5th Wife of Orson Pratt Brown:

Mary Angela Gavaldon Brown

Born: August 10, 1900 in Jiménez, Chihuahua, Mexico
Died: June 20, 1967 El Paso, El Paso, Texas

By her daughter Bertha E. Brown

 Remembrances of Angela Gabaldon

Mother to Silvestre Gustavo, Pauly, Bertha, Aaron, Mary, Heber, and Martha

"My Mother, Angela Gabaldon, was a 5’ 4" woman. She had very light brown hair. In her earlier years it had been dishwater blonde hair but now her hair was very goldish, golden brown hair. Her hazel eyes, big hazel eyes, and very, very fair. Mother was born in Jiménez, Chihuahua. She was of the Spanish and French origin but she was born a Mexican citizen. She was very fair and very lovely and she was well educated. She had read a lot and her education had been mostly in reading.

My father, Orson Pratt Brown, met her in El Paso, Texas when she was studying to be a nurse and working at a drug store. At this time my father had finished with the Mormon Exodus and had lost his four wives. His polygamy and his wives were all gone and he had been all alone for a couple of years. He was looking for a wife and found a very lovely young girl who was my mother Angelita Gabaldon. Angela was her name. Everybody called her "Angelita" her nickname. He formed his home with her in Ciudad Juarez. Then took her to Namiquipa [south of Dublan] also in Chihuahua. There later on he took her and took us there where four of us, Gustavo, myself, Pauly and Aaron into the colonies we had a little black ford. An old ford, which we soon traded in for a house, which was the house that we lived in for the rest of our lives that we lived in the colonies.

Daddy had to leave mother alone quite a bit because he still had business in Namiquipa village in Chihuahua, in the mines. There he worked with his older sons from his polygamy wives. He would go back and forth leaving a young beautiful woman with four children but it was a good secure place because it was all good Mormon people and my mother was starting to learn the religion.

Mary Williams befriended my mother and she was also married to a very good Anglo man. Mary spoke both languages and started working with my mother teaching her the gospel. My mother accepted the gospel very soon and she was able to translate the Pearl of Great Price into

Spanish along with Sister Williams. They would do a lot of work together like this translating the Book of Mormon and many of the church works. They would sit for many hours in the afternoons and translate from English to Spanish, mainly news that would come from S.L.C. My mother was made President of Relief Society very soon after her baptismal [March 30, 1929]. She carried through with the job of being President of Relief Society for many, many years, for as long as I can remember until her health gave up. She was director of drama and acts and plays. She was in charge of every youth activity that there was in the ward. There was not an operetta in the colonies. They had never heard of an opera or an operetta until mother came along. She would have the highest models in places that were available in Mexico City. She would bring the youth of the church and she would untiringly work with them in our living room, every night, practicing their parts and showing them how to act. They would put on some very, very well acted plays, operettas. My mother won the respect and love of the people in the colonies by her activity on behalf of the church. She tried to get the talent out of who ever it was. If it was an old man, an old woman, a mature woman, a young lady, a young girl, or a young boy. She would have them in the different plays. She would work and work hard, until that play was ready to be set.

People would come from the nearby towns of Casas Grandes, Olanatheas(sp), Viejo Cases Grandes, to watch those plays and many times they took them to Cases Grandes to show them there.

The thing I love most to remember about my mother is when I would see her riding sideways on a horse. She had such a royal way she would get up on those horses on the side and sit there real straight. My father had brought her some riding garb from El Paso and New Mexico. It was some type of leather clothing that she had the riding pants and boots and she had the riding skirts and hat. She would wear a riding jacket over her blouses and she would ride so straight. She’d go to Cases Grandes and to the Romney store to get groceries and things on her horse. She would look majestic. I always wanted to look dignified and majestic on a horse but I never did. It was just natural of her to do so.

I’ll never forget how many piggyback rides I got from Ashton and Preston Longhurst. "I’ll give you a piggy back ride if I can have a nice big thick slice of your mothers homemade bread." When we were coming from school we could smell that delicious bread that mother had just baked. Then he would give me a piggyback ride all the way from his home to ours. He’d get a big slice of hot bread with fresh churned butter and, oh, that was heaven to eat. Those boys had lost their mother when they were younger and they knew to appreciate my mothers bread.

My mother was a very, very active woman, a hard working woman. There wasn’t a thing Mormons knew how to make that she didn’t learn how to make them. She would can all the strawberries, raspberries, mulberries to make pies, grapes, peaches, apricots, pears, apples you name it and we had it in our orchard. Mother would put it up in jars she learned how to make jams and jellies and cajetas. She would take the quince and make cajeta that would last the year that we could slice with hot bread and butter and eat. There were always cookies in her cookie jar when we came home from school.

