Heinrich Hug and Jacob Tobler: From Switzerland to Santa Clara, 1854-80

View PDF

“Not a day passes over the earth,” Charles Reade wrote, “but men and women of no note do great deeds, speak great works and suffer noble sorrow. Of these obscure heroes, the greater part will never be known till that hour when many that were great shall be small and the small great.” Two of these “obscure heroes,” Heinrich (later Americanized to Henry) Hug and my great-grandfather, Jacob Tobler, became part of a large throng who accepted Mormonism in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and then “gathered” to Zion to help populate and pioneer the Great Basin Kingdom. 

Both men were German-speaking Swiss—Hug from Canton Zurich and Jacob from tiny Protestant Appenzell ausser Rhoden in eastern Switzerland—who had joined the LDS church during its first decade in Switzerland in the 1850s. Both contributed to the Mormon harvest of souls there that would eventually number in the thousands of converts, many of whom, like themselves, would eventually leave the homeland for America. Hug had converted first, having been baptized with several of his family on 31 January 1853 by the pioneer missionary into that part of Switzerland, George Mayer. 

For the next five years Hug roamed the Protestant cantons—they were not admitted into the Catholic ones—in search of converts, keeping a careful and complete record of the 201 souls he was able to bring into the fold. Jacob Tobler and his first wife, Anna Katherina Preisig, were listed as numbers 167 and 168 of those which he either baptized, confirmed, or both, having submitted on 10 August 1856 while Hug was on a swing through the eastern cantons. Even though he had long wanted to emigrate and several of his extended family, including his mother and four brothers, had emigrated to Utah already in 1854, Heinrich acceded to Mayer and his successors’, John L. Smith’s and Jabez Woodard’s, requests to remain to continue what they correctly assumed would be an astounding missionary success while providing vigorous and informed leadership for the growing Swiss flock. Because he had traveled as a missionary for four years, Heinrich knew virtually every member in Switzerland. By 1858, however, he was permitted to leave and led a group of Swiss Saints to Utah a year later, settling for the time being in Salt Lake City in 1860 prior to the call to southern Utah. 

Jacob’s achievements were more modest as he and his wife became integrated members of the Herisau branch from 1856 until their departure with a sizable contingent in 1861. It would take them most of that year to make preparations, cross over to Liverpool, the Atlantic Ocean and most of America before arriving in Salt Lake City in the fall just a few days before October’s general conference, where both the Hug and Tobler names were read out as part of the 300 plus delegation being sent to strengthen the “Cotton” Mission in Dixie, the southwest corner of Utah. They were to be part of the 85-member Swiss Company sent to strengthen Jacob Hamblin’s barely-established Santa Clara settlement. 

It does not appear that at the beginning of their pioneering experience in Dixie that either Henry or Jacob was chosen for any significant leader ship role, although given Hug’s church background, achievements, and adequate knowledge of the English language—gained in an earlier visit to England—that seems somewhat surprising. Leadership was entrusted to their mutual friend and fellow missionary, Daniel Bonelli, presumably because his ability to speak English was somewhat better than Hug’s, but within a year Bonelli also disappears from the leadership scene. Both Henry and Jacob settled into the community, eventually living across the street from each other not far from the church in the middle of town for most of eighteen years on what is now Santa Clara Boulevard. 

We do not know the details of their association except that, diarist and poet that Hug was—he began keeping a comprehensive journal in 1838— he included at least two poems of comfort and consolation on the occasion of the deaths of two Tobler baby girls. But this record, notwithstanding its 279 double-spaced transcribed pages for the period until 1879, is fragmentary and uneven. Many pages of the original are no longer legible; parts of his life we know little about. Church records show that Jacob was chosen to confirm the oldest Hug child, Fridolin Walter, and court records note that after Henry and the rest of the Hugs left Santa Clara, Jacob represented them on legal matters concerning their property in court. 

