Tilda: A Woman Pioneer

By Romana Annette  08/13/2008

Tilda was my wife Carolyn’s paternal grandmother.  She was born Maria Botilda Hokman in Malmo, Sweden , in 1874.  Her last name was special, since her father, Nils, had been given an exemption from the standard and mandatory naming convention, by which her last name would have been Nilsdotter.

Tilda was the last of nine children.  This was a large family, despite infant mortality, and times were economically challenging with no future for his children, so Nils sent them off to America , Denmark , and Germany to find better lives. 

In 1891, at the age of 17, Tilda left unaccompanied for America .  Tilda first reached Liverpool, and then she boarded a ship that took her and a large number of other emigrants to Quebec.  This was the way it was done, before Ellis Island became the standard gateway.

Upon arrival, she made her first name legally Tilda.  She viewed America as a wondrous place full of promise, in contrast to a surely bleak existence in Sweden .  She had already traveled distances far greater and than she had ever imagined.  Of course, it was all very alien and different.  In America , even men milked cows, which had only been women’s work in Sweden .

A train took her from Quebec to Minneapolis, where she was reunited with her brother Louie.  She worked as a seamstress, and then as a housekeeper, but she was not happy living in an all Scandinavian community, because it was just a constrained, transplanted piece of Europe where few people changed their customs or even spoke English.

Her brother had moved to North Dakota, so Tilda decided to join him; however, she soon grew quite tired of the cold climate.  She decided to head for Salt Lake City, since her cousin Nils Berg lived nearby.  She finally found her cousin in Richmond, but she immediately had to return to Salt Lake City.  She was getting very sick; she had contracted typhoid fever!

This probably explained why Tilda developed lifelong, progressive hearing problems, and why she could be quite cranky at times.

Tilda’s recuperation was tended by a Mormon couple, who introduced her to the LDS faith.  Though she had been raised a Lutheran, her father had become disgusted with that faith many years earlier and had left it behind.  Still, when Tilda became an official member of the LDS faith in January, 1895, her family was very displeased.

Tilda found work with a well-to-do family in Salt Lake City, but she was restless.  When her cousin moved to Pocatello, Idaho, she decided to follow him.  Luckily, she found a wagon ride with another family that was moving to Pocatello; still; it was a three-week trip.  Once she arrived, Tilda prospered, due to her skills as a seamstress.  In 1898, Tilda married George Williams.

George Williams, and his (then) wife Elizabeth (Bessie) Williams, had converted to the LDS faith in England and immigrated to the United States , where George set up a general store in Pocatello. 

They had five children.  However, Bessie suffered post-partum depression shortly after the birth of their fifth child.  One night in 1896, she accidentally slipped off a footbridge and drowned in the Portneuf River.  George was left with four children and a baby.  The baby had to be given away to relatives.  George was a brilliant man, but, in retrospect, he did not seem to be socially gifted.  He especially needed help with the remaining children.

Tilda and George met at a church function.  Their engagement looked more perfunctory than romantic.  Carolyn’s father, Emmons, was born in 1903 as their third child.  Their pairing was very fruitful, since over the years, they had eight surviving children.

1915 was probably their best year together.  George had been elected Mayor of Pocatello, where he initiated many progressive works.  Tilda traveled to San Francisco to attend the Panama-Pacific Exposition. 

Since she was an out-spoken suffragette, she also found time to dialogue with many like-minded women.

George’s apparent lack of political skills created endless enemies; he may not have shared power well.  He lost the election of 1917; then he lost his daughter Laura, from his first marriage, to the influenza pandemic of 1918.  At the same time, George lost his business, when his partner ran off with much of the store’s assets.

George turned to prospecting for gold to recoup his losses; however, his fruitless expeditions grew to greater and greater duration, at the expense of his family.  Tilda was left to raise their children without his help.  Emmons had to quit school and get a job to help out.  Soon, George was so consumed by gold fever that he seldom ever came home.

Emmons once told me that the episode titled The Rainbow Chaser, shown on Death Valley Days in 1954, was all about his father.  Actually, it was just representative of many cases of husbands consumed by gold fever.  Some might have said that such obsession with the quest for instant wealth even reached epidemic proportions for a while.

Tilda and her family lived a marginal life, helped by Emmons and members of her church; they might have prospered, had George stayed home.  George’s daughters all grew to hate him, since he did not even come close to the LDS model of a supportive husband and father.

After many years, Tilda finally divorced George.  She had petitioned the (then) general authority of the church, Joseph Fielding Smith, for a blessing for the divorce, but he refused; she went ahead with the procedure anyway.

Years later, it is said that George finally came back for the last time, as his rainbow chasing came to an end.  When George died in 1945, he did not have a home, so his body was supposedly dumped at Tilda’s house to be prepared for the funeral.  George was buried in the Logan, Utah, City Cemetery, next to Bessie and Laura.  He and Tilda had been married at the Logan LDS temple forty-seven years before.

Tilda had been resilient and self-sufficient all her life.  Besides always caring for her children, she was constantly doing work for her community and her church.  She even traveled a lot by airplane to visit her children and grandchildren in Idaho, Washington, and Utah.  She died in 1958.  Even in death she was different, since she was not buried in Logan; rather, she was buried in the Mountaiview Cemetery in Pocatello.

Tilda with, from left two right, Carolyn’s brother Michael, two of Carolyn’s cousins, and Carolyn.

Laura, and the triple grave monument in Logan, Utah.