Photocopy of a microfilm of a typewritten manuscript. The item is a biography of Clarissa Alger Whitney by an unknown author. The date of composition is uncertain. Cloarissa was born on 2 June 1830 in "The East and grew up in the environmetn of danger, mobbings, journeys attendant to the removal of the Saints from Nauvoo [Illinois], the Morley and Hancock settlements, Winter Quarters [Nebraska], and the crossing of the Great American desert to the Great Salt Lake Valley." One of her uncles, Levi Ward Hancock, served as a member of the Quorum of the Seventies for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1848, Clarissa, her mother, Clarissa Hancock Alger, and her father, Samuel Alger, came to Salt Lake City, Utah. "In about 1848 or 1849, Clarissa Alger met and wed Francis Tuft Whitney." "At this time Clarissa was about 20 years old and her husband was 45." The couple went to Parowan, Utah, in 1851, and she gave birth to the first white child born in the community. Clarissa was the mother of five children, but her husband went to Ohio to visit his family and did not return for fourteen years. She showed great resourcefullness in supporting her family for years. Clarissa and her husband also "raised an Indian boy whom they received in a trade for a saddle horse. . . . ""The Indian spoken of above worked in the blacksmith shop of Rancis Whitney and had been raised in the home of the Whitneys from the age of about seven years. The Pay-eed Indians had traded the boy and an Indian blanket to Brother Whitney for a horse." The boyl, "Indian Joe," lived with the family "for about ten years" before he ran away. The family never found him again. "It is said Clarissa's heart was broken when Joe Indian was never found and that she mourned for him as she did for her only daughter who died in infancy." Clarissa died on 20 March 1907 in Parowan.
