The Irish in the Building of the Intermountain West

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 25, 1957, Nos. 1-4

THE IRISH IN THE BUILDING OF THE INTERMOUNTAIN WEST

BY ROBERT J. DWYER

To THE Irish people history has assigned a role in the expansion of Western culture and civilization far beyond any reasonable expectation based on their numbers or their actual political influence. It is a matter not of oratorical exuberance but of sober fact that the natives of the Emerald Isle, geographically less than one-third the size of Nevada, have contributed far more than their due share to the making of the modern world. To limit attention to the story of the Irish in America is to neglect a vast panorama of their pioneering activities throughout the extent of the old British Empire and in many parts of the Latin American world. If our concern here is to trace their steps and mark their monuments in the Intermountain West, we are conscious that this is but a footnote to the story of their total achievement.

It is an established fact that the Irish in America on the eve of Independence accounted for no less than 17 per cent of the total population. The bulk of this, somewhere around 400,000 were immigrants from the northern counties of Ulster, mainly Presbyterians and Dissenters, and their strength lay in the interior valleys stretching from Pennsylvania to the Carolinas. They had come to America in the eighteenth century seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity, and there is no question but that they contributed mightily to the determination of the colonies to throw off the Imperial yoke. Of the remainder, estimated at something under 150,000, the majority came from the southern and western counties of Ireland, and came under conditions of extreme hardship. For the most part they were the Catholic victims of one of the most vicious penal codes ever enacted; they came branded as criminals or indentured to servitude which was hardly distinguishable from outright slavery.

Denied the practice of their religion, scattered over the length and breadth of the colonies, though largely concentrated at the south, it is hardly to be wondered that they gradually drifted from their moorings and should even seek to deny their nationality along with their inherited faith. It is significant of what happened to these people that by 1790, when the first estimates of Catholic population in the new republic were made, the total, including all nationalities, was set down as only 35,000.

The nineteenth century, however, introduced a new era. America beckoned to the Irish with ever brighter attraction. The impulse for religious freedom, still powerful in the early decades, grew less impelling after Catholic Emancipation in 1829, but its place was taken by sheer economic necessity. In the years before the Great Famine of 1847 Ireland's population was in excess of eight millions, reckoned at 251 persons per square mile, an intolerable burden for a country cursed with landlordism and suffering from the dire results of outrageous laws of enclosure. In the decade of the 1820's some 50,000 Irish landed at American ports. In the next ten years the number jumped to over 200,000, and between 1850 and 1860 the climax was reached with 914,119. When the guns were fired at Sumter, out of the estimated 2,500,000 Catholics in America it is fairly safe to say that over two-thirds were Irish immigrants.

They came, the vast majority of them, the poorest of God's poor. They came herded like sheep in steerage, many of them carrying the seeds of death from years of malnutrition or plain starvation, and thousands of them died in passage or soon after landing in the strange New World. When they disembarked at New York or Boston or Baltimore they were caught up in the enormous industrial development that was changing America. Where, in the 1840's and '50's they had run foul of the native American displaced by the Industrial Revolution, and had been plunged into the angry, senseless quarrels over religion, sponsored by politicians of the "know nothing" stripe, by the decade of the 'sixties they were welcomed as essential tools of industrial expansion.

Spiritually, as well, the situation had changed radically. The Irish Catholic immigrant was no longer a man abandoned to his own devices. He came now accompanied by his own priests, and the American hierarchy was straining every resource to supply him with the churches and schools he would need for the fulfillment of his religious life. But even this concern of the Church for the Irish immigrant led to some strange and unexpected consequences. In the opinion of a prelate like Archbishop John Hughes of New York, an opinion which never lacked for vigor of expression, it was perfectly clear that the place for the Irish to stay and to settle down was along the Eastern seaboard, in the growing cities where the Church was already established and might in time dominate. For him, it was folly of the worst kind to encourage them to fan out over the country, to go to the Middle West as farmers, to the Mississippi Valley where embattled Protestantism was in control, much less to the Far West, which, as far as he was concerned, was a howling wilderness, spiritual as well as physical.

And there is no denying that the iron will of Archbishop Hughes, and of those who saw eye to eye with him, weighed heavily in the decision of the overwhelming number of Irish immigrants during the nineteenth century to stay, if not exclusively in the East, then certainly in the cities. An agricultural people by immemorial tradition, they proved a marvelous adaptability to the conditions of their new life; indeed, in the trying decades of the latter part of the century, and on into our own, they displayed an amazing and sometimes disturbing facility in political management, not to say manipulation.

What was it that brought the Irish to the Far West? There were many reasons, obviously, no one of them finally determining. There was, first of all, the inherent spirit of adventure in their soul, the memory of Brendan, the navigator who sailed to the West a thousand years before Columbus; of the Irish missionaries who reconverted Great Britain and northern Europe; of the Wild Geese who fled from Kinsale to lead half the armies of the Continent and to leave their names in Mexico and Chile. There was, in addition, the fact that not all American prelates thought that Archbishop Hughes had the right of it. It would not be until the 'seventies that serious efforts would be made to establish Irish colonies on farm lands in Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska, but long before that word had gone forth that the Church herself had moved West and could take care of them.

