DON CARLOS SHIRTS, a MORMON SHOOTER and CLUBBER. During 1857, Shirts was a private in one of the platoons around 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 states that Shirts acted "cowardly," indicating 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 and observed the Arkansas emigrants as they traveled toward the south end of the valley. Samuel Knight was ranching at Mountain Meadows that summer and he states that while there he received an express with orders to raise the militiamen at Fort Clara. It may have been Shirts who delivered the express to Knight.
On Monday evening, September 7, after the first attack on the emigrant camp, 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, Lee stated, was Carl Shirts. However, little else is known of Carl Shirts' activities during the following three days of siege or in the final massacre on Friday the 11 th . Shirts was not named in the Judge John Cradlebaugh's arrest warrant nor mentioned during the 1875-76 Lee trials. He is only mentioned in Lee's posthumous memoir, Mormonism Unveiled.
