ANTHONETTE MARIE OLSEN
Anthonette Marie Olsen was born at three o’clock in the morning on January 16, 1845, in Christiana, now Oslo, Norway, to Christian Olsen and Christine Nielsen.
Before little Nettie was five years old she learned to read. This made her schooling all the easier. She was alert and quick and willing.
Nettie’s father was a stone-mason by trade. He received his wages every Saturday night. Too frequently he spent part of his earnings on drinking ale with his jolly companions. This made it hard for his wife and the children at home.
One day in the Lutheran school where Nettie was enrolled, her teacher Andreas Budge, warned the children that Mormon missionaries were making plans to come to Norway with a message concerning an American prophet, Joseph Smith. Said the teacher, “You must keep away from those missionaries as they are false teachers.” Young as she was, Nettie made up her mind to find out for herself what the doctrine was the Mormons were sent to teach.
As a child of ten, Nettie prayed for work and earnings to help her family subsist as in Norway it was work or go hungry. So little Nettie was accepted as a helper in a textile factory. Her part was to hand threads to the girl who threaded the harness in the loom. She was in the factory at 6 AM each morning and stayed until 9 PM each night. She worked at that factory from age ten until she was sixteen.
Nettie, along with her family, heard the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as taught by Mormon missionaries in their home. She was baptized on April 1, 1861, when she was sixteen years old, along with her parents.
The moment Nettie’s friends in the factory heard that she had joined the Mormon Church, they turned against her and became her enemies. She left them as soon as she could find work in another factory, where she stayed until her 20th birthday.
Nettie’s home was happier now. Her parents were also Mormons and the thought of emigrating to be with the body of the Church in the Rocky Mountains of North America was ever on their minds.
Nettie was the first member of her family to join an immigration company. Her father bought her a new trunk and in it she placed a few pieces of underwear. She had but two dresses and one pair of shoes. Neither Nettie nor her parents understood the nature of the journey she was going to undertake.
After Nettie had crossed the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, she went aboard a train in Boston and rode with other newcomers to a point near Florence, Nebraska. From Florence she walked the 1,000 miles to Salt Lake City. Her Norwegian dress shoes wore off her feet as she was walking the first three hundred miles. Nettie offered a certain fellow-traveler her extra dress for a pair of shoes. The woman to whom she had made this appeal had two pair of shoes in her possession, her sister having died on the way. But she refused, saying she would need the shoes later on.
So Nettie walked about 700 miles in her stocking feet. Nettie later said “this wasn’t so bad through the deep sand, for miles and miles, but oh, the cactus patches!”
Nettie’s food ration was a pint of flour each day. Each night she mixed the flour with water and set her tin cup in the warm ashes of her tiny campfire. In the morning she baked a big biscuit in the hot coals. This single biscuit was her food for three meals. It had to be enough as there was no more, and she was lucky to have that.
During the six week trek across the plains, the Saints in Nettie’s party were given a strips of bacon a few times. Twice when she was desperately hungry she found a few crackers on the ground. This seemed like manna from heaven.
Each night after caring for her feet and mending her stockings from a piece of men’s pants someone had given her, Nettie lay down upon the sand with her bag under her head and a shawl over her. She had a shawl but no quilt.
One day there was a cattle stampede. A young girl walking beside Nettie was instantly killed. It hurt Nettie unspeakably to hear of a death in camp. Several of the young men also died along the way, which affected her greatly. One morning on the prairie one of the women lagged behind the others. An Indian on a horse came out from the bushes. He lassoed the woman onto his pony and rode away. Her husband ran in pursuit, but a couple of arrows shot into his legs by a second Indian soon stopped him. The woman was never heard of again.
When asked if the pioneers in her party danced by the light of the fire along the way, Nettie said “indeed we did not dance, we were too tired.”
On November 8, 1865, Nettie arrived “afoot and alone” in Salt Lake City. Although she was still with her company of pioneers, she was still very much alone. That night she went to bed supperless. Early the following morning a good woman, who heeded Brigham Young’s admonition to be kind to the newcomers, came to Nettie with a cup of hot gruel, which she greatly appreciated.
Nettie new a few English words, such as chair, table, cup and book, but she couldn’t connect a group of words into a sentence. She was at a loss to express herself, but there were others in Utah who spoke Norwegian, and she gravitated toward them.
In a short time Nettie found work in the home of Bishop Hunter. It wasn’t long until a Mr. Bonelius, a weaver, taught Nettie how to operate a hand operated loom for weaving cloth. This was quite new to her as the looms she was used to in Norway were run by water or steam power.
During her first winter in Utah, Nettie moved to North Ogden. Here she wove hundreds of yards of flannel and linsey. She also learned how to card and spin. Her services in the community were appreciated and she rejoiced at being needed among the Saints, but still a single foreign girl with no family.
Nettie’s “Sunday dress” was the workmanship of her own hands, every thread of it–she spun the thread, dyed it, wove it and sewed it with needle and thread as there weren’t any sewing machines yet. It was a grey linsey dress and with it she wore a white laundered collar and a pretty ribbon bow.
Nettie became acquainted with an immigrant from Denmark, who was already married, Christian Frederick Bernhard Lybbert, and she became his second wife on March 10, 1866 in the Endowment House in Salt Lake. Nettie was 21 years old; her husband was 31. Of being the second wife, Nettie said, “we accepted the principle of plural marriage with clean hands and pure hearts, each of us worked for the best interest of all three.”
Nettie’s early homes in Utah were in North Ogden, Brigham City, Spring City and Levan. Her husband didn’t feel settled until he moved to Ashley Valley, Uintah County, where he became established as a blacksmith.
In and around Vernal, Nettie and Christian raised a large family of six boys and five girls. Nettie was 22 when her first child was born and 45 when her last child came.
Each Sabbath afternoon Nettie attended Sacrament Meeting, taking her baby with her. Usually during church meetings a mother would nurse her baby from breast. This was a common custom. They walked about three quarters of a mile to church during the hot summers and cold winters.
Nettie was a well-informed reader of the four standard works of the Church. She kept up with the “Juvenile Instructor” and other Church materials. Every Sunday evening she would read and early on Monday morning she put the accent on the other part of the commandment, “six days thou shalt labor and do all thy work.” After learning English, which she learned well, she always spoke it and was very patriotic–she loved America and the opportunities it had given her and her children. She never saw her native Norway again, although her parents later immigrated to Zion in Utah.
During the last years of her long and productive life, Nettie would say, “wait until I get to the other side, then I’ll study art and music and dancing.” Her idea of heaven was eternal progression. Nettie lived according to the words of that wise man of old, “be up and doing, and the Lord be with you.”
(This history was taken from various sources, including excerpts from “My Memoirs” by Nettie’s daughter, Mary Merrell, mother of Irene Gale, mother of DeMar Gale, from stories written by Nettie’s son, Jacob Lybbert, and by Minnie I. Hodapp. Edited by John Hoopes, July 1998)