There were also many chores for us to do. When the milkman would milk the cows in the morning, they would take the milk directly to the dairy. But the milk that was milked at night we’d spread it out in big pans, big tubs and in the morning we’d take out with a big spoon or ladle. We’d take out the cream from the top and later we would churn it into butter. Every night we were to pump the water that was in the little porch near the kitchen and we were to bring 4-5 buckets of cold fresh water. We were also to bring the wood in. The wood was cut by the farm hands. Our obligation was to bring the wood inside the house in the box next to the wood stove. Mother had a big wooden box where we would put enough wood to warm the house up and to cook the meals.

There were many chickens and ducks and goats and lambs and dogs and cats and everything else to feed. Mother would never permit a dog or a cat to come inside the house. We had them all outside and when we went outside I remember mother having a big bucket with cracked corn or wheat to feed the chickens and how they recognized her and how they surrounded her. I used to love to go outside with her to help her because all those chickens would come right to us

Oh, now the summer time came. We thought, "Oh boy, now is the resting time and its picnic time and we can go have ourselves a good time." Oh, no, mother already had us registered for sewing lessons, embroidery lessons, crisscross lessons, you name it. We went to Sister Mary Williams' house and for 2-3 hours in the morning we took lessons from her then we took our lunches with us. We ate at noon and went right next door to Mrs. Ila Deloros, who was a retired Spanish grammar teacher that had arrived from someplace in the south and had come to live in the Mormon Colonies. She was a very refined woman at the time of Porfirio [Diaz]. She was very educated and this was what mother wanted us to learn, she didn’t want us speaking our Spanish half way or the way they taught it in the American schools or even at the Mexican school.

That doesn’t mean we didn’t go on picnics because mother took care that on Saturdays she would take us in the buggy. We would go to a real nice picnic to the river. She had chicken in different ways all the time she had all kinds of goodies for us to eat in the picnics. She always had a lot of good bread, pastries, fruit and vegetables; we would have a good time. She always loved the mountains very much.

It was just wonderful to live in those days when we could go up there in the mountains and feel so free. We’d sing, we’d sing so many beautiful songs. There is where my mother's stories came in, never in my life have I heard of a better storyteller. Everybody seemed to hurry up and do their chores at home, eat their dinner and come over to our house in the wintertime.

We didn’t have a fancy living room it was a small living room. We had large bedrooms because my 3 brothers took one bedroom and Grandma Mary, mothers mother, and then later on Mary and I had the other bedroom. Daddy had his own bedroom. The kitchen was very, very large with a real big black stove, a wood stove with a big crate of wood with a long, long table. You could sit 12 people on each side of the table with benches instead of chairs just a chair at the foot and head of the table.

I remember doing naughty things to mother. Mother would always turn me over to Daddy. If Daddy wasn’t around she would chase me. She would chase my brothers with a whip or with a piece of branch from one of the trees and that was our punishment. She’d get us, you can be sure your back and your legs were marked for a long time. I tried to stay away from my mother’s beatings because she was a very strong woman and when she would get angry she’d let me know it.

I remember one time that I had spilled the berries and she went after me with the whip. I was barefooted and came to a patch of slivers. There was no way I’d go in there I’d have slivers all over my feet for weeks. I knew she was coming, she was right behind me but I just stood there and folded my arms and when she saw I wasn’t gong to go into the slivers she stopped. I’ll never forget how she laughed at me. She laughed and laughed because I was between the sword and the wall, no way out. So she just gave me one little whip.

One day one glorious day I came home to find out that mother had delivered a baby girl. [June 15, 1927] That was a very happy time of my life. When I was able to go into the big bedroom and kiss mother I could see she had a big doll lying right next to her, her name was Maria Angela. She didn’t have any hair you could see, she was very white and she had big brown eyes. She was very, very fair and she was fatso. She was nice and cuddly and beautiful. But it was hands off the baby. I would have loved to grab her and dance with her. Played around with her but I didn’t know you didn’t do that with babies. Grandma Maria let me know very quick, if you want to see the baby you sit near the baby, you wash your hands. I had to comb my hair, wash my face, hands, and be at the cleanest if I wanted to sit near the bed where my little baby sister lay. Mother lay there so proud of her baby. Now I really felt happy because now I had a baby sister.

