Chapter 1
Never before had twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Stewart known such terror as she did during the predawn hours of November 15, 1850.
Elizabeth was traveling on the James Pennell, a fully rigged American passenger ship carrying her and 253 other passengers from England to America. After a difficult six-week journey, the tall ship rounded the Cape of Florida and sailed into the Gulf of Mexico toward New Orleans, less than a hundred miles ahead. Anxious to deliver his passengers on schedule, Captain James Fullerton had rigged the ship for full sail when it was hit by a hurricane shortly after four a.m.
In just ten minutes, the ship was disabled. The main mast was carried away so quickly that its brace smashed through the decking, nearly crushing a half dozen passengers lying in their bunks below. Rain poured through the broken deck, and Elizabeth and her fellow passengers below decks could hear the ship being torn apart above their heads. The worst was over quickly, but the seas rolled violently all night.
When the sun rose on a clear day, the crew and all the passengers had survived, but the ship was in serious trouble. It had been blown out into the Gulf of Mexico without any means of steering. Food and water stores were perilously low. They were so close to their destination, yet so far.1
For orphan Elizabeth Stewart, a great-grandmother of Bill Marriott, nothing ever came easily. Her childhood in Colmworth, Bedfordshire, England, had been one of poverty and toil. Her mother died when Elizabeth was only five, her father when she was seventeen. At eight she contracted smallpox and then later that year nearly drowned in a pond.
Sometime during this period, missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints knocked on her father’s door. They told a compelling story about a fourteen-year-old boy named Joseph Smith who, while living in upstate New York in 1820, was reading the Bible and felt prompted to pray about which of the many Christian churches he should join. As he knelt in the woods near his home, the answer came in a vision. He said that God the Father and His Son Jesus Christ appeared to him and told him not to join any existing church. As word spread about his vision, the young boy was “ridiculed, hated, and persecuted,” according to his own account.
In 1823, he received another vision, this time from an angel named Moroni, who had lived as a man in the Americas around AD 400. The angel told Joseph that near the farm was a set of metal plates on which was engraved a thousand-year history of an ancient civilization in the Americas. Joseph found the plates and translated them into what would become the Book of Mormon. At its core was an account of Jesus’s visit to the Americas after His resurrection.
In 1830, Joseph Smith published the book and organized The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which he maintained was the true Church of Christ restored to the earth. Within a decade, Smith was sending missionaries around the world, seeking converts to the new faith. The Latter-day Saint missionaries had significant success in Bedfordshire and elsewhere in England. Elizabeth, age twelve, and her brother William, seventeen, believed the revolutionary message. William was baptized, but Elizabeth waited until she was nineteen and living on her own.
By then, Smith had been murdered by a mob in 1844 near the Church’s stronghold in Illinois. The Church was under the direction of his successor, Brigham Young, who moved the members to the Utah Territory to avoid more persecution because of their peculiar beliefs. Young sent out a call to all members of the Church, including those in England, to come to the valley of the Great Salt Lake—Zion—triggering an overland and sea exodus that lasted from 1846 to 1890.
By 1850, Elizabeth strongly felt the pull to gather with fellow believers to the Utah Territory. The square-rigger James Pennell, which had been chartered by the Church to take 254 Latter-day Saint converts on the first leg of their trip, set sail from Liverpool on October 2, 1850. Because Elizabeth had only a shilling left after she paid for her passage, she did not have money for food aboard ship. According to family tradition, she worked in the ship’s galley to earn her meals.
By early November, the Pennell entered the Gulf of Mexico, but rough seas and unfavorable winds made it impossible for them to make landfall. Then came the hurricane. After drifting for several days, with provisions dangerously low, the Pennell was reached by a tugboat and towed to New Orleans. From there, the passengers took a steamer up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, where Elizabeth disembarked with still just a shilling to her name. “I was left to get along the best I could,” she recalled.
Helping Elizabeth “get along” was her first love, a man whose name has been lost to the family. All that is known is that she kept his picture the rest of her life to remind her of his courage, gallantry, and sacrifice. One evening, while Elizabeth was carrying a kerosene lamp in one hand and a two-gallon container in the other hand, the lamp exploded, setting her on fire. “My sweetheart ran in and carried me out of the fire,” she wrote. “He saved my life, and he died 18 days later from inhaling the fumes.”2
She continued: “The fire burned me terribly, and the suffering was something great.” In fact, her “burns were not well for three years.” But just as would happen more than a century later in a fire that would engulf her own great-grandson Bill Marriott, Elizabeth’s life was spared. Her recovery, like his, was torturous; her face was also miraculously unscarred. Elizabeth’s arms were marred with burned skin, but the most notable scar formed a V-shape beginning under her chin and extending about seven inches down her chest. One of her granddaughters recalled that her “neck was transparent, (as was her upper chest). You could see the organs when she breathed, and how she swallowed.”3
Elizabeth Stewart Marriott.
