Last Respects Paid To Mrs. Mary Muir Ure
(Special to The News)
BOUNTIFUL, Feb. 13. — Funeral services for Mrs. Mary Muir Ure, who died Wednesday at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Jane Faddis, were held Sunday afternoon in the West Bountiful chapel. Bishop Whishaw T. Gear was in charge and the speakers were: Dr. Fred J. Pack, L. J. Muir and Joseph T. Mabey.
Solos were sung by Nephi Hepworth and Jared Brown and music was choir choir also rendered music. The opening and closing prayers were by O. P. Hatch and Samuel Sessions respectively. The floral tributes were beautiful and many. Interment was in the Bountiful cemetery.
Leaves for Convention
BOUNTIFUL, Feb. 13. — L. J. Muir, president of the Salt Lake Progressive Business club, left at noon today for San Francisco where he will attend the National Directors’ meeting of the Progressive Business Men to be held there Feb. 15. Mr. Muir expects to be gone about ten days.
Utahns Feted in Los Angeles
Close Relationship Between Southern California and Utah Noted
An impressive demonstration of the close interrelation of Utah and southern California was the Utah day luncheon of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, held at the Biltmore hotel in that city Wednesday, according to Leo J. Muir of Los Angeles, who arrived in Salt Lake yesterday afternoon after attending the luncheon.
Mr. Muir was formerly state superintendent of public instruction, and is now the national business director of the National Thrift Corporation of America, of which he is director of agencies. N. T. Porter, formerly state bank commissioner of Utah, is president and general manager of the corporation.
Chesterfield Pioneer Passes Away
Moses Muir was born in Bountiful, Utah, May 11th, 1852. It was here he spent his boyhood days and grew into manhood highly respected by all who knew him. At the age of twenty-four he was united in marriage to Miss Mary V. Call. In the fall of 1882 he moved to the Portneuf Valley in Idaho, settled on a homestead at the place now called Hatch.
Here he lived for eleven years and spent his time building a home and helping to build up the country which was but sparsely settled at that time. He then built a good substantial home in Chesterfield where he might have the advantages of school and meeting and be near the store and Postoffice. He was a faithful worker in the church, having filled the position of Sunday School Superintendent and counselor to the Bishop of the Ward.
In the year 1909 he moved to Logan in order to have better educational advantages and bought a home there. He made many friends and became enshrined in the hearts of all his neighbors. In the fall of 1917 his health began to fail and he went to California with his wife and youngest daughter thinking the climate might help him to regain his health but he steadily grew worse and returned home feeling worse than when he went away. Everything was done for him that loving hands could do, but he passed away on November 19th, 1919, surrounded with loving friends and relatives who did all they could to ease his awful suffering.
Beautiful funeral services were held in Logan at the Sixth Ward Meeting House and many good things were said of one who had done such a noble work in their midst. The casket and pulpit were lavishly decorated with flowers, the tokens of respect offered by his many friends and relatives.
On Saturday November 22nd, his remains were shipped to Chesterfield, followed by his wife and children who had attended him during his long illness. The following day services were held in the Chesterfield Meeting House and relatives from far and near gathered to pay their last respects to one whom they loved and respected for his kind and charitable disposition. Pres. Hogan, Wm. Y. Higginson, Ira Call, Pres. Sessions, and George Muir told of the beautiful character of the friend and neighbor who had departed this life.
The essence of their remarks may be given in the few words:
“Well done, thou good and faithful servant — enter into the joy of thy Lord.”
He leaves behind to mourn his loss, his wife and seven children: Mrs. Chas. A. Higginson, Vasco Muir, Stephen Muir, Mrs. Casia Lasley, Wm. S. Muir who is filling a mission in Samoa, Mrs. Jared Bergstrom and Miss Lillie Muir of Logan, and twenty-two grandchildren.
John Muir, the Naturalist
It has been interesting in reading the life of this loved and honored student of nature to learn of his love for all the creatures of wood and field and ocean which he came in contact through the long years of his intimate association with the wilds of many lands. “To him,” says his biographers, “the most interesting thing about an animal was its mind and the use to which it put the same.”
In this he differed widely from John Burroughs, who seemed to become a more and more outspoken champion of the mechanistic view of animal behavior which explains the actions of animals in the terms of blind instinct. It was refreshing and amusing to hear him go after the so-called animal psychologists and behaviorists bent on making out, in some cases at least, that animals are nothing but “machines in fur and feathers.”
It ought to be added, continues the author, that Muir as early as 1867 confided to his notebook his belief that one of the greatest hindrances to a fruitful study of the intelligence and individual characteristics of animals was the average human being’s insufferable self-conceit; that his egotism magnifies his lordship of creation until he is incapable of seeing that animals are our earth-born companions and fellow-mortals.
To the fact that the lord-of-creation idea has an abused Biblical origin he attributed the fact that the “fearfully good and orthodox” are first to cry heresy on everyone whose sympathies reach out a single hair’s breadth beyond the boundary-epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all the earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for whom that imponderable empire was planned. He denounced the often mean, blind, loveless doctrine that animals have neither minds nor souls, have no rights that we are bound to respect, and are ready only for man to be petted, slaughtered and enslaved.
Muir was a deeply religious man, never amid all the problems that arose in his scientific studies lost the joyous and triumphant faith in the infinite goodness and wisdom at the heart of the universe.
Gold Star Mother of Center Creek Called
HEBER, Jan. 27. (Special) — Mrs. Sarah Rocke Muir, 58, wife of J. L. Muir of Center Creek, died at her home Tuesday after a short illness.
Mrs. Muir was born here Dec. 24, 1868. Besides her husband surviving are the following children: Mrs. Louie Badcon, Salt Lake; Curtis and Joseph Badcon, Salt Lake; brothers and sisters — Mrs. Mary Harris, Albion, Ida.; Mrs. Vernie Allison, Park City; J. W. Rocke, Jerome, Ida.; J. S. Rocke, Albion, Ida.
One son was killed in France during the World War.