Minerva Teichert Autobiography Part 2

Minerva's autobiography contains other brief notes about her early family life and her relationship to her parents, as well as details on their personalities and values. On page 198, she writes:

We had been burned out [When she was 12/13 the family store in Riverside, Idaho burned to the ground] and were very hard up and back on the ranch when I entered Pocatello High School. I worked for my board but the lady I went to live with was called to Montpelier, Ida[ho] after two weeks of school, leaving me without a home [During Teichert's high school years (1902-1906), she initially lived with artist Isabel Ballantyne West, and later in a house in Pocatello owned by her mother].

I could not go back to American Falls to the old ranch I was studying. They pronounced the certificate [Minerva's first teaching certificate, for which she had to pass a qualifying exam] "fine." It was new and shiny but since I only taught to please my mother and hadn't opened the cover of a single book to prepare for it I had barely passed by the skin of my teeth, but after all that wasn't the trouble. Two, at least ,of the trustees could neither read nor write but they knew I wasn't "lickin" the kids enough and I was "awful young fer a teacher." A hint came to my mother that they were planning to surprise me by introducing a new teacher the morning after the holidays, so she sat up all night before getting my things ready and next morning at 3:30 took me fifteen miles to Rockland to meet the American Falls mail stage. It was thirty two miles to American Falls and the coldest day I have ever known.

I went to Soda Springs and taught there two years. My father was on a mission in Germany and I helped my family so altho John Held [unclear whether this refers to John Held, Jr., the popular illustrator of the flap era, or John Held, Sr.--the latter is more likel, since the senior already was an engraver and illustrator] of Salt Lake had persuaded me that I should study at the Art Institute in Chicago I never could see a dollar to start with. The next year I taught on Raft River 4 mo. As there was no store within 35 mi[les] I saved all my money. I had by now a serious case of sinus. Dr. Noth of Am[erican] Falls, with the aid of his good wife, who was an excellent nurse, operated on me on his kitchen table to save the expense of sending me to a hospital. He would not accept a cent until I finished my studies at the Art Institute, several years later.

This account notes at least the second incident where fire burnt down a piece of Kohlhepp property. The first incident was captured in a newspaper in June 1894, when Fred's residence and furniture was destroyed while he was in the Ogden hospital. This at least second incident was very hard on the Kohlhepps according to Minerva. They couldn't provide her room and board, forcing her to live with a willing, kind soul. Another tell incident of their lack of finances is how Minerva had an operation on a kitchen table to avoid the costs of going to a hospital. Her father's visits to hospitals must have taught them the cost of those expenses.

We see the strong influence and assertiveness of Fred's wife, Mary Ella. Minerva feels compelled to teach because her mother wanted her to (probably for financial reasons). Her parents at least had done some teaching throught the Mormon Church's sunday schools; perhaps they encouraged her to do it because it was something they were familiar with. The school system Minerva taught in must have been very poor if people on the board could not read and write. On the other hand, it is less surprising that she past the teaching exam if this was the case. Minerva's portrayal of the school board makes it look a little bit like a good old boys' club. Interestingly, we see another side of Mary Ella once the board plans to "surprise" Minerva: Mary Ella is not up to seeing her children publicly shamed. She makes a long trip to pick up her child and pull her out to save her the embarrassment. This is another instance of Mary Ella travelling as she pleases. Fred hardly tethered her down, nor does it seem like he could have.

During Fred's missionary years, Minerva describes herself as being mostly a teacher, trying to save her money to fund her education at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her father's mission costs must have made it quite impossible for Minerva to gain financial support from her parents to study art at this time.

Minerva Teichert Autobiography Part 1

Minerva Teichert wrote an autobiography, designed mostly to discuss her romance with her husband and her artistic training. It has been preserved in manuscript format in the Minerva Teichert Papers at BYU's Museum of Art.


