Charles Lamone Green

The demands of life in a bygone era are something we can’t experience first-hand, but the struggles, highs, lows, and desires of our ancestors confirm that the human condition doesn’t vary too far from the path that God intends us all to walk. I love and respect my ancestors and hope I have a portion of the determination they displayed in meeting their challenges head-on, and I pray that nothing I have written, in any way, demeans them in the perception of the reader.

First person sketch of Charles L. Green by Jon Green. 

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Charles Lamone Green – 1802-1879

GGGGrandfather of John Kevin Green

I have seen my share of this country during my lifetime but, I’m getting on in years and expect that my wandering days are past. About the only place that I would have liked to have seen, but didn’t, is the waters of the Pacific Ocean. My oldest son, Allen, lived out in California for dozen years or more, he now lives in Arizona. That’s one of the things that life hands you that you really have no control of – your children seeking their own path, and sometimes that path, well…it puts a lot of country between you and the ones that you love.

My lot in life it seems wasn’t just to push to the western horizon but to plant and harvest. I have turned more virgin soil in this country than most and made a serious effort at doing so in over a half dozen places. I suppose that I should tell you that I started my earthly journey in woodlands of Otsego County in the central part of the State of New York. I also married and started my own family in that beautiful part of the country.

When I was twenty-one-years old, I married Mary Emoliza Ellis, we had known each other, and we made a go of it and had our first four children there. When I was about thirty, we pushed into the western frontier and settled on the northern edge of the Ohio Valley, where we had four more children. At the age of thirty, I had a nice piece of property, a sweet wife, and a beautiful family. I didn’t think too much past the coming season and all that I wanted to accomplish.

That all changed when I was thirty-two when a couple of missionaries from the Church of Christ, now The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, came to our area and told us of a Prophet of God in our day named Joseph Smith and gave us a book that he had translated from an ancient record. My Eliza and I were always best of friends, agreeing on the path that we would take, and upon our feelings for the Church and what we felt in our hearts, we were in lockstep. On a chilly day in March, of 1834, I was baptized by Elder Orson Hyde and the same day was confirmed a member of the Church and received the Holy Ghost under the hands of Orson Hyde and Heber Kimble. That day changed the course of our life, our beliefs, our desires, and our outlook on everything around us.

We witnessed the great blessings that came to the Saints in Kirtland through the first Temple of God built in our time. I was ordained and Elder in the upper room of that sacred house in 1838, when I was thirty-six years old. We stayed there in Kirtland, likely longer than we should have, but the Saints were gathering to Nauvoo. The dwindling activities in Kirtland made it less difficult for us to sell our property and go. The sufferings and injustices that the Saints had endured in Missouri had made it necessary for them to leave. The Church had bought land in Illinois and the Prophet was calling for all Saints to gather in Nauvoo.

I had tamed the land in Kirtland, I turned the virgin prairie in Yelrom, and I farmed along the Big Muddy in Montrose, enjoying the fellowship of the Saints in all of these places. But Satan plants his seeds as well, and in every place of peace, the storm clouds seem to gather. When Joseph and Hyrum were murdered those clouds grew darker still, until the darkness forced us from our beloved home and into the unknown wilds of the west.

I tell you these things on a bright spring day in Rabbit Valley, Utah Territory, when your troubles seem so far away, but they’re not. Thing is, trials and troubles are always just around the corner, I buried a son in Ferryville, before we even got a good start for our home in the west. I thought I lost a daughter when she got run over by a wagon but, the Lord helped her recover fully. I lost a son, or two, to the luring prospect of California gold, and I thought that I couldn’t go on at all when I lost my sweet Emoliza, my partner from my youth, when a fever took her – she alone was plucked from a crowd and the Lord took her home.

Truth is, family and friends were always there to help me put one foot in front of the other but the real strength to go forward came from faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, we left Nauvoo carrying the same sorrows as our brothers and sisters in the Gospel, but we also carried the hope of the future, the assurance that our future generations would spread the Gospel to the world. We received our endowment in that majestic House of the Lord on the second day of February 1846, an edifice that had been dedicated to the Lord. We made promises to our Lord and He made promises to us, and we were so fully empowered by the Spirit that we had no doubt that we could make it, that we could survive, that we could endure, that tomorrow would be a brighter day! We left our home just a few days after we received that endowment.

I remarried, and Sara has given me joy in life…and children. If I could whisper in the ears of my children, through the generations, I would say, “Our Savior, Jesus Christ, has enabled our Father’s plan through his Atoning Sacrifice – we need not worry, we need not judge, we need not fear!”