Three Short Family History Stories

by Miriam Beck

1.  Edmund and Mary Ann Richardson were asked by Brigham Young to settle in Manti.  Crops had been eaten by grasshoppers.  One day Walter Cox (friend) was so hungry and saw a new weed growing.  He tasted it and it tasted good!  He knew it must be an answer to their prayers to feed the people of Manti.  What did they call it?  "Manna Weed."  Everyone in town carefully picked this manna weed every day and by the next day there was just enough more that had grown.  In the spring the weed was gone.  It was no more needed.  It was the miracle of the manna weed.

2.  In the winter of 1859, there was a heavy snowstorm--18 inches!  William Jordan Flake couldn't find his oxen.  He'd been looking for 10 days and couldn't find them.  He saw a man who pointed toward a hill and said he'd find them in a clump of trees.  He thanked him and started along the back tracks from which the man had come, but to his surprise there were no tracks beyond where he first saw the man!  Also the man disappeared and he realized he had seen one of the three Nephites!   He walked on, soon found his oxen, and returned to camp. 

3. Green Flake was an African American and was a member of he advance pioneer company who first arrived in Salt Lake City.  He was given as a gift (as a slave) to James Madison and Agnes Flake when he was 10 years old. The James Flake family got baptized in North Carolina and moved to Nauvoo with the Flake family when they joined the Mormon church.  He was baptized in the Mississippi river in 1844.  From the memory of a grandson and from family diaries, it is believed that Green drove the carriage that Brigham Young rode in when he entered the Salt Lake Valley.  (see blacklds.org/flake)  He is one of 3 blacks immortalized on the back of the Brigham Young monument in Salt Lake City.