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but such a system was not available in the years when I grew up. The
early settlers had built dams and many times had to rebuild them when
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from dams, and the canals leaked a substantial amount of the water.
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in the spring. As a result, water, not land, was the usual limiting factor
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arose as their sons matured; fathers naturally wanted to divide the farms
among their sons, but there was too little good soil and water to support
more families. As a result, emigration outward from Utah began.
From the beginning of settlement in 1847, the hills and moun-
tains were grazed by cattle and sheep. Damage was soon evident. As
early as 1865, in a Church General Conference, an apostle warned that
overgrazing was reducing the amount of forage available for cattle and
sheep.
Moving now to our Holmes family background, Grandfather
Samuel Holmes had been a very successful businessman with a boiler-
making shop. He had an outstanding reputation for the quality of work
produced by his men and the honesty in which he conducted his busi-
ness. A reader must understand that mines require pumps to blow air
into the mines and to remove water encountered in the mineshafts. In
earlier years, a mine had to have steel boilers to supply steam to these
pumps. Such boilers required re-tubing periodically, and this was the
principal business of the Holmes Boiler Shop, plus the re-tubing of boil-
ers in businesses and apartment buildings that supplied winter heat to
the occupants. In the early years, entire boilers had been built by Grand-
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Lake Temple was built in Grandfather’s shop. However, by the time I
was born, electricity was becoming available to the mines, and electric
pumps did away with the need for boilers there.
A secondary factor to work against the family boiler business
was the then-new craft of welding. Heretofore, if an area in a steel tank
corroded, a steel patch (it might have to be bent to match the curve of
the area) had to be made, and holes had to be drilled through the patch
and the area being repaired. Red-hot rivets were then inserted in the

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