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Our Uncle Isaac Perry Decker, “caboose son” of (3G) grandparents Isaac Decker and Harriet Page Wheeler, became famous at an unusually early age. He’s represented here in bronze on the face of the “This Is The Place” monument in Salt Lake City, holding his mother’s hand, but paying more attention to the dog, at the moment that Uncle Brigham Young said something like, “This is the right place; drive on.”

On the 24th of July, 1847, Perry, as he was known, was just two weeks shy of his seventh birthday. He and his slightly-younger stepbrother Lorenzo Sobieski Young were the two children in the famous pioneer company.
When he died in 1916, the Deseret News put his obituary on Page 2, as they had done fifteen years earlier for his big brother Uncle Charlie Decker, but they gave him much less ink. They did note that stepbrother Sobieski (as they called him) was now one of only two survivors of the July 24 band.

As a matter of fact, they didn’t have much to say about Perry, beyond the usual obituary eyewash about his status as “a highly respected and honored citizen.” While Charlie was one of the greatest frontier heroes, you see, his kid brother Perry was a spoiled child, a rascal, and a roustabout who drank a lot, rather neglected his remarkable wife Aunt Elizabeth Garratt Ogden Decker and their (at least eight) children, and spent his life in and out of trouble with the law.
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