Sinfully—for this descendant historian—Grandfather Jacob either did not keep a journal or it has been lost, but for thirty years after 1875 he served as Santa Clara ward clerk and later as a counselor in the bishopric. As such he recorded data about himself and his family as well as summaries of his own numerous sacrament meeting talks revealing, among other things, his philosophy of life, his understanding of Mormonism, and his continued joy in being in Zion, even in Dixie. In addition, I have relied on a few documents, including a short unpublished history of Jacob and Barbara Staheli Tobler by their daughter-in-law Cecilia Ence Tobler, the remembrance of older living family members, the 1959 published Hug Family History, and a number of WPA oral histories done during the Great Depression. 

In any event, once in Santa Clara, the lives of the two men and their wives tended in opposite directions. Already sometime during the decade of the 1860s, but certainly by 1871, Hug had become thoroughly disillusioned with Mormon theocratic leadership, especially church leaders in St. George, but also with Brigham Young. Similarly, he completely lost his faith in Mormonism, was “cut off from the church” the year the St. George temple was dedicated in 1877, and felt increasingly like a pariah in this Mormon-dominated community. Although he yearned for the beauties and freedoms of his Swiss homeland and rued his departure, he eventually settled in Oregon where he lived out his days with a new secular philosophy of life. His years associated with Mormonism and Utah became an incongruous chapter in the later Hug family history written by descendants who not only were not Mormons but knew little about the church or its former influence upon their family. 

For Jacob, the Santa Clara experience was vastly different. After arriving there, he participated fully in building the community. Unlike many others, he never left Mormonism and never wanted to. Already in 1865, like many in Dixie, he entered into plural marriage and eventually sired twenty-one children by three different wives, Barbara Staheli, Barbara Hafen Willi, and Rosina Reber Staheli. By 1874 he had become something of a community leader in the introduction of the United Order of Enoch and presumably followed the lead of Bishop Edward Bunker in making a total commitment. 

In 1877 at the age of forty-four, he entered the ward bishopric, a position of trust and respect in the community, serving first with Marius En sign, for whom he named one of his sons, George Ensign, and then after 1884 with his next-door neighbor, John G. Hafen, the younger brother of his third wife. Most important, he became the founding Saint for well over 5,000 descendants, virtually all of whom became committed Latter-day Saints. 

No one who knew the young Heinrich Hug in Switzerland in the latter half of the 1850s would have dreamed that his relationship to Mormonism would end with disaffection. He had been raised in the small town of Weiningen in the shadow of Zwingli’s Zurich. George Mayer had gained access to the family through Heinrich’s brother, John, who had been baptized earlier in Basel. His family was respected in this half-Protestant, half-Catholic town noted for its wine, his father having served for ten years as the town’s recorder. Other local families, like the Bryners and the Mathis, whom Paul Savage has so thoroughly researched and lovingly described in his family history, were part of the same group to whom Mayer brought Mormon ism. Though still young and single, Heinrich—along with other members of his family—appear to have been religious seekers in the true sense of the word. They were dissatisfied with their current religious life and may even have investigated the Baptist faith before Mormonism came along. 

Shortly after baptism, Heinrich was ordained to the LDS priesthood and began his extraordinary four-year ministry which would doubtless have made him better known among Latter-day Saints had he remained true to the faith. His own meticulously kept record shows that he labored first in and around Zurich, recording his first baptism—Jakob Schaufel berg—in 1854. In the spring of 1855 he confirmed nearly a dozen converts in Canton Thurgau who had been baptized by the Bonelli brothers, George and Daniel, both powerful missionaries themselves, close around their home near Weinfelden, as well as a person or two in nearby St. Gallen. But most of his converts in 1856 were fellow Ziirchers like himself or South Germans, temporarily living in Zurich. His labors also took him to other cantons such as Schaffhausen, Appenzell, Bern, and even into the border canton of Neuchatel where he enjoyed unusual success and helped build up the branch at St. Imier. Whenever missionaries were allowed to preach—mostly in Protestant cantons—and in spite of constant harassment by police, zealous pastors, and some citizens, Hug went there. It was during one of his “eastern” walking tours in the late summer of 1856 that he met and baptized Jacob and Katherina Tobler. Their lives and those of his descendants became changed forever. But that was not true for many of his converts, by any means. At least forty-two of his 200 baptisms were cut off (“ausgeschlossen”) before they ever left Switzerland. 

