The Young Scout of the Vanguard: Carlos G. Murray, Who Opened the Trail and Died on It (1847–1856)

Carlos G. Murray was born March 12, 1829, in Ontario County, New York, to William Ellis Murray and Mary Spring — a nephew of Heber C. Kimball through his father's sister Vilate, Kimball's wife. A Seventy of the Church at seventeen, Carlos was endowed in the Nauvoo Temple on January 24, 1846, in the final weeks before the Saints abandoned the city they had built on the Mississippi.

In the spring of 1847, at eighteen, he was asked to join Brigham Young's Vanguard Company, one of the youngest members of the historic band. He traveled in the Tenth Ten under Captain Appleton M. Harmon and was assigned as a scout for the pioneer company — riding ahead of the wagons to find the crossings and read the country no Latter-day Saint had yet seen. The trail journals remember him in May 1847 discovering a grey eagle's nest in a small cedar tree on the bluffs above the Platte — the kind of keen-eyed observation that made a scout useful to a company that could not afford a wrong road.

After entering the Salt Lake Valley, Carlos helped raise the first settlement, returned to Winter Quarters that fall for the family, and came back to the Valley in 1848. In about 1854 he married Louisa Haws, sister of Alpheus Peter Haws.

In 1856, at twenty-seven, Carlos was traveling the Humboldt River road in what is now Nevada — the great emigrant corridor to California — with his wife Louisa and a Mr. Redden, when a party of Indians attacked and killed them. Searchers found a gold pencil and an earring identified as theirs; Carlos's revolvers were traced to travelers who had bought them from Indians on the desert. The news reached Salt Lake by letter in June 1856, and the Deseret News carried the report on June 18. He was buried, as best could be done, where he fell.

He is remembered as one of the youngest of the first company — the scout who gave his youth to the trail west and then his life on it, a full decade after he had first helped open it.