My Daddy was a very generous man. He was always giving of himself and of every thing else he had. He not only was the Bishop of the ward, the President, their "alto verde" as he called it, no he was not only that he was a doctor. Whoever had a pain, who had an ache, came to father to take care of it…. Not a penny, there was never a charge and daddy was always going to Casas Grandes to get medicines. He was always going to El Paso to get different types of medicines to kill the pain and to help. How many times they came to daddy to ask him because somebody was having a lot of trouble. Might have a baby and daddy was not home. Mother would get in that one horse buggy and there she goes without any experience, with out anything. Only to help, to be available, to boil water to have clean sheets. She would say to the maids, "Don’t worry about it, when the time comes (yo departo,) I’ll deliver your baby." And they’d say, "Oh no, no." And she’d say it as a joke but how many times it turned out true and scared her to death because she had to do it. Like I said when my father met her she was taking nursing lessons and she was going to nursing school and also working at a pharmacy in El Paso. She was a very young girl and she never learned anything about delivering babies or midwife or anything of the sort. But then she was to help the poor, to help the needy. Many times both of my parents were called blessed because of what they would do.

In my recollections of life, my mother was a woman that gave names to people she loved if she really loved a maid she would give her a name nobody else would recognize her by, but we in the family knew who she was because this is the name she would give them. I remember a little boy one of our maid had, Manuel, and she called him Ramon and the little boy could hardly speak. He would repeat that whole name and then he would get a sucker from my mother after he had repeated the name my mother had given him. She called another boy, one of the Ayala boys, Coco Fa Demacho(sp). That boy is a grown man now and everyone knows him by that name. O.K, she gave me the most beautiful name she could ever give anyone. Because of her French heritage and of how she loved the French people and French customs and the anthem for the French country is "La Marseillaise". Mother always told us with great pride of how Mexicans and Americans didn’t seem to have the pride or the dignity needed when you see the flag from your country. She would tell us many times how the Frenchmen when they would hear "La Marseillaise" they would stand up and put their hands up in the air and sing with all their might and with happiness they were free people. They were gay and they were smart and she thought that was the most beautiful hymn there was in the whole world because the people of that country and made it so beautiful, because they would respect it and become so gay and beautiful and full of dignity. This is what mother thought of me. She thought I was the most beautiful girl in the colonies. She gave me the name of "La Marseillaisa" by which I am known throughout these years. Anyone related to the family knows who La Marseillaisa is because she thought I was full of arrogance, pride, beauty, self-respect, adorable and any thing else you want to add to that.

            Composed by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle in79 was declared the French national anthem in 1795.

Let's go children of the fatherland, The day of glory has arrived! Against us tyranny's Bloody flag is raised! (repeat) In the countryside, do you hear The roaring of these fierce soldiers? They come right to our arms To slit the throats of our sons, our friends! Refrain Grab your weapons, citizens! Train your battalions! Let us march! Let us march! May impure blood Water our fields! This horde of slaves, traitors, plotting kings, What do they want? For whom these vile shackles, These long-prepared irons? (repeat) Frenchmen, for us, oh! what an insult! What emotions that must excite! It is us that they dare to consider Returning to ancient slavery! What! These foreign troops Would make laws in our home! What! These mercenary phalanxes Would bring down our proud warriors! (repeat) Good Lord! By chained hands Our brows would bend beneath the yoke! Vile despots would become The masters of our fate! Tremble, tyrants! and you, traitors, The disgrace of all groups, Tremble! Your parricidal plans Will finally pay the price! (repeat) Everyone is a soldier to fight you, If they fall, our young heroes, France will make more, Ready to battle you! Frenchmen, as magnanimous warriors Bear or hold back your blows! Spare these sad victims, Regretfully arming against us. (repeat) But not these bloodthirsty despots, But not these accomplices of Bouillé, All of these animals who, without pity, Tear their mother's breast to pieces! Sacred love of France, Lead, support our avenging arms! Liberty, beloved Liberty, Fight with your defenders! (repeat) Under our flags, let victory Hasten to your manly tones! May your dying enemies See your triumph and our glory! Refrain We will enter the pit When our elders are no longer there; There, we will find their dust And the traces of their virtues. (repeat) Much less eager to outlive them Than to share their casket, We will have the sublime pride Of avenging them or following them! Refrain

Mary Brown Hayden writes: "Mother loved Bertha and nick named her " La Marsellesa" which was the national anthem to France. Mother would play the record over and over and knew how the French people would love and respect their hymn. She also made a song for her it goes: 1. De las muchachas de Dublan (From all the girls in Dublan) -No hay nadie que me emparejo (There is none that can match me) -Ni Virginia, Ni Roquel (not Virginia or Rachel) -Menos esa Lupe, vieja (much less that old Lupe) 2. Porque me ha dicho Cipriano (Cypriano has told me) -Que no quiere verme flores en el pelo (He doesn’t want me putting flowers on my hair) 3. Chulapona, Chulapona— (Beautiful girl – Beautiful girl) -Eso dicen cuando pasa me persona! (That is what they sing when my I pass by)"

