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In 1860, Franklin, the first permanent settlement in Idaho, was built on the bank of a stream called Muddy. We know it as Cub River. The Northern Shoshoni Indians were camped on Bear River and had planned to attack the settlement in early spring, but were defeated and decimated in January 1863 by Col. P. Edward Conner and two hundred soldiers from Fort Douglas. Four hundred Indians were killed, two thirds of them women and children. In 1866 William Head built the first house at what is now Preston, at the north end of Cache Valley, and in 1888 the Preston townsite was first surveyed into sixteen blocks of ten acres each. My father Ezra Grover Carter was born in 1892 in a homestead cabin a few miles from the Battle Creek Massacre site. The land had been taken up by his mother Catherine Eames and her first husband Joseph Greaves. The Mink Creek ditch had been built in 1888 to bring water to the new farms. Joseph had been killed in a tragic accident in Logan Canyon while cutting timbers for the Logan Temple, leaving a widow and two small sons. 
Ezra's father, George Dominicus Carter, had also come to the north end of Cache Valley to take up a homestead, and he likewise was a widower with a young family. Catherine's homestead required clearing of sagebrush to make land productive and George Dominicus and his son, a very young boy, had been employed to do this. In a second tragedy, the boy was killed when the horses he was driving ran with the harrow and he was dragged to death. These two great griefs brought my grandparents together and they combined their resources and families and had four more children of their own. Ezra was the second son born of this marriage. He had on older brother Myron, a younger brother Noel, and a sister Vera. The farm apparently prospered, for a fine new house built of white bricks with red brick trim was built when Ezra was a small boy. He ran errands for the builders and became such a favorite with them that when the new house was finished, one of the carpenters made a pretty little table for him that was later part of our furniture in Logan.
There were trips to Logan by horse-drawn wagon to visit his grandmother Eames, who had a house on main street. The trip would begin in the early morning, with a stop in Smithfield for lunch, and Logan arrival late in the afternoon. Ezra was never really fond of his grandmother; she had known hardship, and her grandchildren could have butter or jam on their bread but not both. Both butter and jam would have been sheer extravagance. While Ezra was still a small boy, his parents separated. There was tension between George Dominicus and the older stepsons, and he left the family and took up a homestead on the left hand fork of the Cub River. Myron went with him, but Ezra stayed on the Preston farm.
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He grew up as a farm boy with chores to do and the pleasures of fishing and
swimming in Bear River. Older brothers sometimes promised and later didn't deliver
a much anticipated fishing trip, but fishing became a lifelong pleasure for
him and he was a supreme expert at it. He and Myron had to feed the horses,
and one day when the weather was particularly foul, Ezra had finished his chores,
but the weather was so bad that Myron was excused from doing his. The injustice
of this so incensed Ezra that he went back out into the storm and removed the
hay from the horses he had already fed.