Besides being an active, full-time missionary and local leader, first as branch then district president in Zurich, Hug served as a member of the leadership of the mission that included John L. Smith, Smith’s successor, Jabez Woodard, both of whom would later settle in St. George, the Bonelli brothers, and Ulrich Stucki and Ulrich Biihler, early converts from Canton Bern. At one mission leadership meeting, as recorded in Woodard’s journal, Hug bore a strong testimony of the gospel. “He said he knew he should have the spirit of the Lord while he did what was right.” His journal for those years contains numerous poems and entries redolent of faith, testimony, and enthusiasm. 

It was not easy being either a missionary or a member in those days. In spite of its vaunted reputation for freedom, real religious liberty was hard to come by in nineteenth-century Switzerland. In Zurich authorities repeatedly and routinely refused the Saints permission to hold meetings and it was not uncommon for Saints wherever they lived to walk 8-10 miles to attend meetings when and where they could. Woodard recorded, for example, how a Brother Johannes Alder in Herisau, Appenzell a.R., al though financially better off and respected than most Saints, was stoned by a mob and charged with (1) reading the Bible with three friends, (2) lodging Saints in his home, and (3) hiding missionaries. He was fined thirty shillings—a considerable sum—by the local magistrate. Woodard cap tured the challenges the missionaries, including Hug, faced those days in his entry for 1 January 1858: “[It is] not very pleasant when a man expects every time the door opens in a meeting to see a policeman coming to arrest you.” 

Hug performed other services for the new Saints. In 1857 he was asked to accompany President John L. Smith in leading a group of emigrant Saints to Liverpool, one of the first Swiss contingents to leave. There he became acquainted with church leaders in England, including Elder Orson Pratt, labored with a new German convert, Karl G. Maeser, who had only recently fled his native Saxony, had his picture painted with him, and preached—sometimes in halting English—to congregations of English Saints. It was undoubtedly his first trip to England and initiated him not only into the details of the emigration process, but to the European Mission leadership. It was, therefore, not surprising that in spite of his limited English language ability, he was later entrusted with his own emigrant company in 1859. 

In a letter to the Swiss Saints and published in their Mormon periodical, Der Darsteller (The Representative), in 1858, Hug announced already in March that he—”the first,” he said, “was now being the last”—would indeed, finally realize his “long-cherished wish” to be “carried by the waves of the Atlantic to Zion.” He also felt a strong need to leave his testimony with his fellow Swiss Saints. “At the time of his entrance into the Church,” he wrote, “its genuineness [Achtheit] was as clear as the noon-day sun.” He then explained that he had searched “for years and in different forms” for the “path of salvation” (Weg des Heils). He concluded his warm and friendly letter by stating that in the beginning he had merely “believed on the prophets of the dispensation,” but that belief had turned to certainty (“Mein Glaube wurde zur Gewissheit”). He hoped, he wrote, “to remain eternally in this truth.” Such in brief is a summary of Hug’s four-plus productive but turbulent years as a Latter-day Saint missionary in Switzer land. 

Jacob Tobler also labored off-and-on some four and a half years in his native land before emigration. The flourishing Herisau branch, some five miles from their home village of Schonengrund, welcomed him and Kath erina as its nineteenth and twentieth members. Unlike Hug, he did not serve a full-time mission but aided the missionaries as they came into the territory. In his journal Jabez Woodard recorded that on 31 October 1857 he “stayed the night with Brother Jacob Tobler” and then ordained him a teacher the following day. Ten days later Woodard was a Tobler guest again; Jacob then accompanied him to a meeting—perhaps one he had arranged—with the Abraham Webber family in a neighboring town where “we have liberty.” Two months before in August 1857, “the authorities in the Canton of Appenzell [had] commenced persecuting the Saints, and sending some of the Brethren out of their native towns to stop them preaching Mormonism.” 

Neither Jacob nor Katherina had any luck interesting their own families—immediate or extended—in the gospel, either while they were there or when Jacob’s son William and later several grandsons returned at different times during the first half of the twentieth century to try again. For his own part, Jacob is recorded as having himself baptized seventeen persons and confirming another sixteen prior to their departure. In any case, he must had received the Melchizedek priesthood before 19 December 1859, the first recorded confirmation he performed. 

