Elizabeth Bumgarner, née Curry
(Pooweguep)
A Woman of Courage,
Terminated Mixed-Blood Uinta, Roll #30
On the cold night of January 25, 1918, in Randlett, Utah, a beautiful Native girl was born to Della Ella (Harris) Curry and Oran Franklin Curry. At the time, Oran was serving as a Tribal police officer, while Della was a homemaker. They named their daughter Elizabeth Alice Curry. (Though many called her Alice, her true name was Elise, after her father’s sister, Elise Pawonnie.)
She was a beautiful baby with coal-black hair and dark skin, the daughter of proud Native parents. Elizabeth was the third of five children. Known affectionately as Liz, she spent her childhood in Whiterocks, Fort Duchesne, and Altamont. She enjoyed teasing her younger brother Richard, though she hated reading the cartoons from the newspaper aloud to him.
For her education, Liz attended Sherman Indian Boarding School in California, along with many other Native children from the Uinta Basin. When she returned home, she met a young Cherokee-Choctaw man named Samuel W. Bumgarner, Jr., who had come from Porum, Oklahoma to work in the C.C. Camps in Uinta Canyon and Coyote Basin. Sam was of average build, with striking black wavy hair and hazel “Choctaw eyes.” The two met at a baseball game in Fort Duchesne—a popular pastime in the area.
Liz and Sam were later married in Price, Utah, and together they had five children:
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Elizabeth Ruth, who passed away from pneumonia at just six months old,
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Samuel Reginald (“Reggie”),
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Oranna Malcene (“Ran” or “Skin”), named for Sam’s mother,
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Craig Walker (“Little Joe”), and
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Elizabeth Marleen (“Maley”).
This was the Bumgarner family.
The 1940s were difficult years. World War II was raging, and Sam served in the United States Marines, while Liz stayed home caring for Reggie and preparing for the birth of Oranna. After the war, Sam returned to work as a property clerk at Fort Duchesne, and the family lived in a government home in “the Circle.” By the mid-1950s, Liz and Sam started their own business: a combination grocery store and lunch counter in Fort Duchesne, which they named the Ute Trading Post.
But these were also the years when federal termination policies devastated Native communities. The Ute Tribe was targeted for termination, and Liz quickly became a strong voice for her people.
In the early 1950s, Liz was elected to represent the Uintas on the Ute Tribal Business Committee, where she fought tirelessly for her band. After termination policies began to take hold, she was elected to the first Board of Directors of the Affiliated Ute Citizens (A.U.C.), which sought to manage the division of tribal assets between full-blood and mixed-blood members. Alongside Preston Allen, Elmer Hackford, Lula (Harris) Murdock, and Bill Reed, Liz shouldered heavy responsibilities. Their first meeting was held on June 7, 1956, in the old Fort Duchesne hospital.
The work was grueling. The A.U.C. Board clashed constantly with the BIA superintendent, federal officials, and attorney John Boyden, who represented both full-blood and mixed-blood groups. Pressure mounted daily. As Parker Nielson later recorded in The Dispossessed, Liz stood at a general council meeting on May 4, 1955, and read a powerful statement calling for the dismissal of tribal employees Francis McKinley and Rex Curry, whom she and others believed had betrayed their people by supporting termination legislation pushed by Senator Arthur Watkins.
Liz carried these burdens heavily. Termination policies threatened her family’s future, her people’s survival, and her own children’s wellbeing. Her youngest daughter, Marleen, was diagnosed with terminal kidney disease. At the same time, her brother Rex Curry worked for the Tribe, leaving Liz painfully caught between family and duty.
By 1960, the federal government had begun retreating from termination as official policy, but for the mixed-blood Uintas, it was too late—the damage had already been done. Families lost lands, grazing rights, and shares of tribal assets. Health care vanished. Dishonest dealings stripped people of what little remained.
Liz and Sam tried to provide for their family. They moved their store to a 20-acre allotment near the Highway 40 turnoff to Fort Duchesne, painting Liz & Sam’s on the roof. Liz also secured land in Strawberry during the asset division. But as her daughter’s illness worsened, Liz was forced to lease land to non-members to pay for medical care.
Tragedy followed. Marleen died at just nine years old. Liz’s marriage crumbled under the strain, and Sam returned to Oklahoma. The store was foreclosed, and the children lost their inheritance. Liz turned increasingly to alcohol to numb the heartbreak of termination and the suffering of her people.
Her decline was painful to witness. Once a proud, beautiful woman with black hair and bright eyes, Liz endured abuse at the hands of an alcoholic husband, her spirit crushed by injustice.
On a cold winter morning—eerily like the day she was born—Liz’s life ended violently. The car she had traded her Ute distribution stocks for crashed at the intersection of Highway 40 and Lapoint Road, flying more than 100 feet before landing nose-first. Liz was found inside with a broken bottle embedded in her head, her leg still in a cast. She was only 45 years old.
And yet, her legacy endures.
“Liz’s spirit lives on.” So long as her family breathes, her work continues—the fight to break the chains of termination, to open the locked door that left the Uinta people imprisoned in their own homeland. Her struggle lit a fire that has not gone out.