I said before mother had many talents. One of her greatest talents was being a good storyteller. In those days the church had not established a family night in which the member of the family participated and someone tells a story. But mother invented that all herself. Like I said, we had a very large rustic table in our eatery area, kitchen, dining room whatever, and it wasn’t just us that would hurry about dinner time and cleaning off that table. There was the Ontiveros and Moffats and Ayalas. Maybe others that would come to listen to mother's stories. Hector Spencer, Alberto Thayne, would come and sit around that big table. There wasn’t one story of the thousand and one nights that mother didn’t tell us. She could almost see those Arabians dressed up in their gallant outfits and their big horses. The open sesame- we could see that door opening in that big rock. We could see in our imaginations. Mother would carry us into those far away lands that we had never heard about and she would tell us stories about Greece, the great anka da(sp), Turkey, the Arabian nights in Arabian countries, the Jordanians, the Indians, Africans, the French, and she had such great knowledge of stories of literature of different countries, different poets that she would go one night from a faraway country back up there in Turkey the Great Constantinople that belonged to Greece and was taken away by the Turkish she would let us know about these faraway countries these far away people that we had never heard about and we just sat there with open mouths amazed at the beautiful stories that she would bring to life and enrich our simple lives in the colonies. The next night it would be a story from the Old Testament. And she in her very young experience in the Mormon Church was tickled to death to be able to read the Bible, to be able to look into books that had been forbidden to her all her life. A Catholic did not read the Bible, not in those days. But now mother had the Bible in her own hands and she could sit there and read and read. At night she would tell us from the beginning of the world, how the lord formed the earth, how he formed men and Adam and Eve, how we all came to this world. And every night it would be a different chapter, a different story. We learned to love and appreciate the Bible because of mother's stories. The stories maybe would’ve been told to us by school teachers, Sunday School teachers and primary teachers but they could never be told like mother told them. Seemed like in Sunday School and Primary you had to listen to them. Sometimes they were interesting and sometimes they weren’t. Sometimes they were confusing and when we would come and ask mother about a story a schoolteacher or a Primary teacher told us, she would straighten us up about that story fast. She would get her Bible out and that night she would tell us that story like it should have been told in the first place by the primary teacher that left a lot out or that just didn’t have the time or the talent mother had. This is the way we learned about how Jesus Christ was born and came to the earth to be our Savior. She didn’t leave out any details and as she told it to us little by little, night after night, it grew as part of our lives and we enjoyed this very much. My mother was a healthy woman the most part of her life until later on which I don’t want to remember. But as I was growing there was a healthy woman, a hard working woman, enthusiastic. She would sometimes, in the warm nights, put a tent luna outside in our yard. We didn’t have a pretty lawn or anything like that but we would be there under the stars and even the workmen, Hank Flores, Haz Sanchez, and others would come and sit around, stand around and listen to mother's stories of ancient customs and ancient times. We also were united in our child hood by the same group that would come listen to mothers stories and would enthuse us into going out and playing games like Run, Sheepy, Run. We had much older girls like Fefya(sp) Ontiveros, Estel , Juanita, Eugenia, the Moffats, the Longhursts, Hector Spencer, Marion, Elmo Robinson, Fletcher, others that would come. And true friends at that time of our life.

            Daddy's…[three previous] wives were already gone to the United States [between 1912 and 1916, except Elizabeth "Bessie" MacDonald who had died in 1904]… He had many children. There were 32 [34 total] of us and he took care of his duties with his wives and with his families. Now after so many years he comes back into the colonies as a Bishop in the church with a young beautiful wife. [The colonists] wanted to call her a Mexican and she would say, "Yes, I am Mexican," because she was born in Jiménez, Chihuahua, Mexico. She was a Mexican citizen, and she did descend from Mexican people who descended from French and Spanish… Mexican, French, Spanish, American, Anglo, one was just as good as the other to her…my father was a full-blooded [Anglo] English, Irish, part Dutch. Mother took people as they were and not because of the nationality or the blood that ran in their veins. She taught us to have love for everyone, and she sent us to school so that we would learn to respect and appreciate Mexico and the Mexicans, where we were born, raised and where we were being educated. We would learn about the good Mexicans, about the good Spaniards, about the good French, about the good Anglo, about the good Americans, and to learn to distinguish the difference between one and the other. {We were taught] that we were all sons and daughters of Christ, of God. Brothers and sisters of Christ and that there was no difference between one and the other unless our education, our actions, our deeds, made us different. That is where we differed one from another. [We lived] in among the families that had been Daddy's closest relatives through his [first four] wives… [We felt as though they were] hoping they could just erase us out of their minds. [With time they seemed to gain] some understanding of us, our problems later on, loving us through mothers example, through knowing mother and what a hard Relief Society worker she was and how many years she served the church as president of the Relief Society. She set her example to all of them; if you need help I am going to give you help. " I’m going to give the best I can regardless of what color, what nationality you come from." [Mother] lived by this and people knew they could come to her and trust her and father was very proud, very humble to see that his wife had become such a heroin in the colonies, a hard worker and set an example…