Like other European Saints both the Hugs and the Toblers were under considerable pressure to emigrate. One was not really a full-fledged Lat ter-day Saint if he or she was able and did not. To stay made it easier to fall away from the faith. As noted earlier, Heinrich had long wanted to emigrate to America even before be became a Mormon, a paradoxical attitude when one considers his later intense longing for his Swiss homeland after he began to be disaffected in Santa Clara. Heinrich’s journal, as well as a long and descriptive letter back to the editors of the Darsteller, give us a good idea about emigrant life aboard their ship, the Emerald Isle, and what emigrants that would follow could expect. In New York he was, for example, fascinated by the Castle Garden reception building, the efficient church organization to help them, and the rapidity with which emigrants with trade skills and English could quickly find work to tide them over the winter of 1859-60 and gain funds for the necessities of the trip west. He also reestablished his relationship with Karl G. Maeser, then doing missionary work in Philadelphia but sent to New York by George Q. Cannon to translate for him. Like themselves, Maeser was working to get funds to eventually travel to Zion. 

We know much less about the crossing from the taciturn Jacob. He and Katherina sailed with 945 other Saints on the large ship Monarch of the Sea on 16 May 1861, one of the last ships of the season. Most of the passengers were Scandinavian Mormons, but that were enough Swiss (88) to form one ward, the eleventh on board, under the leadership of Bishop Ignatz Willi, later the first husband of Barbara Hafen Willi Tobler, Jacob’s first plural wife. Their old friend and sometime guest, Jabez Woodard, was president of the group. They too had an uneventful ocean crossing but pushed on westward arriving at Florence, Nebraska, on 1 July 1861. There tragedy struck: Katherina Preisig Tobler contracted cholera and died. They had had no children in five years of marriage; Jacob was left to pursue their common dream alone, crossing the plains as part of the Sixtus E. Johnson company. His second wife, Anna Barbara Staheli, traveled in the same company. 

In 1860 Henry also experienced tragedy, but for him it came at the end of the journey. Soon after arriving in Salt Lake City both Henry and his wife Maria contracted mountain fever from which she died. In addition, they lost two small sons to death, one in Switzerland and one later in Salt Lake City. 

According to Hug family tradition, Henry had already on his arrival in 1860 encountered disappointments with Zion and wondered why his family had not warned him. What he had seen was “a severe shock to his Swiss ideals of democracy and justice,” both principles to which all of the Hugs were fiercely committed. This may be so, but there is little support for this view in Hug’s journal, at least for the early years in Zion. 

He soon married again, this time another young Swiss woman, Anna Mtiller, whom he had undoubtedly known in Switzerland, but met later at his mother’s home—next door to his own—in Salt Lake City. They were later married and traveled with the group to Santa Clara together. 

According to Tobler family tradition, the widower Jacob Tobler, like many others, was counseled by church leaders, even Brigham Young, not to go to Santa Clara, where he had been called, without a wife. Married couples and families were what was needed in pioneer Utah. Jacob remembered the two-year younger woman from Landschlacht Branch in Thurgau, Anna Barbara Staheli, who had been part of their group from Switzerland to Utah. She had found an unhappy job with an English family in Mill Creek when he came calling and, according to family lore, would even marry him to escape it. They were then married on 18 October 1861 along with other Swiss couples in the Endowment House just a few days before the trek south began. 

Life in Dixie in the early 1860s was trying and primitive. The natural contrast with Switzerland, especially lush, green eastern Switzerland with its richly verdant pastures, vineyards, fields, and forests, that had been their home, must have been striking. Still, they were now out of Babylon, away from persecution and ridicule, and helping build the Zion society; to most of them that mattered most. 