Elizabeth stayed in St. Louis for two more years after the fire, working and relying on the kindness of strangers until she could afford wagon passage across the plains in the summer of 1853.
Her journey was typical of the Mormon pioneer saga—hunger, fatigue, heat, Indian encounters, the dead buried by the side of the trail. At night, wagons were drawn up in a circle for protection. After walking beside a loaded wagon all day, Elizabeth would gather buffalo chips for the cook fire and bake bread for the next day’s journey. Around the campfire, the travelers would sing, recite poetry, and dance accompanied by a couple of violins. Early in the journey, she reported, “My shoes wore out and I had nothing but rags to wrap my feet in. It was a walk of 1,500 miles.”
The wagon company arrived in Salt Lake City in a staggered fashion over several days in mid-September, and its members were cheerily welcomed by the city’s residents. Elizabeth was destitute. “I had no home to go to, no money, and no way of earning any,” she wrote. “All [in Salt Lake] were too poor to hire or pay for help. I offered to work for my board, if only I could get something to eat. But I still was not discouraged, because I knew that I had come to Zion and that the Gospel was true. The Lord had heard my prayers and helped me to come to this land I had so much desired.”
Finding no employment in Salt Lake, she headed north to the small settlement of Kaysville and moved in with her brother William’s family. It was while in that home, looking out the window one day, that she saw a man coming through the field toward the house. She wrote, “The Spirit whispered to me, ‘That is the man who is to be your husband.’” It was William’s brother-in-law, John Marriott. Elizabeth continued, “A few days later he came again and asked me to be his wife.”
Elizabeth’s descendants—including father and son J. Willard and Bill Marriott—were shaped by the stories of her journey to the New World, which were told and retold in the family. That frontier grit is in their DNA. Bill once said in a speech to a church group: “I often think about my pioneer ancestors who helped to pave the way for our family. Six of my eight great-grandparents walked across the plains pulling handcarts or walking behind covered wagons. They came in search of a place where they could be free from persecution. They had experienced great lawlessness. Their homes and farms had been burned, their leaders killed, their religion mocked and scorned. They had reason to doubt their future. They had reason to turn back. But they didn’t. They went forward with faith and courage. They knew the work would be hard and that their faith would continue to be tested. But they believed in Jesus Christ. They picked up their personal burdens, marched forward, and came unto Him.”4
It was Elizabeth’s husband, John Marriott, who provided the mantra by which his descendants live: “There is no such thing as, ‘It can’t be done.’” John’s respect for the job at hand was reflected in the fact that he always wore a white shirt, whether laboring on the farm, in the fields, or in his home.
Besides his unflinching will and dedication to work, John had the added advantage of being strong, which made him a legend of sorts in Ogden, Utah, where he lived. He could often be seen carrying 400 pounds of wheat in sacks at the same time. The story is told that once when two men began quarreling violently, John intervened by lifting both men up, one in each hand, banging their heads together, and dunking them in nearby water, thus bringing them to their senses. He was known to break many shovels because the handles couldn’t hold the weight of the loads he lifted.
When John proposed to Elizabeth, he already had a wife, Susannah, but by that time the Latter-day Saints had re-instituted the Old Testament practice of polygamy. The majority of their men never practiced polygamy—perhaps primarily because they simply could not afford to support multiple households and dozens of children. Historical perspective suggests that one reason for the practice was that it provided a viable way for a community to care for higher numbers of single women like Elizabeth, who was poor, twenty-five years old, and without prospects.
After Elizabeth married, she was not whisked off to a new cabin—her thirty-seven-year-old husband could not afford to build one for his second wife. Instead, the home the new bride lived in for her first year of marriage was a wagon bed. Only a year into the marriage, John was assigned by Brigham Young to colonize a town near the convergence of the Weber and Ogden rivers, about three miles west of the new town of Ogden. He moved his first wife, Susannah, and their five children into a dugout in the new settlement. Pregnant with their first child, Elizabeth stayed in Kaysville until she could walk the eighteen miles carrying her six-week-old daughter.
