Ezra Houghton Curtis was born in 1823 in western Pennsylvania to Enos Curtis and Ruth Franklin. He was the tenth of fourteen children. His father was an early convert to Mormonism and one of its earliest missionaries. In 1831, Enos Curtis had a role in the eventual conversion of future Mormon leaders Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball.
In 1835, 12-year-old Ezra Houghton was baptized a member of the Mormon Church. During the mid-1830s, the Curtis family lived in the Mormon settlements in western Missouri. In the difficulties known in Missouri history as the “Mormon Wars,” they and their fellow Mormons were expelled during the winter of 1838-39 and eventually relocated in the newly-founded Mormon settlements in western Illinois.
Immigration to Utah
Following the assassination of Mormon founder Joseph Smith in 1844 and the continuing unrest between the original settlers of western Illinois and the Mormons, the Curtis family joined the Mormon hegira from western Illinois beyond the Mississippi River into the Iowa and Nebraska territories. In the early winter of 1846, 22-year-old Ezra Curtis married Lucinda Carter (1831-1904), who was nearly 16. A native of Maine, Lucinda was the daughter of Dominicus Carter and Lydia Smith. Their first two children were born in the Mormon settlements in western Iowa, near modern-day Council Bluffs. She would eventually bear him twelve children.
In 1851, after accumulating sufficient means, the extended Curtis family joined a Mormon wagon company and immigrated to Utah Territory.
To Cedar City and the Ironworks
The Early Ironworks in Cedar City
By the mid-1850s, Curtis and his wife and children had moved to southern Utah and settled in Cedar City. His sister, Celestia Curtis Durfee, and his brother-in-law, Jabez Durfee, were also pioneering members of the new settlement.
In moving to Cedar City, Ezra Curtis was settling in an area dominated by the Deseret Iron Company, known more familiarly as the Ironworks. See Summary of Deseret Iron Company for a brief summary of its early development. In June 1855, Curtis and Wesley Willis drove wagons to the Muddy River in modern southern Nevada to retrieve discarded iron parts. Back in Cedar City, the blacksmiths would reforge the iron into useable implements.
In April 1857, the delivery of a new steam engine from Great Salt Lake City seemed to breathe new life into the ironworks. Working from April to June they installed the steam engine and completed the new engine house. In the first week of July, they were ready to begin smelting. They “put on the blast” and had a modicum of success. But they continued to be plagued with problems ranging from poor quality raw materials to smelting equipment that lacked technical sophistication. When in late July the steam engine seized with sand from the dirty creek water, they speedily dug a reservoir to store a supply of clean water for the boiler. They continued making smelting runs through August. All the while crews at the ironworks manned all the necessary functions there, while other crews, mainly miners and teamsters, gathered the raw materials – iron ore, coal, limestone, and wood – necessary to sustain smelting.
The smelting continued until September 13. In other words, around September 3, when a dispute arose between some settlers and several men in the passing Arkansas company, the blast furnace was running nonstop. And when Cedar City militiamen, many of them ironworkers, mustered to Mountain Meadows where they were involved in the massacre on September 11, other ironworkers in Cedar City continued the smelting runs night and day. For additional details, see Smelting at the Ironworks in 1857.
During this period in 1857, Curtis was a teamster who provided a team and wagon to haul a variety of materials including charcoal, "adobies," coal, fire clay, and rock to the Ironworks. During the iron run in August 1857, Curtis hauled several tons of coal to maintain the blast in the furnace.
The majority of the southern Utah militiamen at Mountain Meadows were from Cedar City. Of these, nearly all of them had worked at the Ironworks or supplied raw materials to it. Indeed, in the weeks before the Mountain Meadows Massacre, they had worked intensely together, hauling materials, building a new water reservoir, and making the latest run of the blast furnace. One perennial mystery of the massacre has been why the militiamen mustered to Mountain Meadows in “broken” militia units; that is, from different platoons and companies, none of which had a full compliment of its members. Perhaps the reason lies with the Ironworks. Those in the Ironworks knew each other and had worked alongside one another. Not only did Ezra Curtis knew those who mustered from Cedar City to Mountain Meadows, he had worked with them at the Ironworks as recently as the week before. Perhaps the answer is that the men of the Ironworks were on hand and available and Isaac Haight, who himself had worked closely with them, assigned them to muster to Mountain Meadows.
In the Iron Military District: 2nd Lieutenant Ezra Curtis, Company E, Isaac Haight's 2nd Battalion
In 1857, the Iron Military District consisted of four battalions. The platoons and companies in the first battalion drew on men in and around Parowan. (It had no involvement at Mountain Meadows.) Major Isaac Haight commanded the 2nd Battalion whose personnel in its many platoons and two companies came from Cedar City and outer-lying communities to the north such as Fort Johnson. Major John Higbee headed the 3rd Battalion whose many platoons and two companies were drawn from Cedar City and outer-lying communities to the southwest such as Fort Hamilton. Major John D. Lee of Fort Harmony headed the 4th Battalion whose platoons and companies drew on its militia personnel from Fort Harmony, the Southerners at the newly-founded settlement in Washington, the Indian interpreters at Fort Clara, and the new settlers at Pinto.
