In November we left our home and went to Copenhagen. On the 5th of December the same year, we sailed for England with the first company of Mormon Emigrants that emigrated from Scandinavia. We landed safely at Hull. We then prepared to sail for America. We sailed on a sailing vessel, which travels much slower than a steamship. We were on the Atlantic eleven weeks and three days, and had very little to eat. They gave each of us a tin plate, tin cup, and a spoon when we started and we kept them as our own. Then a man came around with two large pails, one in each hand, and gave us our portions. Every other day we had split peas boiled without seasonings, and often burned at that. The next day we had barley prepared for food, and boiled the same way. The grown people had one cup each day, us children half a cup. Then we had what they called sea-biscuits. They were as large as a small saucer and were made of shorts or some course meal of some kind, and so hard we could only gnaw them, but we were glad to get the one each for the grown-ups and one half for children.

We had no water except what was carried on the ship, and they used to haul it up, out of the bottom of the ship every morning, and we could have only so much a day. I was seven years old at this time – the oldest child in the family and I used to take the little pail and get our allotment for he day. We never sat down to a table while on board the ship. Then one day a steam boat came and took us on board and we soon landed in St. Louis, Missouri. The day we got on that boat, I went to the kitchen door. Then is when I saw the first Negro woman, and she gave me a slice of white bread and a piece of roast beef, and a piece of pickled beet. I never tasted anything so good. I ran to Mother and gave her some of it, and she enjoyed it too.

While in St. Louis, we had better food. Then we went to some other state by rail, I think Iowa, and prepared to cross the plains. We traveled with ox teams, two yoke to the wagon. Some had three oxen and a cow, so as to have a little milk. There were two families to each wagon, so there was no chance for anybody to ride that could walk. I walked all the way and enjoyed it.

On the twenty-ninth of September, we arrived in Salt Lake City, stayed there a short time, then moved to Kaysville where we lived in a dugout, and it seems to me when I think of Mother, that she was very happy. We had a cow and some chickens, and she felt right at home. There is where I first attended school, taught by a Sister Allred in her own house – one room, without a floor except the good earth. We had a couple of slabs of wood against the wall for seats. I could not speak a word of English and when the other children talked to me, I cried. Sister Allred had a little boy who sat in a little chair by her side. She leaved over and said something to him and he stood up. She motioned for me to come to her. She put her arm around me and smiled at me and I felt I had found a friend. Then she seated me in her little boy's chair by her side.

In a few days I began to play with the children. We then moved back to Salt Lake. The next year, we moved to Ogden where Father ran a mill. The first winter was known as the “hard winter.” When the cattle died from starvation they were dressed out and used for food. When spring came we cooked greens and dug roots for food, until vegetables could be raised. After living in Ogden for two years we moved to Brigham city, where Father ran a flour mill for President Lorenzo Snow. My parents lived in Brigham city the rest of their lives. Father died in 1898 and Mother followed 14 months later.

I was married to Sheldon B. Cutler in 1861. We had 4 sons. John, my eldest son, was born April 29, 1863, and died at Idaho Falls, April 11, 1891, leaving a wife and five children. My second son, M. Christian, was born May 22, 1865, and lived only eight hours. My third son, Parley, born June 2, 1866, lives at Idaho Falls, Idaho. My fourth son, Andrew, born April 27, 1868, lives at Pocatello, Idaho. Sheldon died in 1870.

In 1872, I was married to Alanson Norton. We had two sons, Elvin J., born January 6, 1877, lives in Salt Lake City. Joseph A., born February 14, 1882, died at Logan, Utah, March 16, 1902, aged twenty years, one month, and two days. 

So ends the sketch as Maren gave it, of her own life. There is so much that could be told of this good woman, her joys and sorrows, her successes and failures, but no doubt if she had told us about them she would have said of them, as she did of her journey across the plains, “I passed through my life doing the best I could, and I enjoyed it all the way.”