The 1860s were the most difficult years. There was the lack of housing, the resorting to dugouts and caves, the floods, and the constantly-ruined ditches which had in late 1861—and would again—demand heavy and repeated labor and care. Water would make the western desert blossom as a rose, but it needed to be carefully husbanded and controlled. Usually, there was too little of it, causing contention among communities and strife among Saints; sometimes there was too much and it became a destructive force which savaged their common handiwork in a flash. This was, unfortunately, true both for the Santa Clara and Virgin rivers. According to the minutes of the Santa Clara Irrigation Company, both Henry Hug and Jacob Tobler were ditch shareholders and regularly contributed their share of work and money to keep it intact and functioning. Neither appears to have been a “slacker” in the pioneering venture. 

But there was also much hunger, drought, disappointment, and contention in those early years. Edward Bunker, whom church leaders had called from Ogden in the fall of 1862 to preside over a growing community where the newly arrived neat-and-tidy Swiss with their garden culture were being harassed by the free-roaming cattle of the earlier settlers, lamented the economic condition. “At this time [1862],” he wrote in his “Autobiography,” “we endured many privations and hardships on account of dry seasons and loss of crops. I was obliged to haul my breadstuffs from the north for several years.” Most of the others, especially the Swiss, were too poor to be able to afford anything from the north and lived on what they could find locally, mostly pigweed. It was little wonder then that even in the late 1860s when Erastus Snow was traveling back to Dixie from Salt Lake City, he felt discouraged by the number of families he met traveling north, giving up on Dixie and looking for something better. Not everyone who was “called” stayed where they were sent. Still, for those who remained where they had been called, they were happy, as Jacob later said in testimony meeting, to be in the bosom of “apostles and prophets” to whom they were obedient. 

Neither Henry nor Jacob appear in the beginning to have played anything but supporting roles in building the community, although later on by the 1870s that changed for Jacob. This may have been, in part, and notwithstanding Hug’s earlier claims, because of their relative lack of ability in English; Harmon Gubler claimed later that the younger generation often had to interpret for their parents when visitors showed up in town. But it must have seemed like something of a slap in the face for Henry after all of his service and church prominence in Switzerland. Moreover, it is clear from reading the minutes of the St. George Stake that until well into the 1880s, and then only sparingly, Santa Clara people, generally, but especially the Swiss, were given little responsibility or authority within the church. Only Edward Bunker and Marius Ensign, neither Swiss, appear to have spoken for or represented the community. This may be only one of several historic sources of discord—irrigation water distribution was the main one—between the two communities and the traditional St. George condescension toward the misnomered Santa Clara “Dutchmen.” In any event, the legible parts of Hug’s journal are silent about these matters while church records show that he only blessed one child—not his own—in February 1863 and never performed another church ordinance during the remaining sixteen years he lived in Santa Clara. He did, however, gain a Lieutenant’s commission in the local militia in 1865. 

Hug’s sensitive poetry—written mostly in High German or with an occasional piece in the Swiss dialect (Schwyzerdutsch) and often set to familiar Swiss melodies—exudes in the 1860s a sense of joy and gladness about being a Latter-day Saint in Zion. In “The Happy Circumstance” (“Der gluckliche Stand”) he fairly explodes with happiness. “The joy in my heart is great,” he wrote, at not being a prisoner of the material world, but being a member of “Christ’s great army” with “Brigham as its head.” 

At about the same time—many of the poems are not dated but presumably in the mid-1860s—Hug wrote a spright, whimsical tribute to the Santa Clara River entitled “A Joyous Little Word to the Santa Clara” (“Ein freundliches Wortchen an den Santa Clara”). The Swiss, he tells the ani mated river, will, because of their industry and experience growing grapes and making wine, make the river beautiful and famous. “The vineyards will become the river’s most beautiful decoration.” 

Then in 1866, speaking for the Swiss scattered throughout Utah—two of his brothers had settled in Providence in Cache Valley—he praises his countrymen and predicts that they will show God their gratitude for having brought them the gospel in the old country by being faithful “here in Utah’s meadows.” (“Wir Schweizer hier in Utah Auen, Wir wandeln treu, um Gott zu schauen.”) In “The Call to the Southern Mission,” written in February 1866, Hug summarizes in verse what the Cotton Mission was all about from Brigham Young’s perspective and heaps premature praise on the Swiss and their ability to achieve its purposes. 