I slept alone in my little bed with Grandma Maria, Grandma "Waleta." God must have her on his side [though] she never did join the Mormon religion. She had her own religion. She lived the Catholic religion. She lived it like no one could live any one's religion. She was a God fearing woman. She was a loving Grandma she was just a little younger than Daddy and lived with us on many, many occasions. For many, many years and she was always mother's helper and mother's adviser. She kept us in line and she was loveable, so loveable she always had candy, cookies and she would call us there and give us little goodies and surprises that she had there for us. When she was making quesadero, which is a special Mexican cheese I remember her very well saying, "No, venga Bertha." That means don’t come here Bertha. Don’t you dare come here. That of course meant come here I’ve got something good for you. This meant that I was right there next to her with both my hands ready for that good hot cheese that would spread out and make threads and she would enjoy that so much that we’d just come and grab it away from her.

Grandmother Maria would be praying her mass her different prayers that she would read from her prayer books and then she’d make a little signal to me, now don’t come now, but I’d go and sit right next to her and hold on to her beads. When she saw I’d hold onto her rosary beads she’d reach out her hand in the back of her bed where she had a shoe bag where you would put many shoes and she had it tied to the back of her bed with many little bags. She knew just where she had peanuts, candy, cookies and different little goodies that she had to give us. She always had a sweet disposition. I never saw Grandmother Waleta angry. She was a councilor. Many times I went to her for counseling before I dared talked to mother about things. Of course since I always felt so much closer to Daddy than to mother because Daddy had time for me and Mother just had too many chores and too many children to take care of. I remember in my most important subjects of life I went to him instead of to mother and asked him about problems of growing up.

Angela Gabaldon Brown died on June 20th, 1967 of a stroke in El Paso, El Paso, Texas at the age of 67. Angela was living with her daughter Mary Hayden and family. Angela is buried at the Evergreen Central Cemetery on Alameda in El Paso, Texas.

On January 20th 1968 Angela and Orson were sealed by proxy in the presence of their children, Pauly, Aaron (Aron), and Mary in the Mesa Arizona Temple.

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  Mayo 10 - Dia de la Madre

 A - aunque tu no estas ya aqui y por eso no nos vemos,

N - no por eso te alvidamos ni nunca te olvidaremos.

G- gusto nos da que ya estas ozando tu merecido,

E - en un ambient mejor que el que nosotros tenemos.

L - la llamada que yo esfrero parece que se dilata; pero

A - aqui la espero paciente al fin seguro vendra.

           Angela

B - Buena yo, delio de ser si quiero ir a dond estas.

R - Recuerdon que adi aprendi en la escuela del domingo,

O - de lo contrario entonces con toda seguridad

W -Will I go to another place where I never will see you?

N - No, no quiero pensar en eso deho, debo de ser buena para lograr mi deseo.

 

                        Recuerdo a mi querida amiga Angela G. Brown

                        en este dia 10 de Mayo 1967

                                Maria L. Williams

This remembrance was found secured to Angela's tombstone, mounted on cardboard with plastic film over it to preserve the words from the elements.

 

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Angela's Genealogy

Father: Tomas Gabaldon, born 7 March 1874 in Ciudad Jiménez, Chihuahua, Mexico

Mother: Maria Duran de Holguin, born 29 May 1876, also in Ciudad Jiménez, Mexico

Paternal Grandparents: Mariano Gabaldon
Elena Gabaldon

Maternal Grandparents: Pedro Duran
Josefa Holguin

Siblings:
Rafael Gabaldon 24 October 1895 Ciudad Jiménez
Gonzalo Gabaldon 1897 Ciudad Jiménez
Concepcion Gabaldon 8 December 1898 Ciudad Jiménez
Soledad Gabaldon March 1902 Ciudad Jiménez
Josefa Gabaldon 19 March 1904 Ciudad Jiménez

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Sources:

PAF - Archer files = Orson Pratt Brown + Angela Gabaldon

Lucy Brown Archer Book of Remembrance.