Lafayette Dana

Lafayette Dana

was born on June 18, 1876, in Montpelier, Bear Lake County, Idaho. He was the son of Charles Carrol Dana and Hannah Ellen Odekirk. The Dana family was part of the early Latter-day Saint migrations into the Intermountain West, seeking agricultural lands and community stability in the valleys of Idaho and Utah.

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As a young man, Lafayette moved south to the Salt River Valley in Arizona, where the expansion of canal systems was opening new farming tracts. He settled in the Mesa area, finding employment as an agricultural laborer and farmer.

Life and Labor in the East Valley

Lafayette married Adaline Amerilla Riggs, a young woman from a prominent frontier family with deep ties to the Hamblin peacemakers and the Babbitt pioneers. The couple established a modest home in Mesa, where Lafayette worked the fields. He was part of the labor force that cleared mesquite, leveled the land, and maintained the irrigation ditches that turned the arid valley floor into productive crops.

Together they had several children, including their youngest daughter, Leona Dana, who was born in 1904. The family's daily life revolved around the demanding schedule of agricultural labor, water rotations, and the mutual support systems of the local ward.

A Sudden Loss

The precarity of frontier life was made manifest when Lafayette died on December 14, 1912, at the young age of thirty-six. His death occurred in the same year that Arizona achieved statehood. The cause of his passing is not recorded, but during this era, infectious diseases, industrial accidents, and a lack of access to medical care frequently claimed the lives of young men in their prime.

Lafayette's early death left Adaline a widow at thirty-three with young children, including Leona, who was only eight years old. Without a husband or a government safety net, the family relied on extended relatives and close-knit church networks to survive the subsequent decades in the desert. Through the marriage of his daughter Leona to Earl Ellsworth, Lafayette's lineage became permanently connected to the agricultural and medical history of the East Valley.