick with mud and very warm. Many of the company died. We had no boxes to bury them in so they were wrapped in a white sheet and laid in the cold ground, not even a slab to mark their graves. Sometimes a large rock or tree marked their burial place.
"After the cholera died out, we got along real well without an accident for several hundred miles. We had all the buffalo and antelope meat we wanted and some deer meat, which we got in the Black Hills. The Company dried a lot of it and it came in very well, for we needed it when we got out of the buffalo country.
"My husband was on guard at night and during the day he walked ahead and drove the stock. He shod the horses and was looked to as a kind of overseer of the Company.
"We were now getting into the mountains on this side of the Sweetwater River. Our wagons were loaded with machinery and our horses were just about given out. Our bread stuff was all used up except some whole corn which I made hominy of and we lived on this until we reached the Salt Lake Valley in September 1850. Here and there in the little city were patches of grain and vegetables. We lived in our wagon until my husband managed to get the walls of a small adobe house up. We put a portion of our things in the little house and stretched a domestic wagon cover over the place where the bed stood which would shelter us for awhile until my husband had time to put a roof on it. He had to get the wagons unloaded and haul hay and wood for the winter. We were living in Big Cottonwood Creek at this time. There was no floor, no roof and no door in the house. It had been raining for three days - was still raining_ and in the midst of this, on November. 4, 1850, my second baby was born. Everything in the house was wet through and streams of water poured through the wagon cover onto my bed. We set pans to catch the water. The baby, which we name Timothy, lived but a few minutes and I came nearly dying also.
On the 28th of December we left for Provo. I drove in an open wagon all the way. It was just about the coldest weather I ever experienced. We camped out two nights and reached the Fort on the last day of December, 1850. We could not get a house to live in, except an old log cabin with just the walls and a dirt floor. It wasn't very good for winter use but we fixed a roof on it and stayed there until March, 1851. We then built us a log cabin on the other side of Provo River. It was neither chinked nor plastered, but it was a paradise compared with the ones we had lived in before. Next, my husband built a machine shop and set up the first carding machinery brought into this country. Bishop David Evans helped to put it up and in October it was ready to begin work. Brother Evans first took charge of running it and then my husband. Soon after, he built a blacksmith shop."
On December 12 1851, their third child was born, and he was named William Shadrach.
About the middle of November 1852, Shedrick Holdaway married Lucinda's sister, Eliza Haws Pickup. Eliza had married George Pickup, a Mormon Battalion member. They had one son George Pickup, Jr. On 3 September 1852 Eliza divorced George Pickup because he became intolerable to live with. He must have been mentally unbalanced as he imagined she was entertaining men and used to stand out behind trees at night watching. She became so frightened of him that she could stand it no longer and divorced him. Shedrick and Eliza had two children: Eliza born 15 April 1854; died an infant, and Marion Haws born 28 February 1855. Lucinda's fourth child Amos David was born 23 Jan 1853 and on 30 Apr. 1854 their fifth child John Madison was born. Eliza died when her son Marion was only five days old and Lucinda took him to raise. This made four children under four years of age for Lucinda to care for. In the summer of 1853 Shedrick and Lucinda moved into town because the Indians were getting so hostile and it was not safe for the people to live in a scattered condition. Shedrick built a little house between fifth and sixth West on the north side of Center Street.
Grandmother says in her history: "These were trying times for us all. The people didn't know what to expect from the army (Johnston's Army); but were ready to fight in an instant if the call came. All of the men were on guard around town watching for the Indians because they were very annoying and treacherous and no one knew what to expect of them" When Johnston's Army left Camp Floyd, they burned their wagons. Some of this scrap iron was brought to Provo and made into a threshing machine by Shedrick and his brother David Holdaway.
Always active and a leader where there was work to do, Grandfather helped lay out and build the old logging road in Provo Canyon.
In the spring of 1859 Shedrick Holdaway built a sawmill in the South Fork of Provo Canyon. Because the mill was built on the summer hunting ground of the Indians, it cost grandfather several fat steers each year to be left in peace. One year Grandfather had paid his tribute to one band of Indians when later in the year another hostile band came. The Chief sent for Grandfather. The escort took Grandfather to the Chief and seated him on a blanket between two Indian warriors. Of this incident Grandfather said: "As I was being taken to the Chief I noticed that the two warriors on the blanket each held a great hunting knife behind him. Seated between them I made the easiest bargain anyone ever got out of me."
His experiences were many and varied as those of any pioneer must be. He was seriously injured a number of times but Grandmother's skillful nursing pulled him through. On one occasion he went to Salt Creek near Nephi for a load of coal. He was helping a man lift his wagon wheel so he could go on, and just as the horses started his foot slipped and he fell under the wheels and the wagon, filled with seventy bushels of wheat sent over him breaking every other two pair of ribs open and his collar bone. At a later time he had set a gun to shoot a bear. The next morning he went to see if the bear had been shot and happened to step on the string which had been arranged to discharge the gun. The gun went off and he received the bullet in his leg, which passed clear through his thigh, but no bones were broken. He almost lost his leg at that time. Later still, he was working at a sawmill near Scofield and while hauling timber, he was suddenly pitched forward between the horses. They became frightened and dragged him for nearly a mile over rocks. The result was a broken jaw bone in two places, a fractured skull and a badly cut throat.
