Free The Real Romney by Michael Kranish, Scott Helman

family “accumulated a great deal of means” in those “lovely times,” Hannah wrote. The Romneys owned many cattle and chickens, farmed vast lands, and built sturdy houses in a town near the original settlement. The children went to a newly built redbrick school and joined a baseball team that sometimes traveled 150 miles northeast to play in El Paso, Texas.
    One day in early March 1904, sixty-year-old Miles looked out at his farm and commented how beautiful it looked. That night, as he read a newspaper, he called to Hannah and requested the gathering of all of his wives, and their children and grandchildren. Hannah held his hand for a moment and then he “breathed his last,” she recalled years later. Miles’s life had spanned the saga of the church from his birth in Nauvoo to the exodus over the Mormon trail to Utah, across the border to Mexico to maintain polygamy, and then into the more modern era, when the church sought broader societal acceptance.
    Now the burden of family leadership shifted even more to Gaskell. As much as he had admired his father, Gaskell represented the church’s new outlook, and he and his wife were married only to each other. With the foundation laid by Miles, Gaskell accumulated land and businesses and became “very prosperous,” running a cattle farm and a door factory. His wealth enabled him to build a two-story redbrick home that was considered one of the nicest in his community. It was in that home in 1907 that Gaskell’s wife, Anna, gave birth to George Wilcken Romney. George would go on to display many of the distinctive family traits; he was industrious, smart, and indefatigably hardworking, but also a blustery, imposing, and outspoken figure like Miles. George would tower over his short father, and his long frame would be passed along to his son, Mitt Romney. For five years, George Romney lived an idyllic life in Mexico. The wealth of his family, and the stability and sturdiness of their home, were in stark contrast to the wanderings and poverty experienced by Miles. But prosperity would again prove fleeting.
    Gaskell was aware of constant talk of revolution among the local Mexican population. Factions within the country were battling one another, and the Mormon colony tried to remain neutral. At one point, little George heard gunfire as he sat on the porch of their home. In July 1912, the Romneys learned that hundreds of revolutionaries were nearby. The rebels ignored the Mormons’ insistence that they were neutral. They demanded that the Romneys turn over their guns and horses. Gaskell’s half brother Junius declared that he “would die before ordering our people to give up their arms.” Vastly outnumbered by the rebels, the Romneys, including five-year-old George, packed their belongings and joined other Mormons at a nearby railroad station, waiting hours before boarding a packed train to El Paso, Texas. Over three days, 2,300 of 4,000 Mormons evacuated.
    Twenty-seven years after Miles fled from U.S. government agents and took refuge in Mexico, the Romney family was back in the United States. In the course of a few days, Gaskell’s family had gone from owning a large Mexican ranch to being nearly penniless. George would later say that his family was among “the first displaced persons of the twentieth century.” George would forever be bitter about his unceremonious exile. “I was kicked out of Mexico when I was five years old because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that my people . . . became prosperous,” George said years later. He also noted that “the Mexicans thought if they could just take it away from the Mormon settlers, it would be paradise. It just didn’t work that way, of course.”
    Fortunately for the Romneys, the U.S. government, which had once chased Miles to Mexico due to his polygamy, now welcomed the Romneys and other Mormons to the United States. Congress established a $100,000 relief fund that enabled the Romneys and other Mormon