“I am going to go to America, if you stop me from going now, I will leave the day I become of legal age.”“If you will swear that you that you will be responsible for your own sins, you can go.”
– Ebenezer Bryce in conversation with his father, Andrew
Ebenezer Adam Bryce
A few weeks after my memoir, Me and the Cottonwood Tree: An Untethered Boyhood, came out, I received an email from a reader. In it, she asked, “You wrote about why and how your mother’s family moved to Ashurst, Arizona. What about the Bryce side of your family?”
The whys and hows of the Bryces’ settling in Gila Valley, Arizona, and how this ultimately led to my birth in November of 1933, is a long and winding story. Which reminds me of a joke:
Johnny asked his mother, “Where did I come from?”
“Oh no!” Johnny’s mother thought. “How do I tell a seven-year-old boy about the bird and the bees?”
After waiting a good long while as his mother mulled over her response, Johnny grew impatient. Finally, he said, “Billy told me that he’s from San Diego.”
Many histories have been written about my ancestor, in whose honor a national park and two cities—Bryce Canyon, Bryce, Utah, and Bryce, Arizona—were named. Still, I’ll do my best to keep my answer closer to the “San Diego” side of the spectrum.
In 1981, one of Ebenezer’s great-great grandsons, Mark Smith Bryce, was doing genealogy research in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints headquarters in Salt Lake City and found a brief handwritten autobiography by Ebenezer Bryce, dated November 1st/97 (November 1, 1897). According to the man himself, Ebenezer Bryce was born in Dunblane in the county of Perthsire (now called Stirling) in Scotland, on November 17, 1830, to Andrew and Janet (Adams) Bryce. The family moved to Tullibody to be closer to the shipyards when Ebenezer was eighteen months old and, at the age of eleven, he began working as a ship’s carpenter and millwright. This skillset is what ultimately brought him across the North Atlantic Ocean to the United States.
After a six-year apprenticeship, Ebenezer met a group of converts and missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—commonly known as the “Mormon Church” though the preferred nomenclature is “LDS”—a religious institution founded by Joseph Smith in the United States the same year as Ebenezer’s birth. Seven years earlier, in 1823, Joseph Smith claimed that he had a vision in which an angel named Moroni instructed him to excavate engraved golden plates from a hillside near his home in western New York State. His translation of these plates tells the story of an Israelite family’s migration to America hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus.
A foundational tenet of the LDS faith is grounded in the Great Commission, God’s commandment to “go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19–20; see also Mark 16:15–16). Joseph Smith emphasized the importance of missionary work from the beginning, and so we can imagine that this LDS group, who was waiting in the Tullibody shipyard to make passage to America, proselytized to Ebenezer and others. We don’t know any specifics about that auspicious encounter, other than it prompted the seventeen-year-old to become interested in the LDS faith.
This caused some trouble. His family were devout Covenanters in the Scottish Reformed Presbyterian Church, and held views so prejudiced against the new religion that Ebenezer’s father, Andrew, went so far as to lock up his son’s clothes to prevent him from attending the meetings. Still, the teenager begged his father to allow him to immigrate with the 232 converts—he needed his father’s signature because of his status as a minor—and Andrew eventually agreed, after Ebenezer swore that he would be responsible for his own sins.
Ebenezer converted and was baptized in the LDS faith in the spring of 1848. Andrew promptly disowned him. The young man never saw his father again.