Clothield Young Newren, his granddaughter says of him: "About seven miles north and west of Provo on the shores of Utah Lake, Grandfather located a ranch about the year 1873. The land needed water for irrigation, so, aided by his brother David, he laid out a canal along the brow of the West Bench. The perfectness of this piece of engineering filled my mother with awe. One day I heard he say, 'But father, how could you do it without any instruments?' He replied, 'D-David walked ahead of me and I - I - I laid it out by the brim of his hat.' That canal is still in use.
"During the late 80's Shedrick worked at a sawmill in Scofield but most of his time was spent on the ranch in Vineyard. After the death of my father (Loey Young) mother and I went to live on the ranch. The following eighteen months were the happiest of my childhood. A devoted grandfather who always had time to listen to me and take care of my wants, was my constant companion. I can now see that the tact he used in getting along with me was a combination of a sense of fairness, and understanding of human nature, and a proper evaluation of fundamentals. His brilliant mind solved problems of human relations just as accurately as it did problems of mathematics.
"The hard life on his father's farm when Shedrick was a boy and the long distance to school made attending school impossible most of the time. Altogether he attended school only three months of his life. But his mind was that of a natural born mathematician. Many times mother has told me that when in her school years she could not work out her problems in cube and square root, she got her father to work them for her. He always got the right answer though he did not follow the rules she had to use, but with the right answer she could make her own methods work.
"Grandfather was also a master at story-telling. I still remember some he told me. But it was the way he did things that made the deepest impression and demonstrated character traits. One incident I shall never forget. Harry Gammon owned the adjoining land and because of long usage he had a right-of-way on Grandfather's side of the fence. Grandfather did not mind that but Mr. Gammon used to leave the gate open when he went through. It was just too much trouble to get out and shut it. An open gate meant that the cattle got out of the pasture and it took the hire man about half of the day to find them and bring them back. Tried beyond endurance, Grandfather got up early one morning and plowed the end of the north pasture that Mr. Gammon had been using for a road, and turned the irrigation water on it. When he came in he remarked to mother 'I-I-I'd just like to-to see him t-try to use it now'. The cattle weren't let out any more because Mr. Gammon had to drive on his side of the fence."
Aunt Mary Conrad tells the story that one day Grandmother was complaining to Grandfather about his being away from home so much building roads, canals and ditches, or up in the canyon working at the sawmill, and Grandfather made her this reply: "Well, Cindy, I never expect more out of this old world than I put into it," which could well be used as a motto for all his posterity.
Shedrick Holdaway was a man of marked mechanical skill and ingenuity and could fashion almost anything out of wood and iron. As years passed he prospered and became a large landowner. He was a public spirited man, participating in every project put forth for the development of land around Provo and the rebuilding of the District. During the Fall before he passed way he attended the State Irrigation Congress, made plans and drew maps for pumping water from Utah Lake into Elberta.
It was in the fall of 1902 that Shedrick drove into the yard of the old home in Provo and announced, "Well, Cindy, I-I've come home t-t-to stay". He immediately began cutting down the big apple trees so that he could have room to build a shop.
Grandfather was a diligent reader of the Bible and could quote large portions of it off by heart. He was a member of the 31st Quorum of Seventies and also a High Priest in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Shedrick Holdaway died 24 December 1902, the 54th anniversary of his wedding. The last week of his life he cut down twelve of the big apple trees on his place, but he caught a cold which developed into pleuro-pneumonia and in less than a week he passed away. The funeral was held Saturday, December 27, 1902 at 11 a.m. in the Provo Tabernacle and he was buried in the Provo City cemetery.
He was the father of 16 children (Lucinda had 14; Eliza 2) as follows:
Lucinda's children:
George Bradford, born 26 Sep 1849 died
Timothy, born 4 Nov 1850 died
Wm. Shadrach, born 13 Dec 1851
Amos David, born 23 Jan 1853
John Madison, born 30 Apr 1854
Mary Elizabeth, born 12 Sep 1856
Levi Stewart, born 13 Apr 1858
Logan Gilbert, born 1 Aug 1859
Cynthia Mahala, born 1 Oct 1860 died
Nancy Emeline, born 16 Aug 1863 died
Andrew Nathan, born 27 Dec 1864
Louisa Diantha, born 12 Nov 1866 died
Warren Haws, born 17 Mar 1868
Amanda Lucinda, born 17 Jan 1870
Eliza's Children:
Eliza, born 15 Apr 1854 died
Marion Haws, born 28 Feb 1855
Shedrick's mother, Mary Trent Holdaway Lunceford came to Utah in 1852, arriving Sept. 6, with her husband and family, one daughter Charity Outhouse and husband Joseph.
Her family by William Lunceford was as follows:
William Trent,Lunceford, born 7 Aug 1838 St. Clair Co., Ill.
Nancy Emeline Lunceford, born 4 Dec 1840 St. Clair Co., Ill.
Sarah Melvina Lunceford, born 18 Dec 1844 St. Clair Co., Ill.
Cynthia Mahal Lunceford, born 6 Sep 1847 St. Clair Co., Ill.
This family with her daughter Elizabeth Ann Rabel all settled in California
History compiled by Granddaughters Clothield Young Newren and Edna Holdaway Bentwet
Page Modified July 9, 2002