In the early summer of 1884, the big Joseph Robison family with their slow teams and wagons were moving westward along the road from the state of New York. They had joined the Latter-day Saints and were headed for Nauvoo in the state of Illionois. As they traveled near the shore of Lake Michigan, word came to them that the Prophet Joseph Smith had been martyred, and that it would not be safe for then to go on. They stopped for the time being at a place called Crete, which in later years was to be included in the suburbs of Chicago.
It was here in Crete, four years later, on December 21, 1848, that our mother, Adelia Robison, was born, the twelfth child in a family of thirteen children. This was the happy place of her early childhood, and she carried its sanctified memories through all the years of her life. She often spoke of how she loved to hear the bells of the cows as they went slowly to and from their pastures morning and evening in Crete.
When she was six years old, her people sold their farm at Crete for $2,200, sewed the old-style greenbacks up in the lining of her mother's petticoat, fitted themselves out with strong teams of horses and oxen, loaded their equipment into three or four wagons and headed off across the wide plains for Salt Lake Valley. Little Adelia watched the sun sink from ahead of them every night, and cried for the time when they would surely come to the edge of the earth and drop off where the sun had gone.
When they reached Salt Lake City, they paid tithing from the money received from their farm and were advised by President Young to go south to Fillmore, where fifteen families had built a fort, for Fillmore was in the heart of the wild, Indian country. Awakening one morning, she saw near the house a wagon which had not been there the night before, and with eager curiosity to know what was in it, she climbed up on the wheel and looked into the deep box. In the bottom of the box lay two dead men, Brothers Brown and Call, who had been brought in by a searching party from where they had been killed by the Indians. The arm of one of them had been cut off because he fought so hard for his life.
It was difficult, after this terrible shock for Adelia to get right on the question of Indians, but she learned later to talk with these Pauvants, to see the good in them, and to hope for the time when they would awaken from their degradation and become a clean and beautiful people.
Her father was the first one to build a house outside the fort; it was a strong house with very thick walls and is still in use. Industry and hard work was the watchword with the Robinsons, and Adelia learned at a tender age to card wool, to spin and knit, to make candles and soap, and to sew with needle and thread. When she was little more than a child, she was teaching a school of other children in one room of her father's house.
When she was about fifteen, she heard her brother, Lonnie, speak so often of a boy called Platte Lyman, that her curiosity impelled her to ask which one of the boys was Platte. They had corralled some horses near her home, and when Lonnie came to the house for a drink, he pointed out for his sister the boy among them that was Platte Lyman.
That was her first sight of him, but when they were eighteen, and he was called on a mission to England, she went with him as far as Salt Lake City, where she was married to him in the Endowment House on May 18, 1867, the Ceremony being performed by President Brigham Young. She returned to Fillmore and lived with her parents until her husband's return.
From the frontier at Fillmore, where she had lived from the latter part of her childhood, she went with her husband to build up a second fronteir at Oak City, to be the wife of Oak City's first bishop, and to meet the demands of poverty and went while he filled a second mission to England. In this new wilderness, she grasped more of the precious lessons which are taught only in the school of stern adversity.
The hardest demands which Oak City made of her was when it took from her three of her four children. Leaving the three little graves behing her, she was desperate to get away from Oak City while she could before losing her remaining child. This, more than anything else, reconciled her to the idea of moving far away to the south and facing the unknown dangers and hardships of the San Juan county in the southeastern Utah.
In 1880 she came to her third frontier--more wild, more remote, and more thick with peril and hardships than the first two. Beyond the frail log barriers of the fort in Bluff lurked more danger than had ever menaced her two former homes. With no trees in the fort for shade, the fierce sun poured down its heat on the white sand, half blinding anyone who went outside the door. When the wind blew, which was frequently, it beat in through a thousand loose chinks to sift over everything inside. When it rained, the muddy water dripped from the dirt roof for hours after the storm had passed. Anything in the way of refrigeration was undreamed of; pure, cold water was conspicuous for its absence, and their hard-earned food could be kept from spoiling but for a little while. They had nothing but tough cottonwood to burn in their stoves. The limited yard space in the fort afforded no privacy.
They had an irregular delivery of mail coming about once a month with freight teams from Colorado. Prices were high, cash painfully low, and all kinds of supplies difficult to get. Stern necessity had to devise ways of surviving-ways which had not been known before in the humble dwelling where she lived after the fort was broken up. She taught her children the gospel by songs and by stories, by precept and by determined example. Her dear voice is not recorded on any phonograph record where it can be reproduced, but it is engraved on the imperishable tablets of memory in the hearts of her children. These undying songs, these impressive teachings, accomplished without the advantage of school education, but with a heart full of faith and love, constituted the big work of her life. They are the precious offerings she brought forth from her tribulations to place on the altar for her loved ones.
The family moved back to Millard County in 1884, and returned to Bluff in 1891. When she was old and weary and her faithful companion had gone to his reward, she plodded on still, facing another frontier, the fourth frontier, of her life, when she came and pitched her tent and engaged to do what she could for the new settlement at Blanding, where some of her children had settled. She had two children when she came to Bluff, four when she moved to Scipio, and six when she returned in 1891 to Bluff.
In all these moves and changes and hardships she carried on still in her services to the church she loved, and for which her parents had sacrificed so much before her. She died in the harness where she had worked from childhood. She was acting as a Relief Society teacher when, on February 21, 1909, she fell with pain on the door step of a home she went to visit, and in a few hours she was dead.
Her body rests on the gravel hill above Bluff, and beside her is the body of Platte Lyman with whom she had made her most resolute effort to magnify the callings which had been made of her by the servants of the Lord (Lyman 256-260).
