Christine Gertraude Walz - Part 6

            Christine learned a bitter lesson shortly after she came to Rexburg. A neighbor woman told her many negative things about another neighbor. She repeated it to someone else and that someone went to the original victim and said Christine had started it. The woman who had told Christine denied the whole thing and Christine then became the villain. She learned from that experience never to gossip or repeat stories.

            Karl and Conrad obtained haying jobs in Montana during the summer of 1887. While they were away Christine stumbled and fell into an irrigation ditch. She was going to or returning from a well across a pasture. It was dusk and difficult for the young mother to see and she was pregnant. The fall caused her to miscarry. She grieved over the loss for a long time.

            Karl returned home in the late summer, injured and ill, without Conrad. He had been seriously hurt in a runaway team-and-wagon accident and while in his weakened condition contracted typhoid fever. He lingered for a while and then died of pneumonia on October 27, 1887. He was only 27. The neighbors came to give solace to the young widow and to build a coffin from a cotton wood tree. Miss Ella Hinckley made the clothes and lined the coffin for Karl. After a funeral he was buried in the Rexburg Cemetery. The baby that Christine miscarried in the spring would have been born about the time of Karl's death. (Ella later

married Thomas B. Cardon and the two became parents of Genevieve. When Genevieve grew up she became the wife of Karl Klingler, son of Christine and her second husband Friedrich Ludwig Klingler.)

            Christine struggled to maintain her little family without her husband. Emelia was three months short of being six years old. John Henry was 3 1/2, and Lena was two.

Christina Gertrude Walz Buchmiller seated;
Standing-Christina Magdalena,
John Henry and Emilie Walz Buchmiller

             The young mother took in washing, did housework, and sewed for other families to provide their living. The children gleaned wheat from the ditch banks which their mother made into flour. But they often went hungry. Christine remembered later how tasty some wild meat was that had been given to her by a neighbor. Once she used a whisk broom to brush together enough flour to make some gravy.

            Three years had passed since Karl and Christine had arrived in Idaho to homestead. On March 9, 1888, Christine traveled to Blackfoot, the county seat of Bingham County, Territory of Idaho. She paid nine hard-earned dollars to the county treasurer and received the deed to the 2 1/2 acres she and Karl had homesteaded. The property was located in Southend, a community in the southwestern section of what is now Rexburg.  (Note:  This property is just down the street from where George and Diana Wilson used to live.)

            Christine became acquainted with a German woman named Charlotte Klingler Pfost. Charlotte's brother, Friedrich Ludwig Klingler,

Friedrich Ludwig Klingler

his wife, and family of six children had joined the Church in Germany and had come to Rexburg in 1886. They had a son born while in Rexburg on August 18, 1886. When Christine went to see the new baby, Christoph, she thought he was one of the most beautiful babies she had ever seen. The Klingler family moved a short time later to Pocatello so Friedrich could work for the railroad. While they were there another child was born, May 22, 1889. Two months later the mother died, and the baby lived only four more days.

            The children were brought back to Rexburg to live with various relatives. Friedrich continued working in Pocatello but would visit his children whenever he could. Charlotte wanted Christine to meet her brother. She played matchmaker and was the one who introduced them to each other. After a courtship they thought about marriage. They did much soul-searching on this matter, as Friedrich had seven living children and she had three. Also, Fredrich had a habit to overcome — he smoked a pipe. Christine did not approve of smoking.  He was able to give up the habit and a wedding day was set.

          They were to be married February 11, 1891, in the Logan Temple for time only.  Christine was already sealed to her first husband, Karl Heinrich Buchmiller. The day arrived for her to meet Friedrich in Pocatello where they would take the train to Logan. As she approached his home she could see him through a window with a pipe in his mouth. When confronted with this, he said he was not smoking but had put the unlit pipe in his mouth out of habit. He really had not smoked since he told her he would not, he explained. She was finally convinced he was telling the truth and that he did love her.

            They attended the temple on the appointed day. Christine stood as proxy for Friedrich's first wife, Anna Maria Bauer, so Anna could receive her endowments. The sealing of Friedrich and Anna Maria would be performed later. Then Christine Walz Buchmiller and Fredrich Ludwig Klingler were married for "time only" by Merriner Wood Merrill, president of the temple.