Prayer saved LDS family from '59 Yellowstone 'quake

On the evening of Aug. 17, 1959, JoAnn Ruf was putting together a puzzle in her father's cabin near Hebgen Lake in Montana when an earthquake registering 7.5 on the Richter scale struck at 11:37 p.m.

"It sounded like a bomb," Ruf said. "It was scary."

Ruf recently reminisced about that terrifying evening, when she was a young mother of two with a third child on the way. The Latter-day Saint woman, now in her 70s, vividly remembers the details of the disaster and how she felt "the Lord's protection" over the cabin.

When the quake hit just outside of Yellowstone National Park, Ruf knew what it was. She had lived in the San Francisco bay area for the first few years of her marriage and experienced a tremor or two.

"It's an earthquake," she said as the shaking began.

Ruf's mother came in from the kitchen carrying a pitcher of lemonade that sloshed all over the floor. "The stove is chasing me!" she said. Between the shaking and the slippery floor, her mother fell down. Ruf and her brother sprang to their mother's aid, lifting her up.

Ruf then heard her two children crying in the loft. She collected them and sat in a chair under an arch with a child on each knee.

"My brother was standing in front of me when he got the strangest look on his face," Ruf said. "He walked towards me raising his hands in the air, at which time a log broke loose from the ceiling and fell right into his arms. It was 4 or 5 inches in diameter and would have surely killed me if he hadn't of caught it."

Meanwhile, her fallen cousin was trying to dodge the piano that was rolling across the room. It ran over his thumb.

"He had to go to the hospital," Ruf said. "But that was the only injury we had."

Despite the commotion, her father, David Smith called for a family prayer.

"The first thing we did was knelt down and prayed," Ruf said.

Her father was a good friend of Elder Stephen L. Richards, and the apostle had dedicated the cabin and said it would be safe from the elements. Elder Richards also owned a cabin in the area.

Ruf said that every cabin in the area, except for her father's and her brother's, suffered some sort of structural damage, the most common being crumbling rock fireplaces.

In addition to Elder Richards' blessing, Smith was meticulous in building the cabin over a period of several years. Smith had moved to Idaho Falls at an early age and served as a bishop, stake president and president of the Idaho Falls Temple. He had "put money down" on lands nearby the cabin and "envisioned" parks and maybe even a temple there someday.

The earthquake put an end to any of those plans, but the cabin was spared. Only the interior items were damaged.

"Everything had come out of the cupboards," Ruf said. "Every dish was broken, flour and sugar were mixed and maple syrup was all over the floor."

A year or two after the earthquake, Ruf's father was backing up the car near the cabin and fell into a hole concealed by tall grass. They also later discovered a huge crack in the ground that encircled both their family's cabins.

"The Lord surely protected our cabin," she said.

E-mail: wjewkes@desnews.com