The Sagebrush Beacon and Six Pounds of Flour: Lyman Curtis, First Into the Valley and Home Again (1847)

Lyman Curtis was born January 21, 1812, in New Salem, Massachusetts. Baptized in 1833, he and his father and brothers helped build the Kirtland Temple, marched with Zion's Camp in 1834, and endured the persecutions of Missouri and Illinois. In 1847 he was chosen for the pioneer company as a hunter, assigned to the 13th Ten.

He left Winter Quarters on April 7, 1847, in company with his friend and traveling companion Levi Jackman, who recorded the faith with which the whole company set out, not knowing where they were going: "And in this condition we started to go, where, we could not tell or what we should have to contend with. We only knew that we must go and the Lord would attend to the bringing out the result."

On July 22, 1847, Curtis was in Orson Pratt's advance company — the first Latter-day Saints to enter the Great Basin from the canyon. That evening, in the new camp on the valley floor, he built a great fire of sagebrush whose glow was visible to the rest of the company still working their way down the canyon — a pioneer beacon telling them the way was found and the valley floor was reached.

That fall, when the company divided and most of the able men turned back east to bring out their families, Curtis made the thousand-mile return journey to Winter Quarters in the company of Levi Jackman — with six pounds of flour and one horse between the two of them. Traveling through October weather on the road they had themselves blazed months before, they subsisted on what the hunt and the prairie gave them, and came through to Winter Quarters. The provisions were spent; the way had held.

Curtis started back west in 1850 with his family — on the Nebraska plains, his wife gave birth to their ninth child en route — and arrived in October. He went on to build the first canal from the Little Muddy River near Moapa, Nevada, then a canal from the Santa Clara River to below St. George, and served a five-year mission among the Indians of southern Utah. He died January 27, 1898, at Salem, Utah — remembered as the man whose sagebrush fire first lit the valley for those still in the canyon, and who proved the trail home on six pounds of flour and one horse.