During the late 1860s Hug’s attitude and spirit began noticeably to change. Already, presumably in late 1866, he had a serious bout with an extended, confining illness—we do not know exactly what it was—which he calls his “time of sorrows” (“Meine Passionzeit”). He is troubled, he says, not only by the sickness but because in this most difficult time, he cannot understand why God has left him alone (“In such troubled hours, my soul has become an orphan”). This theme of his impending death, however, becomes transformed into release from the pain and suffering of this world and the joy of meeting forefathers in a better life in his long meditative poem, “Premonitions of Death” (“Vorgefiihle des Todes”). 

By June 1867 Hug’s poetry began to reflect some early signs of loneliness and alienation. In “The Desire for Solitude” (“Lust der Einsamkeit”) and “Hope” (“Die Hoffnung”) he paints in somber hues a verbal picture of being a “pilgrim” in a “dark valley.” This theme is more fully and meta phorically developed in a later poem entitled “The Complaint of the Red Mountains” (“Klage der rothen Berge”). What Karl Larson later affectionately called the “Red Hills of November” were, Hug says, once green, beautiful, and full of wildlife like the beloved mountains of his native Switzerland but have become bare and desolate because of human sin. A simi lar fate has come to him. Speaking through the abused red, bleeding hills, he lashes out: “so, people, don’t be so arrogant, through you much has been ruined, We bleed here still as a sacrifice, hear, Sinners, hear the word ring out.” 

In 1869 Hug reached age forty. His poem, “Life-Career” (“Mein Lebens Corrier [sic]”), written for his sister—probably Rachel Roulet who also lived in Santa Clara—vacillates between disillusionment and faith. He is struggling with himself. He confesses that in these years he has gained little of the world’s goods but is still happy to be “in Zion.” With family close by, he praises God for having brought him to this land, but the love for the gospel which characterized so many early poems has vanished. 

Hug’s talents as a poet were apparent and probably appreciated in the repeated times of sadness and death that plagued pioneer Dixie. He may have served the Santa Clara Swiss in much the same literary way as Charles Walker did the larger St. George community. Over the years, he must have written many epitaphs; some of those preserved are for the children of friends Jacob Tobler and John G. Hafen as well as for Lina Martha Stucki and Lydia Roulet. 

Neither Hug’s journal nor other available documents reveal fully the causes for the volcanic-like eruptions of bitterness, animosity, and rebelliousness which dominate his poetic writings throughout the 1870s, but conflict between the people of St. George and Santa Clara over water rights was high on the list. Karl Larson’s later judgment that “controversies arising from [the shortage of irrigation water, especially on the Santa Clara] have probably been more numerous in regard to that unpredictable stream than any other major tributary of the Virgin River,” seem to describe well the condition Hug decried. During the decade he vented his fury first at his fellow Santa Clara Swiss for their timidity and pusillanimity, at civil and church authorities in St. George, and eventually at all church authority, even Brigham Young. This he coupled with a growing skepticism about Mormons, Mormonism, and Zion which would first turn him and his family into local pariahs, then take them out of the church, and finally out of Santa Clara and Utah in 1879. 

In this vein, August 1871 was a particularly “productive” month. In “Santa Clara” and “Santa Clara: St. George’s Henpecked Husband” (“Santa Clara unter dem Pantofel von Seite der City of [sic] St. George”) he chides Swiss friends—including presumably Jacob Tobler—for their sub mission to the “despotic”—written in huge letters—abuse of power by St. George and their wholesale betrayal of their Swiss love of freedom and the rights that belong to free citizens, but especially to the Swiss. They have, he says, become “obedient slaves,” their sense of right and freedom dead. The Swiss of Santa Clara—unlike the historic victorious warrior heroes of the old country—have gone down to ignominious defeat. Just as Gessler tried to force his will on the quintessential medieval Swiss hero, Wilhelm Tell, so St. George authorities were using their “rights” and power in a “despotic, tyrannical and arrogant” manner against the people of Santa Clara. Those who, like himself, spoke up were ignored or silenced. Similarly in “Brigham Youngs Dream” he accuses the prophet of responsibility for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, a forbidden topic only whispered about in Dixie, and predicts that that shameful crime will haunt him throughout eternity. Presumably Hug had either not heard or not believed Brigham’s comment in St. George about the same time on 11 June 1876, as recorded by Charles Walker, that “as to the Mountain Meadows Massacre, if he [Brigham] had not been foiled by Judge Cradlebaugh and other federal officials, he would have hung every guilty person concerned in the bloody deed.” 

