Don Carlos Shirts

 

Biographical Sketch

Carl Shirts, his personal and family background, and his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre

Don Carlos Shirts/Shurtz (1836-1922)
Biographical Sketch

The German forebears of Don Carlos ("Carl") Shirts (var. Shurtz, Schertz, Schurtz) were from Hesse, Germany and settled in Bergen and Hunterdon counties in New Jersey, then moved on to Ohio. His Swedish forebears immigrated from Stockholm to New York County, New York, then to Bergen County, New Jersey. He also had Scot (Cameron) and Irish (Kelly) forebears who immigrated to Pennsylvania. Shirts himself was a native of rural Ohio who, like many of his fellow Mormons, moved in a westerly arc to Illinois and then to frontier Utah where Shirts along with his parents and siblings were pioneers in southern Utah. 
In 1836, Don Carlos Shirts was born in Geauga County in northwest Ohio toPeter Shurtz/Shirts and Margaret Cameron. After joining the Mormons, the large family moved to Illinois. As a result of the unrest between the newly-arriving Mormons and the original settlers in western Illinois, the Shirts family moved through the Iowa and Nebraska territories and arrived in Utah in 1849. 
By the 1850s, they have moved south to the Parowan/Cedar City region in southern Utah. During that time Shirts married Mary Adeline Lee, one of John D. Lee’s daughters. But the union was not to last and they eventually separated. On August 23, 1857, on the eve of the crisis leading to the massacre, Shirts married his recently-deceased brother’s widow, Elizabeth Ann (Betsy) Williams in Parowan.
During 1857, the 21-year-old Shirts was a private in one of the platoons in Fort Harmony under the leadership of Major John D. Lee. Lee stated that after his consultation around Thursday, September 3 or Friday, September 4 with Isaac C. Haight in Cedar City about raising Indians to attack the Arkansas emigrants, Lee returned to Fort Harmony. On Saturday, September 5, Lee gave orders to his son-in-law, Carl Shirts, to take an express to other settlements to recruit Indians to Mountain Meadows. Lee later stated that Shirts acted "cowardly," an indication of Shirts’ initial reluctance to follow Lee. But soon Shirts fell in line and carried the express as ordered. It is probable that Shirts was at Mountain Meadows later that Saturday where he observed the Arkansas emigrants as they traveled toward the southern end of the valley. Samuel Knight was ranching at Mountain Meadows that summer. Around the time of the emigrants arrival at Mountain Meadows, he received an express with orders to raise the militiamen at Fort Clara. It may have been Shirts who delivered the express to him.
On Monday evening, September 7, after the first attack on the emigrant camp, John D. Lee traveled south in search of the militia contingent from the southern settlements of Washington and Fort Clara. He encountered them some miles south of the Meadows. Among them was Carl Shirts. Moving up to Mountain Meadows on Tuesday the 8th, Lee gave Shirts charge of the Paiutes. Shirts's son Ambrose believed there was another reason that Lee taunted Shirts in later years for being a coward: Lee believe that in translating commands to the Indians, Shirts conveyed orders in direct contradiction to his own. Other than that, little else is known of Carl Shirts’ activities during the three days of siege or the final massacre. In 1859, when Judge John Cradlebaugh issued the arrest warranty naming those allegedly complicit in the massacre, Shirts was not on the list. Nor did his name arise during either of the Lee trials in 1875 or 1876. He is only mentioned in Lee’s posthumously published memoir, Mormonism Unveiled.
Sometime after the massacre, Shirts and Lee’s daughter Mary separated, in no small part because of the antipathy Lee bore toward Shirts. Shirts remained with his other wife, Betsy Williams Shirts. In 1858, Shirts helped build a road to establish new settlements in the Virgin river valley of Washington County. Shirts had some skill as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. In 1861, he built a dulcimer using lumber from red cedar and forging timing pins from iron spikes. During the 1860s, the Shirts family moved east to the upland where the new settlement of Panguitch had been founded. In 1876, Shirts, his wife Betsy and one child relocated from Panguitch to the remote settlement at Escalante in Garfield County. There Shirts built a home of adobies and jerked venison to preserve for the winter. In those years in Escalante, Shirts and another cabinetmaker built a piano for community use. During all these years, Betsy Shirts bore her husband twelve children. They eventually settled throughout southern Utah. In 1922, Shirts died in Escalante, Garfield County, and was buried there.
References: Carter, Heart Throbs of the West, 10:466, 12:380; Cleland and Brooks, ed., Mormon Chronicle: The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876, I:258; Daughters of Utah Pioneers, An Enduring Legacy, 1:71; Lee, Mormonism Unveiled; Lee Trial transcripts; Newell and Talbot, The History of Garfield County, 131, 133-134, 165, fn. 6; New.FamilySearch.org; Seegmiller, The History of Iron County, 59 fn 13; Shirts and Shirts, A Trial Furnace: Southern Utah's Iron Mission, 20, 438, 497; Shurtz, "History of Peter Shirts and his Descendants," 93-94; Walker, et al, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Appendix C.
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