Also, it was recently published in Marian Wardle's (Minerva's granddaughter; my aunt) book Minerva Teichert: Pageants in Paint. The autobiography has a few interesting remarks about her father. The first mention of him occurs on page 196:

My family seemed to enjoy travelling around. Altho[ugh] I was born in utah I spent most of my life in Idaho. Ruth Moench Bell of A. C. [Utah State Agricultural College] was my first teacher in the Plain City grade school. Soon after that first year we were up on the "Old Ranch" [the homestead owned by Fred and Mary Ella near American Falls, ID] in Idaho and didn't go to school much more until I finished the eighth grade "back to grandma's" [Minerva Wade's place] in North Ogden. Father had bought a great long legged mare, Puss, from Lyman Skeen in Plain City. She had her "spirits broke," as Skeen put it, from a long trip while she was too young to work. One morning I went to the barn and to my delight discovered a sorrel colt [Puss' colt, Gem] so brilliant in color to remind one of a very newly coined penny. He had deep purple eyes and I fell in love with him. We had Puss for years. Her sire was Derrick, the fastest race horse in Montana. Even now I see that mare at work, her head down, her spirits broken. Again I see her racing over the hills, loose and going like the wind when not in harness.

Gem was sired by a $40,000 horse, Sline, [whom] Skeen imported from England. He was mine. No princess was ever more delighted with her heritage. From the time I first tickled his glossy coat with my little bare toes until the big boys would say, "There goes Minerva Kohlhepp. I'm goin to ride home with her" and another answer "no you're not[--]she's on Gem." He was the greatest joy in my life. No wonder I love horses. I was never beaten nor nearly rivalled on that great long-legged raw boned aristocrat. Poor folks like us should never have owned Gem, at least not for his sake, but for mine it was wonderful. I often wondered, child that I was, how he knew he was a race horse. Father always worked him when he needed an extra horse. Then Gem hung his head in shame[,] but let his mistress mount him and the change couldn't be imagined. He lifted his classic head and no one ever passed him on the road. He thot any rider who happened along was just trying to beat him and pull as I would I couldn't hold him. Since I was not afraid of him I learned to let him go. I didn't have to teach him the game. He taught me.

Teichert has a very romantic picture of her time with Gem. It is hard to imagine that such an expensive race horse was actually Gem's father, and that if this was the case, that such a horse would end up with the Kohlhepps. Teichert admits as much, but it is still hard to believe. The With a Bold Brush story has her work 3 summers to purchase the horse, while the autobiographical account has it be a colt of a horse already owned by Fred, Puss. Fred apparently used Gem for work around the farm, and Teichert anthropomorphizes his "shame" at doing such work.

Mary Ella Hickman Autobiography 2

Today, I will finish the second half of Mary Ella's account here. Unfortunately, it doesn't too us too much more about Fred:

Other years when crops failed I started out with a team and covered wagon in the autumn, going twenty miles on one side and seventy on the other to buy and trade provisions. Once on my last trip I was overtaken by a storm. I never crossed bridges until I got to them. I had an extra horse tied beside the team. He got frightened at one of the frail bridges and crowded the team so one wheel slipped off into the mire at Marshaw Creek, ten miles west of Pocatello. The team just could not pull it out even after I had unloaded all the wheat, flour and supplies. I unhitched and fed them and we got up into the wagon to eat our lunch. I always took one of the older and one of the younger children with me. They kept us company and were a great comfort. "We can't stay here all night," said the older child, "What will we do?"

"No one can cross the bridge until they help us out," I answered, and before we had finished our lunch, one of the finest big teams I had ever seen came along. There were two big strong men in the wagon. They had to unhitch and help us out, but then they went on without even offering to help load the sacks of wheat back into the wagon. I managed it someway and was soon on the road rejoicing in our winter's supply of provisions.

The account ends abruptly, with her simply managing things somehow. She doesn't take us very far into her own life. We rather see more into her willingness to get things done on her own, and how much she traveled, often without Fred.

Mary Ella Hickman Autobiography 1:

In 1977, Glendy Baddley donated to the LDS Church Historicial department a document by Mary Ella Kohlhepp Martineau that described her family history in her matriarchal line from the American colonial days down to her own life. With each of the historical personages, she writes as if she were them, but stays close to her actual family history. The document was written likely somewhere between 1933-1938 when she was living at 270 Vine Street in Salt Lake City, Utah. It can still be seen in the Church Archives in Salt Lake City as MS 5739 under the title "Story of the lives of her great-grandmother Mary Thayer Bundy, her mother, Minerva Wade Hickman, and herself." In her account, Mary Ella mentions some information about Fred and their family arrangements during their marriage. This comes from pages 6-7 of the account. I will share the other half of the account in the next post:

When I married in 1886, we went on a homestead in Idaho. There were great expenses building fencing, clearing the sagebrush off the land, and everything that goes with building a new country. Often the two of us lived on less than a dollar a week. We could buy one hundred pounds of potatoes for fifty cents. Jackrabbits were plentiful and my husband was a good shot. Our meat diet was cottontail or bunny fried in butter.