For 1857, Curtis, 35, was listed in Iron County militia records as a 2nd Lieutenant in one of the militia platoons in Company E. Irishman Samuel Pollack was sergeant in the same platoon while Curtis's brother-in-law, Jabez Durfee, was a private in the platoon. The platoons in Company E were led by Captain Elias Morris, a Welch emigrant, and that company was attached to the 2nd Battalion under the leadership of Major Isaac C. Haight. See A Basic Account for a full description of the massacre.
Multiple sources attest to Ezra Curtis’s presence at Mountain Meadows during the week of the massacre. Mormon herdsman Henry Higgins observed Curtis among the militia detachment departing Cedar City for the Meadows on the evening of Monday, September 7.
John D. Lee mentioned Curtis as among those in the area on Thursday evening when the final militia council was held, the one that led to the deceptive ploy to trick the Arkansas company into abandoning their defensive wagon circle.
Curtis’s exact role in the final massacre on Friday, September 11 is not known with certainty but it seems probable that he was among the Cedar City militiamen who accompanied the emigrant men away from the wagon circle in their northward line of march. As the massacre commenced, the duty of these guards was to wheel and fire on the emigrant men, quickly dispatching them. Yet during the actual massacre, reactions varied among the guards. Some shrank from their duty, others fired over the heads of their victims, while others still undertook their bloody duty with zeal. Within minutes, members of the Cedar City unit had killed all but three of the emigrant men. However, whether Curtis was in this guard unit and if so, how he acted during the massacre will probably never be known with any certainty.
Curtis’s name is included in the 1859 arrest warrant issued by Judge John Cradlebaugh. In 1875, during the first trial of John D. Lee, Samuel Pollock identified Curtis as among those who mustered to Mountain Meadows early in the week. Lee also mentioned Curtis in his posthumously-published autobiography, Mormonism Unveiled.
Abandoning Cedar City for Northern Utah
After the dual disasters of the massacre and the failure of the ironworks in Cedar City, Curtis and his family joined the exodus from that troubled settlement. They moved north to Provo where he pursued farming.
During the late 1860s, Curtis was in the militia and played some role in the Mormon-Native American conflict known as the Black Hawk War. In the Centennial History of Sevier County, published in 1947, Ezra Curtis was remembered as a noted veteran of that conflict.
In 1875, they moved back to southern Utah to pioneer at Willow Bend, now Aurora, in the high broad valley drained by the Sevier River. His brother-in-law and sister, Jabez Durfee and Celestia Curtis Durfee, also pioneered this new region. It is not known whether this move from Provo to the more remote mountainous region in southern Utah was prompted by the indictment and prosecution of former Iron County militiamen for their complicity in the massacre or by other considerations. However, their move to the Sevier Valley coincided with an intense expansion of Mormon settlements in the higher-elevation mountain valleys. Participation in the migration to these new and promising valleys seems just as likely as a motive.
From 1877 to 1879, Curtis was the bishop in Salina in the Sevier Valley. Eventually, Curtis took a plural wife, Juliaette Everett, who bore him seven more children.
Final Years
His first wife, Lucinda, died in 1904.
In 1915, Curtis died in Aurora, Sevier, Utah where he had lived for four decades. He was survived by his second wife and his many children.
Our thanks to John Warnke for further background on Ezra Curtis.
Note: The histories of Emery County refer to an Ezra Curtis, or E. Curtis, Sr., who was an early settler in Emery County in 1878. This Ezra Curtis was a militiaman in Sanpete County who first ventured into what would later become Emery County in pursuit of marauding Ute Indians during the Black Hawk War in the mid-1860s. In 1905, his wife Mary Ann filed for divorce against him claiming that he was "an habitual drunkard" who swore at her and the children, according to a story in the local newspaper. This does not appear to be the same individual as Ezra Houghton Curtis (1823-1915).
References
Bagley, Blood of the Prophets, 12; Bigler and Bagley, Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives, 235; Bishop, A History of Sevier County, 85; Brooks, Journal of the Southern Indian Mission," 129 fn. 70, citing the diary of George Washington Bean, one of the Las vegas missionaries. Esshom, Pioneers and Prominent Men of Utah, 832; Jenson, Encyclopedic History of the Church, 738 (Salina); Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, 232, 276, 379; Lee Trial transcripts; New.familysearch.org; Shirts and Shirts, A Trial Furnace, 495; Walker, et al, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, Appendix C, 257; Warnke, "Biographical sketch of Ezra Houghton Curtis, 1823-1915"; Warnock, Through the Years: A Centennial History of Sevier County, 107, 108 (photo), 110, 122; Warnock & Warnock, Sevier Stake Memories, 416.
For full bibliographic information see Bibliography.
