David W. Tullis

David Tullis, his personal and family background, and his involvement in the Mountain Meadows Massacre

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David Wilson Tullis

1833-1902

Biographical Sketch

Early Life in Scotland

A native of Fifeshire in East Central Scotland, David Wilson Tullis was a Scottish Lowlander whose family left Scotland and immigrated to American. Tullis later moved west to frontier Utah were he pioneered in southern Utah.

Tullis was born in 1833 in Cupar, Fifeshire, Scotland, the son of David Tullis and Euphemia Wilson. The family occupied itself in farming and drayage. They may have also fished in the nearby Firth of Forth.

Immigration to American and onto Utah

In 1849, the Tullis family immigrated to America. While working in St. Louis, Tullis heard the Mormon preaching and joined the Mormon Church. When his parents died in the mid-West, Tullis moved west to Utah in 1852.

In fall 1853, Tullis was among those called to the Southern Indian Mission and in 1854, he moved to southern Utah, first settling at Fort Harmony, then briefly in Cedar City where he learned the stone mason trade, then to Fort Clara on the Santa Clara River. In 1856, Tullis and others pioneered the village of Pinto in Iron County, midway between Cedar City and the Mountain Meadows. Among the group with Tullis were Thales Haskell, Amos G. Thornton, Richard Robinson, Benjamin Knell and others. For several years they expanded the Pinto settlement in the summer and returned to Santa Clara in the winter. When Jacob Hamblin pioneered a mountain ranch at the Mountain Meadows in the summer of 1857, Tullis moved there to work for Hamblin. Samuel Knight and his wife also ranched there that summer.

The Iron MIlitary District: Private David Tullis, Company H, in John D. Lee's 4th Battalion

In September 1857, the 24-year-old Tullis was a private in the Fort Clara first platoon, one of two platoons there, in Company H under Captain Alexander Ingram, attached to Major John D. Lee’s 4th Battalion. On Saturday, September 5, Tullis later told federal investigators, he encountered the emigrant train as it entered the valley of Mountain Meadows. On Friday, the 11th, according to Tullis family lore, Tullis feigned illness to avoid being called up to participate in the final massacre. This same lore reports that Tullis told his son what he had learned from Indians about the massacre. However, his son refused to tell what he heard because it was "too bad to tell," a very common reaction for decades after the massacre. In 1859, federal Indian Superintendent Jacob Forney listed Tullis in his list of the "most guilty" but Forney's opinion does not appear to be substantiated. One of the seventeen surviving children -- six-year-old Rebecca Dunlap -- later claimed that an "Englishman named Tullis" was the murderer of one of her parents. But Tullis was not listed in the Judge John Cradlebaugh's arrest warrant nor mentioned during the 1875-76 Lee trials nor by John D. Lee in his postumously-published memoir nor, finally, in William Bishop's "list of assassins" which he appended to Lee's autobiography.

Later Life

In 1862, 28-year-old Tullis married a 40-year-old widow, Mary Alice Hardman Eccles (1821-1883), of Lancashire, England. Two years later, Tullis married Mary's 16-year-old daughter, Martha Eccles (1847-1915), also of Lancashire. Mary Alice bore him one child and Martha eventually bore him twelve. Although such relationships may offend modern notions of romantic and exclusive marital love, these particular unions endured and seem to have worked.

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Besides farming, Tullis herded dairy cows which provided him with a cash crop of cheese and dairy products. He contributed his skills as a stone mason to the rock meetinghouse and other buildings in Pinto.

According to family lore, Tullis followed the Scottish virtues of cleanliness, order, and economy. Beginning in 1882, he returned to his native Scotland on a church mission. Returning after fifteen months abroad, he continued his previous pursuits.

Family records report that Tullis was a large, handsome man with blue eyes who in later years had wavy, white hair. Although he had little formal education, he was gregarious and intelligent. He is reported to have provided generously to his fellow Scots and he had a local reputation for singing, clog dancing and waltzing. In later years he spent winters in nearly Gunlock to take advantage of its milder weather.

In 1902, Tullis died at the age of 69 and was buried in Pinto, survived by his second wife and ten children.

References

Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 154, 239; Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, ; Lee Trial transcripts; New.FamilySearch.org; Tullis family records; Statement of David Tullis, in Forney Report, 1859, in Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, Appendix IX; Turley and Walker, Mountain Meadows Massacre: The Jenson & Morris Collections, 212-213, 268-270; Walker, et al, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, 149, 152, Appendix C; Woodbury, “A History of Southern Utah and its National Parks, Utah Historical Quarterly, 12/3-4 (Jul.-Oct. 1944), 144, fn 36.

External Links

For further information on David Wilson Tullis see: http://www.tullistrees.org/Vol5No1/DavidWilsonTullis.htm

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