Mary Jane

You plant a fruit tree and you wait for years. You plant a grape and you're in business in a couple of seasons, and that, it was said, is how Nels Johnson, Fruita's first homesteader, came to be selling wine to passing cowboys. Mary Jane Behunin was the oldest daughter among thirteen children, and her father was Elijah Behunin, a man who kept moving. At seventeen she married Nels Johnson. He was forty-two, a Swedish immigrant who'd set out some of Fruita's first fruit trees. A year on she had a girl, Betty Jane, who died at five. She lost two more babies before she had a son, Nels William. When her family moved on again, the park says, Mary Jane stayed behind with her husband. The Fremont River is what made this ground worth planting. She was five months along with a fifth child when a flash flood on that river drowned him. The park's page gives no year, so I won't either. A few months later she had a healthy baby, Lilly May. In all she had lost three children and a husband. For a year and a half she lived on in Fruita with the two she had left. Then she met Charles Cooper of Torrey and married him. They had eight years and three more girls, Mary Elizabeth, then Ida Pearl, then Fern May. Complications from Fern's birth killed her at thirty-five. The park's page gives her all three names, Mary Jane Behunin Johnson Cooper. There's a row of old walnuts along this road, on the edge of what was his homestead, and a park report says they may date from those first years. That's as far as anybody will go. If they do, they were young trees the day she carried Lilly May past them.