But what was happening inside Hug appears to be more than just indignation over water rights. Other poems, like “The Village of Weinin gen,” “Dixie in Utah,” “Looking Back,” “Longing for my former Swiss Homeland,” and “The Old Swiss Homeland,” are critical of the barrenness, the heat, the sand of Dixie (“Our little folk here in the South, knows this is no Eden”), and compared it unfavorably with the beauties and productivity of Switzerland as well as the happy memories of childhood. “There,” he sighed, “I dreamed my best dreams.” 

Most bitter and poignant are the writings which chronicle the loss of faith in Mormonism. In a longer epic-like poem also written in 1871 entitied “Deceived” (“Geteuscht”), he describes the spiritual journey that had brought him to Dixie and that had now become utterly anticlimactic. He had become, he said, “an empty house.” His long-standing hopes lay shattered, his once-firm faith weak and small. “Deceived spoke a still small voice, Deceived was the message from day-to-day.” Soon he could no longer stand the pain of this inner hymn; “the dream,” he wrote, “was gone.” 

In “An Apostate Swiss Mormon in Utah” (“Ein abgefallener Schweizer Mormon in Utah”) and “A Deceived Mormon in Utah” (“Der geteuschte Mormon in Utah”), neither of which is dated but probably written some time in the 1870s, Hug gives full expression to his loss of faith in Mormons and Mormonism. “Mormon doctrine just didn’t pass the test” (“die Mor monenlehre halt nicht stand”); it was only “empty phrases” similar to “morning dew” or “soap bubbles.” Mormonism was a “pious delusion” (“frommer Wahn”) and Zion a place where “priestly deception” (“Pfaffen trug”) blooms and the “hypocrite can find his happiness without much trouble.” “If,” he concluded, “you love virtue and are not afraid of the light, go to the heathen; they are better.” 

All the same, in finally taking leave of Utah in 1879 both Hug and his wife have, Anna, revealed mixed, even contradictory feelings. They were leaving behind their “foolish, pious faith” but also many happy memories of good times and good people. Anna, especially, poured out her heart to Susette Bosshard Hafen, the first wife of John G. Hafen, her “best friend and loyal neighbor” with whom she had lived in “good harmony” for eighteen years. She and Henry would both, they said, remember what they had learned in Dixie. 

Santa Ward membership records—probably in ward clerk Jacob Tobler’s own hand—record laconically what must have been especially painful for him, namely that on 5 September 1877, the year the St. George temple was dedicated, Henry and Anna Miiller Hug were cut off the church for apostasy. On 3 June 1879 the family drove their wagon out of town; Henry and Anna would never return. Family ties with Mormonism would be severed for well over a century. 

For Hug’s convert, neighbor, and friend, Jacob Tobler, the “joyous journey” continued and became better. Like Hug, he and Barbara established their home in Santa Clara, eked out a meager living, mostly by raising fruit and peddling it into the northern Utah communities, Pioche, and the Silver Reef as well as caring for the school house and keeping books for the ward for which he was paid an annual fee of $75. Never did the family ever gain many of the world’s goods. Jacob appears to have been more bookish and less worldly than some. Moreover, his spirituality, wisdom, and faith deepened noticeably as he became one of the community’s spiritual stalwarts. But, unlike the Hugs, by 1865 Jacob and Barbara entered into plural marriage, a practice that may have been at least as widespread in the town and among the Swiss as Larry Logue has shown it was in neighboring St. George. When Ignatz Willi died, Jacob took his widow, Barbara Hafen Willi, as his first plural wife; that marriage produced two sons, who grew to maturity, and two daughters who died in infancy before their mother herself was taken in death in 1875. Later, in October 1881 Jacob married another widow, Rosina Reber Staheli, by whom he fathered six children before she too died in 1900. Virtually all of the families’ children who survived were then raised in a relatively happy atmosphere by Barbara Staheli Tobler.