John proved a natural leader in the new settlement, which the townspeople decided to name “Marriott.” Elizabeth again lived in a wagon box in Marriott for six months, then moved to a windowless dugout where her baby slept on a shelf. Sometimes, after going to get water half a mile from the dugout, Elizabeth would return to find that snakes had crawled into her daughter’s bed, seeking warmth. Later she lived in a small log room that was only about six feet high, with a sod roof. In the winter, the makeshift cabin was so poorly insulated that “our bread froze all the way through and had to be thawed out before we could eat it,” Elizabeth recalled.
In December 1863, when the eastern American states were embroiled in the Civil War, Elizabeth gave birth to her second son, Hyrum Willard, nicknamed “Will.” As he grew, he became opinionated and quick-tempered like his father. At about fourteen, Will moved out after an argument with John. He took up harness making and eventually married a distant Marriott cousin, Ellen Morris, and became a prominent farmer and sheepherder.
When it came to Will’s courtship of Ellen, love was not mentioned in family histories. The same is true of his parents John and Elizabeth. There was a sense in both cases that the two Marriott men believed they were “rescuing” the women from an unmarried life of toil. While neither Elizabeth nor Ellen were noted for their beauty, both were diamonds in the rough who had proven in their early years to be more than a match for whatever life could throw at them. Both couples fell deeply in love during their long marriages.
John died soon after his son Will married Ellen. The young couple settled in the town of Marriott and had two children, first Doris (“Dodie”) and then John Willard. As an adult, their son would be known as J.W. Marriott, the founder of a multimillion-dollar restaurant enterprise. But during his childhood years in Marriott, everyone called him Willard.
When he was three years old, Willard nearly died of typhus, which might have been caused by living next to a mosquito-infested canal. Dodie also got sick, as did the third baby, Ellen (also known as Helen). Willard saw himself as the “man of the family” even at a very young age. When his mother was pregnant with Helen, she climbed a tree to pick apples, fell, and broke her leg. Little Willard became her nursemaid while she was bedridden, fetching whatever his mother needed.5
A big change occurred in 1905, when the family moved to the “grand estate.” Owned by an Ogden racehorse breeder, it was the showplace of Marriott—100 acres of lush pasture with a two-story house, a twenty-stall barn, and a high white fence around the entire property. Even without indoor plumbing or electricity, the new house was considered a mansion by the townspeople. Will and Ellen’s fourth child, Eva, was the first to be born there, followed by Paul and Kathryn (“Kay”).
Ellen was pregnant with her seventh child when Helen and Eva, playing with matches, started a fire that burned down the mansion. Later, as a well-known restaurateur, Willard would remember that fire and attribute the spread of the flames to an unkempt house where chickens were allowed to wander and dirty linens lay in piles. As a result, he developed an obsession with cleanliness and order. But although Will may not have been tidy, he was industrious, and within six months he rebuilt the house larger than before. The last two children, Russell and Woodrow (“Woody”), were born there, for a total of eight.
Will was often away herding sheep so Ellen managed hearth and home. The family never went hungry, and Will always found enough money in the family accounts to be generous with his children. He loved to take the family on summer camping trips to the mountains. In the winter, there were horse-drawn sleigh rides with Will at the reins singing at the top of his lungs to the accompaniment of jingling bells. All the children of the town could count on Will to light torches around the frozen pond on his property so they could ice-skate after dark.
The Marriotts were the first family in town to own an automobile—a 1914 Buick touring car. When they drove the new car to church, the children from the Sunday School climbed all over it, and some even took the liberty of scratching their initials in the paint to commemorate the arrival of the town’s first horseless carriage.6
In the winter, Willard’s education was spotty, as he took on responsibilities at home while his father was frequently away in Salt Lake City serving in the Utah State Legislature. Willard was schooled through the sixth grade, often getting up at four a.m. to study. But high school was hit-and-miss.
As for his religious education, Willard credited the influence of his mother more than his father. In the winter evenings, the family would gather around the big stove, and Ellen would read the Bible to her children. On Saturday nights, Ellen would boil water for baths so the children would be suitably clean for church. There was no question that her children would follow the tenets of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She told them, “I’d rather have a stone tied around your necks and have you cast into the ocean than to have you forget your religion and not live it every day of your lives.”