When we had exhausted all our means on the homestead, my husband got his job back in Pocatello. Every six months, however, it was necessary to return to the ranch in order to hold it. Before we proved upon it my husband met with an accident and lost the sight of one eye. He thought if I had to take the living I could do better in some town where he could help raise a garden. We got a little home ten miles from Ogden. I made coats into capes as capes were then the fashion, and did dress-making and sewing of all sorts.

When our six months were up my husband again returned to the homestead to look after things. He wrote to me to follow [him to Idaho] as a man had decided to jump our claim if we did not return. We had two mares with colts, and I rigged up a white top buggy, filled the box with food and clothing, and a bed on top of everything, put in my five little children and on the fifteenth of September 1884 we started out.

p.7

When we reached Curlew Valley it snowed so we stayed three days at my brother's. After leaving my brother's we camped at night. I gave the children their supper then told them stories until they went to sleep.

My oldest daughter asked me recently if I remembered how the wolves howled around our camp when we were going back to Idaho to save our homestead. She said, "I think they were trying to get the colts." It was such a dreary lonely place and she was afraid of their mournful howl, but when she would mention that I would only say, "It's nothing but coyotes," and go on with the story. She thought that if I was not afraid it was all right. She says I taught her the greatest psychology in her childhood she has ever learned. "If it is anything bad the Lord won't let it hurt you. If it is anything good it won't hurt you, so don't be afraid of anything."

NOTES:

1. It is interesting how Mary Ella only refers to Fred as "my husband." Other accounts in the story mention Moses Wade her grandfather, but she never mentions her father (Wild Bill Hickman) or Fred directly. Since many names of men, besides these, are neglected, it may not have been a specific choice to omit Fred's name alone. Perhaps her new marriage also influenced this.

2. Mary Ella mentions a lot about their trying to "prove up" a homestead in Idaho. She mentions the hard toil in clearing out the land for their work. She also explains how poverty stricken they both were out there. Fred's shooting skills are noted, and how he kept shooting Cottontail to put meat into their diet.

3. It looks like the life on the homestead grew too hard with tthe lack of finances. Fred had to work in Pocatello (over at the railroad, which this account does not mention), but then had that terrible eye incident as I mentioned in prior posts. With his inability to see out of one eye, Mary Ella implies here that Fred couldn't find other manual labor as he had done throughout his life. People apparently didn't want to hire someone with poor vision, and who didn't have the healthiest build to boot. Mary Ella claims that it was Fred's suggestion that she should become the primary bread winner after this point, and that he would supplement the family's income/provisions by creating a garden. Ella did a lot of seamstress work, and she was quite excellent. My grandmother still has many nice lace tablecloths that Ella made. They moved near Ogden, UT, which is where Mary Ella's mother, Minerva Wade Hickman lived. However, they still wanted to keep their land in Idaho, and they couldn't leave the land too long or they would lose their right to possess it. The Ogden moved was out of desperation; they still wanted their Idaho home. Fred took the effort to head back and check on the land. But this was no easy for them to juggle, especially when someone else had wanted to jump their claim. Imagine being a mother throwing 5 young kids into a buggy and riding across rugged country to Idaho! The howling of those wolves certainly would have been frightening. Mary Ella mentioned staying three nights at her brother's. She had many brothers, so I am not sure which one she is referring to here.

4. She mentioned leaving in September 1884, but this must either be a typo or an error. She wasn't married until 1886, so how can she have left for Idaho with 5 kids by then? 1894 might be more likely. I will have to go through my gedcom and see if she had 5 living children by then.

Fred's Interest in Painting

In the 19th Volume of Southwest Art (1989), there is a note on page 93 that contains a snippet from a letter of Minerva Teichert's, which proports to explain why Fred left his home. I have provided this snippet below. Fred is described as a:

rich man's only son who ran away from home because his father wanted him to be an accountant and he wanted only to paint. The hardships of his western life were too much and he died quite young--57.

This snippet is interesting in emphasizing Fred's interest in painting, and for claiming that this was one of the two important factors that encouraged Fred to run away. Fred does not mention this in his own autobiography. It is clear from severa documents that Minerva seemed to see her career as an actualization of the dreams and interests of her father. The accountant remark likely refers to Fred's time at the Comer's Commercial College in Boston.