Adherence to the practice of plural marriage may have been not only an important barometer of one’s faithfulness but also de facto pre-requisite for leadership in the church, not just in Dixie but elsewhere. Charles Walker recorded in his journal that he heard President George Q. Cannon of the First Presidency say in St. George in April 1884 that “he did not feel like holding up his hand to sustain anyone as a presiding officer over any portion of the people who had not entered into the Patriarchal order of marriage.” 

Grandfather Jacob’s development into a tried and tested Saint in Santa Clara must have been similar to many. The memory of powerful spiritual experiences at the time of his baptism never left him. Neither did his love for the apostles and prophets, for whose guidance and society he had yearned even as a youth. 

Santa Clara records show Jacob as an active participating member and priesthood holder. Over the years he blessed numerous children and baptized, rebaptized, and confirmed many in the ward before he ever became a member of the bishopric. Previously, in 1874 he had, so Harmon Gubler remembered, with Bishop Bunker and Brother Hafen, enthusiastically pushed the introduction of the United Order of Enoch in Santa Clara. Both he and Barbara were rebaptized into the order, Barbara being confirmed by Apostle Erastus Snow. Presumably, like Bishop Bunker he “put in all [he] possessed,” though his amount must have been considerably smaller. But when the order broke down after about a year—”a dark day for myself and family,” Bunker called it—Jacob was apparently unwilling to follow his leader in the founding of Bunkerville, although his son Harmon would later move there in 1905. 

In 1877 not only did Jacob become a counselor in the bishopric with his friend, Marius Ensign, but was present at the dedication of the St. George temple and played with the Staheli Swiss band of which he had been a charter member. Already in the late 1870s, like most members of bishoprics, he spoke often in sacrament meetings, emphasizing his faith in the gospel, in the gifts of the spirit, his support for the church leaders, for the principle of tithing, the need for careful and accurate records, for teaching the gospel to the children, and for enduring to the end. 

Jacob Tobler lived to age 85 and died in November 1918. He and three of his wives are buried around the bend and up the hill from Santa Clara in the red and bleeding dirt. As noted earlier, there is now a sizeable posterity from these ordinary pioneers, most of whom are Latter-day Saints who love these ancestors and treasure their memory. Their gratitude, admiration, and affection know no bounds. He and his wives would undoubtedly take some pride in the number of their “jewels in the crown of eternal life,” his own name for his posterity. It is not known whether any of Henry Hug’s descendants are Latter-day Saints. 

For at least one of Jacob Tobler’s descendants, there is also a warm love and appreciation for Heinrich Hug. He was, after all, the one who originally brought the gospel to Katherina and Jacob; God touched their lives—and ours—through him. While he may have been guilty of pride and at times lacked humility, he also helped spread the gospel and build the kingdom and the community that nourished but also tried, chastened, and purified them all. Moreover, he passed on a record of Switzerland, of the introduction of Mormonism there, of life, his thoughts, his struggles, and his own perception of reality. Life in Dixie was, indeed, harsh and he was right: Santa Clara was no Scherzingen or Weiningen. Perhaps there was too much mixing of church and state in Utah and too much “unrighteous dominion,” even despotism, ostracism, and pettiness, and not just in St. George. Perhaps pioneer Dixie was too small and too stifling for some free and intellectual spirits and too much attention was being paid on temporal matters, and the spirit, at least of some, suffered. The speakers, Charles Walker lamented, talk “as they themselves feel not relying on the Holy Spirit for utterance. The congregations are very small and often time is taken up in items concerning the ditches, fences, fields, dams, stock, etc. I sometimes think if our meetings were devoted exclusively to the worship of God and feeding the Bread of Life to the Saints it would have better effect on the people.” In evaluating the contributions of each of these Swiss Saints, I feel a sense of sincere gratitude for both of these obscure heroes and am pleased that a juster and fairer Judge will decide their rewards.