Willard had a natural entrepreneurial spirit that was evident at an early age. After helping grow the family’s sugar-beet crop and tending to the cattle and sheep, Willard found time to engage in a variety of money-making ventures, such as raising rabbits and chickens, which he would sell in nearby Ogden. He demonstrated a Tom-Sawyer–like talent for managing his younger siblings. When the dreaded job of weeding and thinning the sugar beets came along, Willard would promise his siblings a cold soda pop for everyone who did their part. Leaving the others to start the work, Willard would go into town, buy the soda, and return to put the bottles in the cold stream that ran through their property. The children could see their reward as they worked.
Sheep were the family business, and Willard was a natural, just like his father. “My father always gave me the responsibility of a man,” he said. “He would tell me what he wanted me to do, but he never told me much about how to do it and he never sent anyone along with me to show me how. It was up to me to find out for myself.”7 If Willard displeased his father, he was whipped. Once he was locked in a closet for two hours and then sent to bed without supper. Willard inherited that temper from his father.
At the age of thirteen, Willard traveled to deliver summer supplies to a high mountain plateau pasture where Basque sheepherders were tending the Marriott flock. It was a thrilling time for Willard, outfitted with a big cowboy hat, a pair of woolly chaps, a six-gun strapped to his side, and a rifle and lariat secured to the saddle. One night, a rattlesnake slithered under his bedroll. When Willard discovered it in the morning, he took three shots at the fourteen-rattle snake and killed it, impressing the Basques, who had never seen such a large rattler. Another snake saved Willard from a smoking habit, he jokingly recalled. One day, he happened to be chewing a plug of tobacco the Basques had offered him when a rattler sounded off near his horse. In his surprise, the boy swallowed the repugnant wad, thus developing a distaste for tobacco.8
The next summer, when he was fourteen, Willard arrived at the high mountain range to find that bears had been picking off the sheep. Willard and a Basque sheepherder named Manuel followed fresh brown-bear tracks leading from one of their dead lambs up the mountain range. The terrain became so steep that they had to dismount and lead their horses. At one point, they heard crashing sounds coming toward them. While Manuel held the horses steady, the rifle-toting Willard saw a bear cub burst out, followed by a rampaging mama bear. She reared and then dropped on all fours, rushing forward as Willard took two shots, both of them hitting home. The cub dashed up a tree, and more crashing in the brush could be heard, which Manuel explained was the father coming for the cub. “You must shoot the cub,” Manuel urged, and Willard did. The larger male bear turned back down the hill once that was done. The bearskins were hung to dry in an Ogden butcher shop, and a newspaper article told the story of the boy who had killed two bears in a single day.9
Willard was only fifteen when his father sent him alone on a train with thousands of sheep to sell in San Francisco. It was an adventure that opened his eyes to the world outside of rural Utah. He ran along the top of the moving train with a pole, jumping from car to car to sort out the piles of sheep that tumbled into each other every time the train put on the brakes. In San Francisco, Willard bought his first suit with long pants. He explored Chinatown, where he saw opium dens with men sucking on their pipes and staring dreamily. He ate exotic foods on the wharf, took the ferry to Sausalito, and watched in horror as a monoplane doing loops over the bay took a fatal nosedive into the water.
Then he wandered through the 1915 World’s Fair, officially called the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, celebrating the completion of the Panama Canal. It “filled my head with dreams of travel and achievement and shining cities, world-makers, and world-shakers who never had to hoe a row of sugar beets in the blazing Utah sun or ride herd on a flock of sheep through a choking white cloud of dust,” he wrote in his journal.10
The following year, at sixteen, he took the sheep by train to Omaha for sale. On the way, a conductor sized him up, determined he was too young to be traveling alone, and put Willard off the train in Cheyenne while the sheep went on to Omaha alone. Undeterred, Willard caught the next train, only to arrive in Omaha and find his herd had been mingled with others. He solved the problem by cutting the biggest sheep out of the mixed herd and claiming them for the Marriotts.
Back home, Willard was the only one of the children who was allowed to drive. Hence, he considered himself the unofficial owner of the family Buick. His dad had put him behind the wheel from the time that Willard’s legs could barely touch the floor—a practice that peeved the town sheriff, a one-legged man called “Peggy” who himself had only a cart pulled by a Shetland pony. Peggy often would flag down young Willard to give him a lecture about safe driving.
But Willard’s driving privileges would come to an abrupt end shortly after he turned nineteen, when Will and Ellen would sell their precious Buick to finance an important event in his life—a two-year proselyting mission.