Autobiography
of
Clyde William Mills
(1908)
This is the history of Clyde William Mills, born March 26, 1908.
When I was about five years of age, while living in Ogden, my
father, Richard Isaac Mills, and mother, Josephine Deseret Romrell,
separated. Mother and her four boys moved in with her brother,
Hyrum, and family in the George Romrell home Located on 4th
Street in Ogden. Grandpa, George Romrell, and Grandma,
Patience Romrell was also living in the same home.
My mother had a nice four room brick h ome built across
from the George Romrell home. We lived here until I
was about 10 years old
Then we moved onto a twenty-five acre farm in Sugar City, Idaho
to get us boys away from the poor company we started to go with, Mother arranged to move to
Idaho.
Three-hundred dollars was all Mother could get together after the down payment on the farm.
With this she built a one-room home about twelve feet wide by twenty feet long, one kerosene
lamp, and one cook stove; tables, chairs and beds with hung up sheet for privacy at night.
We carried all our water front a canal across the road from our home, washed our cloths on scrub
board., and ate our meals when we could get anything together to eat.
We were so poor at times we could not even buy shorten to a bake our bread with. We trapped
white snowshoe rabbits, caught fish, raised garden vegetables for food. It was a very hard life
for mother.
We boys didn’t seem to think we were having a hard time. We raised sugar beets, alfalfa, hay
and had ten acres of pasture, one cow, a few pigs and chickens, two sheep, and two horses.
It was a very rich experience for me to be raised on a small farm and learn to hunt and fish and
trap our food.
Now that I’m older, I look back on my past life and I can see the protecting hand of our
Heavenly Father in protecting us boys from tragedy.
(This is being recorded on the second day of January 1972.)
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I remember at one time that we had a box of rifle shells; 30-30 shells. We took an ax and went
down to the railroad track. We layed these shells on the track one at a time and hammered them
off with the back of the ax. Never once did we get a scratch. I feel now that if I should try to do
such a thing, now that I know better, that the first shell that I hammered off would probably
injure us or kill us.
We also took pieces of pipe, a foot long to two feet long. We put powder inside of the pipe,
screw a plug in each end, and set it in a bonfire, and when the fire had heated the pipe hot
enough, it would cause the pipe to explode. Some farmers plowing in their fields two miles away
said they heard pieces of this pipe whiz past them. I surely feel that we were in great danger, but
through the protecting hand of our Heavenly Father we were protected.
One time I remember we had a pipe that was about two f e e t l o n g ; w e filled it with powder.
We didn’t have a plug to screw in the back end of it, only on the front end, so we drove a wood
plug inside in this piece of pipe, set it in a bonfire, and when it exploded, it blew the wood plug
out of the back of the pipe. and acted as a rocket. And it raised about four of five feet off the
ground, went about a mile and a half and landed in a sugar beet field. We saw it all the way.
And it went so fast that a man out hoeing sugar beets tried to dodge this little piece of pipe which
didn't come very close to him at all, but the pipe hit the ground before the man could even start
to dodge.
The townspeople in Sugar City, Idaho nicknamed my brother and I “Dynamite Mills." You can
see why.
One day we took one of these pipes and filled it with powder, and we screwed a plug in each end
and laid it on a fire by the side if the railroad tracks. We laid on the opposite side of the tracks
from where this was burning, and as the pipe became hot and, we thought, about ready to go off,
to our surprise a little work car came down the track with six or eight men on it. And it scared us
very much because we were afraid this would go off when they got even with it.
We didn't know whether to flag them down or to let them go on passed. We decided as boys that
we would let them go on past and hope it wouldn't go off while they were even with it. We held
our breaths as they came closer to the explosive, very much afraid, and they got passed about
fifty feet, and the pipe exploded making a big cloud of smoke and a very large hang; and pieces
of pipe whizzing in every direction.
The workmen looked back but were going so fast down the track that they didn’t even stop--they
just kept on going, and we run away from this particular Incident as boys will, And I feel once
more the power of our Heavenly Father was with us and protected other people as well as us.
At another, time in the when the water was real high in the Teton River, my brother and I were
down by the river as we were very often and we decided to build some rafts and go down the
river.
