CHARLES REDD CENTER FOR WESTERN STUDIES
BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY
LDS POLYGAMY ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

INTERVIEWEE: LAURA CLARK COOK
INTERVIEWER: Leonard R. Grover
DATE: February 7, 1981
PLACE: Salt Lake City, Utah
SUBJECT: Life in a LDS polygamous family

LG: This is an interview for the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at Brigham Young University. This interview is part of the LDS Polygamy Oral History Project. This interview is being conducted with Laura Clark Cook at her home in Salt Lake City on February 7, 1981. The interviewer is Leonard Grover. Her daughter LaRue Bowen is also present and taking part in the interview.

Sister Cook, tell me about your early life.

LC: I was born January 30, 1880, in Farmington, Davis County, Utah, the ninth of ten children of my mother Susa Leggett Clark and my father Ezra Thompson Clark's second family. Their first child was a boy, Seymour Thompson Clark. Then there were three girls, Annie Vilate, Sarah Lavinia, and Susan Alice Bell Clark. Then there were four boys, John Alexander, Eugene Henry, Nathan George, and Marion Franklin Clark who died at two years of age. I came next and two years later my brother Horace Wells Clark was born. Aunt Mary Stevenson Clark had eleven children, ten boys and one girl.

My childhood and youth were spent in Farmington, the town my father helped colonize on assignment from Brigham Young. They rejoiced because I was a little girl after so many brothers. I had brown eyes, dark brown hair and a little round face.

LG: Tell me about the living arrangements of your father's family.