Curtis, county attorney of Garden county, was born in Knoxville, Marion county, Iowa, on September 24, 1871. His paternal ancestors came from England in early colonial times and each new generation joined the western bound pioneers. In the early fifties when Mr. Curtis's father. Stephen Curtis, was a small boy, the Curtis family emigrated from Ohio to the Des Moines river bottom near the site of old Bellefountain and engaged in the usual occupations of the woodman. The grandfather was a sash and door maker, and his sons operated the first portable sawmill on the Des Moines river.

Herbert J.'s mother was also of pioneer stock but her people originally came from Ireland, and settled in Pennsylvania, from thence moving to Highland county, Ohio, from there to Des Moines county. Iowa, and on to Marion count v. Several of her ancestors, the Mc- Conaugheys were scalped in their own dooryards by the Indians of William Penn's province.

HISTORY OF WESTERN NEBRASKA

Mr. Curtis's boyhood was spent on a farm near Knoxville. He did farm work in the summer, and attended the district school in the winter, until he was sixteen years of age, when his father died, and he being the oldest of a large family of children quit school and took charge of the farm work. When he was twenty-one years old, his mother married again, and taking a four year old colt as his inheritance, he struck out to earn some schooling. By teaching school a portion of the year, and attending school and doing odd jobs the remainder of the time, he secured a first class teacher's certificate, and the degrees of Bachelor of Didactics, and Master of Didactics from the Highland Park College, Des Moines, Iowa. He then took the Principal Teachers' examinations in the United States Civil Service, and in 1895 received an appointment as teacher at the Colorado River Indian Boarding School at Parker, Arizona.