Notes on Fred Kohlhepp and Minerva's Childhood from "Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert: With a Bold Brush"

In the article "Minerva Kohlhepp Teichert: With a Bold Brush," written by Jan Underwood Pinborough and published in the April 1989 Ensign, the following is noted about Frederick Kohlhepp and Minerva's childhood (interesting tidbits are italicized and not part of the original):

Born on 28 August 1888 in North Ogden, Utah, Minerva was the second of ten Kohlhepp children. Most of her early years were spent on her family’s Idaho homestead. Her father, Frederick John Kohlhepp, was a cultured gentleman who gave up the prosperity of his Boston family to go west in search of adventure. When he found Mary Ella Hickman and the restored gospel, he embraced both.

The Kohlhepp family was poor financially, but life on the homestead near Pocatello was rich food for Minerva’s taste for drama and romance. With no school nearby, Minerva had little formal education as a small child. But each night her father gathered the children around to read the scriptures or classics of literature. “My parents were dreamers,” she later recalled. “Oh, the fairyland we lived in.” (“Miss Kohlhepp’s Own Story,” Pocatello, Idaho, 1917.)

In a willow patch near their farm, young Minerva acted out plays with her older sister. Working in the fields with her father, she dreamed as he described faraway places and peoples he had seen. She raced the wind on Gem, the fine, fast horse she had paid for with three summers’ work in the hay fields. When a wild horse was rounded up, she ran to the corral to capture the ripples of its muscles in her sketchbook.

Throughout her life, she loved filling her canvases with the rough beauty of the desert, her palette reflecting the blues and greys of the distant mountains. She had a particular love for painting animals. “The movement she captured in horses and cattle is magnificent,” comments Nancy Webb, a writer who recently reviewed the museum exhibit for Southwest Art and whose article on Minerva Teichert appeared in the March 1989 issue.

Minerva left home for the first time at age fourteen to work as a nursemaid for a wealthy Idaho family in San Francisco. There she saw museum art for the first time and attended classes at Mark Hopkins Art School. But it was not until she had graduated from high school back home and taught school for several years that she was able to pursue any serious training in art.

By age nineteen, she had scraped together enough money to go to Chicago, where she studied at the Chicago Art Institute under the great draftsman John Vanderpoel, a master of the academic school of painting. Several times during her three-year course she had to go home to earn more money in the fields or in the classroom. But always she returned to follow her dream. With characteristic confidence, Minerva once confronted Mr. Vanderpoel, asking why he criticized her work so harshly when so many classmates were doing much poorer work. She later recalled, “I shall never forget the disappointment on the dear little man’s face when he answered in a choked voice, ‘Miss Idaho, can it be possible you do not understand; they’re not worth it, they will drop out, but you—ah, there is no end.’ ” (“Miss Kohlhepp’s Own Story.”)

By 1912, she had finished her course at the Art Institute and returned west to earn more money. During this period she spent time “proving up” on her own homestead in Indian Warm Springs, Idaho—sleeping with a revolver under her pillow for protection in her isolated cabin. She was also courted by two young men—calling off a wedding with one wealthy suitor when she learned that he didn’t want to be married in a Mormon church. The other young man, not a Church member either (she knew no Latter-day Saint young men), was Herman Teichert. Herman was a gentle cowboy whose favorite sport was chasing wild horses on the desert by moonlight. In April 1915, however, she left Herman behind, telling him to marry someone else, and went to the Art Students’ League in New York City.

There are several interesting details from this article that I italicized throughout. Those that are self-explanatory for why I noted them I will pass over. It notes that Fred's main reason for leaving Boston was for adventure; it notes nothing about his health and the "consumption" issue. Fred's reading to the kids is emphasized (perhaps even over-emphasized; I doubt he read to them "each night"). Gem is noted in the story, this time (unlike in other of Minerva's accounts) earned by her own hard work instead of as a gift. Minerva is noted as leaving home for the first time at 14; this is not correct. She left home several times before going to San Francisco, at least to visit Minerva Wade in Ogden, Utah. Lastly, it can't possibly be true that Minerva knew of no Latter-day Saint young men. Fred himself taught many young men of the church as the superintendent of the Sunday Schools. The church records for her own geographical area testify otherwise. Apparently, there weren't any Latter-day Saint young men that she wanted to know of, or whom wanted to know of her.