The river was high and running real fast, and it was really dangerous, and our Heavenly Father
I’m sure, was with us in this.
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I found a bunch of logs tied together about four feet each way but was quite thick so it stood up
high above the water when I placed it in the river.
My brother found some one-inch boards and criss-crossed them and made a raft on which he got
on. We started down the boiling water, and his raft s t a r t e d g o i n g to pieces - one board at a
time would be washed away. Pretty quick he was only standing on three or four boards, and he
started to sink. He got clear up to his waist in water, and he gave a big lunge for shore and swam
to shore, and, of course, laughed at him being on my high and dry raft.
But my raft at the next bend came straight in toward the bank, and a limb sticking out from the
bank caught the top of my raft as it washed toward the bank, turning it upside down, and I was
thrown under the raft in the boiling water, the opposite side of the river.
I managed to get out from under the raft and cling to the branches and get in to shore. But now I
was on one side and he was on the other side of the river., and the river was high.
As I stood up, I noticed cramps in my stomach. I couldn’t even stand straight. But I was an the
opposite side of the river from our home, so I was the one that had to swim across the river, And
I found a place where it looked like it would be a good place to swim.
My brother called to me in encouragement. 1 jumped in the water, and i managed to swim across
without doubling up with cramps as the water was very cold early in the spring. And once again I
feel that our lives were spared.
A little later in our lives (I must have been about fifteen; my younger brother Ray was about
twelve) we had a dog that had been with us all of our lives while in Idaho, and it came down with
hydrophobia, a very, dreaded disease, And my brother was bitten with this dog, and I had a
scratch on my hand, and I didn’t know that the dog had hydrophobia, but I was playing with the
dog with a ball. And he’d go get the ball with his mouth with saliva dripping out of his mouth
and bring it back to us – didn’t act quite natural but still played with it.
And I'd picked this ball up with this hand of mine (or scratch on my hand), and the saliva would
get right in the sore from playing with the dog.
And then a day or two later, we noticed that the dog was getting very bad, so we tied him up, and
the city marshal had us let the dog die of hydrophobia before they'd send the head in to be
checked on to see what kind of hydrophobia it had. And then they'd make a serum and send it
back to us to be inoculated against the hydrophobia.
It took them, I believe, twelve days to get an answer back on this dog's head and get a serum to
us. Fourteen days is the incubation period for getting h yd rophobi a, no r m al l y. And we were
quite nervous about it. But we prayed to our Heavenly Father to protect us, and we each took the
treatment for hydrophobia which was just being developed and had not been on the market very
long. And once again our lives were spar ed in that we di d not come down with hydrophobia
before this treatment was given to us.
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About this same time, I received a Patriarchal Blessing from Patriarch Donaldson who lived in
Salem near Sugar City, This blessing was given in the Rexburg Tabernacle one Sunday, I
remember.
And in it he told me that I would prophesy even as a boy of things which would shortly come to
Pass. And a few years later, I was called to go on a mission in Michigan; Northern States
Mission.
Noah S. Pond was my mission president, And while there, I made a prophecy to a little group in
Pontiac, Michigan that we had baptized and converted to the Church that they would be tried and
tested, and if they did not watch, some of them would leave the Church.
I came back a few months later, and they told me this had truly come to pass; that they had.
really been tried and tested, and they had a11 remained faithful.
Now I’m almost sixty-four years of age and about, ready to retire from my work. I’ve been a
watchmaker most of my life. I went to the St. Louis watchmaking school in St. Louis, Missouri
to learn the trade. And now I see the hand of our Heavenly Father in my life in helping me in all
that has happened to me.
I am thankful for my wife, Helen, and for a lovely family which are a11 active and faithful to the
Church. And I am thankful for the testimony of the gospel which I have - that I know that it is
true, and that our Heavenly Father oversees conditions for the benefit of those who try to do his
will and. keep his commandments.
I would like to give this advice to my children , the same as my mother gave to me: To be clean
and pure in your life, keep the Word of Wisdom, and attend your Church meetings, and attend to
your prayers, and no good gift will be withheld from you, and you will be blessed in your lives
as I feel. that I have been blessed.
Taken from a tape recording made 2 Jan 1972
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