Archbishop John Ireland of St. Paul and Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Peoria, both prominent in the movement to induce the Irish to return to the land in the endless reaches of the American West, were themselves echoing the urgings of priests and bishops who had gone before them and had seen the opportunity. It cannot be said, however, that the Irish colonization societies met with anything like success. In contrast with the Catholic German movements of the same nature, they were comparative failures.

It was the abject poverty of the typical Irish immigrant which prompted him, failing ready employment in the industrial East, to try his hand at canal digging or railroad building, the very means by which he would penetrate the West, for all of the Archbishop of New York. The saying goes that the Erie Canal was lined with the bones of the Irish laborers; certain it is that one can trace the growth of the Catholic church in upper New York State along its channel, the Dioceses of Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo marking the stages. It was the concentration of the Irish roadbuilders that changed Chicago from a poor mission, so poor that its second Bishop was glad to exchange it for the see of Natchez, into a far greater Hibernian center than Dublin itself. And as the railroads crept even further west, all through the 'sixties, the Irish were in the van, smoothing the gradients, laying the endless miles of track. And here again the historian of the Catholic church in America marks the stages of the road with the episcopal sees planted along the rightof-way: Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Grand Island, Lincoln, Denver, Cheyenne, until finally Salt Lake City and Reno are reached. The same pattern holds for the northern and southern routes.

In the meanwhile, moreover, another factor had emerged. The discovery of gold in California, in 1848, normally would have had little bearing on the fortunes of the Irish in America, or at least no bearing beyond a visionary interest. There was little in the Irish background to encourage interest in mining. True, the English Industrial Revolution had necessitated the importing of thousands of Irish to work the coal mines of the Midlands, but it was hardly a labor that inspired or appealed. The fact was, however, that the discovery of gold coincided with a surplus of Irish labor in the great eastern cities of America. Within a matter of months the sleepy mission of San Francisco de Assis, near Yerba Buena, was overrun with Irish argonauts. When the Dominican friar, Joseph Sadoc Alemany, was consecrated Bishop of Monterey in 1850, he had dreams of spending his life in an agrestic Spanish-American arcadia; instead, he found that he had inherited a see of an overwhelmingly Irish complexion. By 1860 an Irish priest, writing home, would estimate that San Francisco was one-third Irish in population.

The gold dust trails led from San Francisco into the Mother Lode country, then into the high Sierra, and ultimately through the passes into Nevada. It is difficult if not actually impossible to be certain of the proportion the Irish bore to the rest of the argonauts. The likelihood is that they numbered approximately one in four, a higher average than was maintained in the later years when the mines were opened in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, and Utah. If historic Virginia City, Nevada, be taken as reasonably typical of western mining history, the inference is justified; the records indicate that at least a quarter of the inhabitants were Irish born.

The stage, then, is set for the entrance of the ubiquitous Irishman into the Intermountain West. He came because he liked to travel and was enamoured of adventure; he came because he was poor and had a yearning to get rich quick; he came because he built the railroads that brought him there; and he came because he had heard, as one Paddy would tell another, in the steerage passage, along the sidewalk on Mott Street, out along the tie-siding in Nebraska, that there was gold in the West and a fortune at the foot of the rainbow.

There is hardly more than the merest tinge of Irish influence in the early history of the Intermountain West, the era of the explorers and the mountain men. The nearest Domiguez and Escalante came to it was to name a camp-site near Milford in honor of St. Bridget, and it is terrifyingly possible that they may have had St. Brigid of Sweden in mind. The fur traders, based at St. Louis, anteceded the coming of the Irish to the banks of the Missouri. One name, however, emerges with honor, that of Thomas Fitzpatrick, "Broken Hand," the Canadian-born Irishman who seems to have come as close to fulfilling the definition of a gentleman as a mountain man could ever reach and keep his skin intact.

A few other names catch the attentive eye. In the sorry procession of the Donner party, breaking its way through the Wasatch barrier in the summer of 1846, there was a waif by the name of Luke Halloran. He was a consumptive, and he died about the time they were fording the Jordan River. Is his the first white man's grave in the Salt Lake Valley? There were also in the party Patrick Breen and his family, stalwarts who were to win through to California after the horrors of the winter on Alder Creek.

The following summer saw the Latter-day Saint settlement of the Salt Lake Valley, and the beginning of the first decade of the Mormon development of Utah, then that vast area between the Rockies and the Sierra. One is tempted to hazard the suggestion that the relative peace and quiet of that decade was due in part to the fact that so few Irishmen were around, though it would be an interesting study to determine how many of the original Mormon settlers themselves were of Irish ancestry. But destiny was hedging the Mormon experiment round about; to the east rich ore discoveries were announced in the front range of the Colorado Rockies; to the west, in the barren hills along the Carson River, the famous "blue stuff" that was the outcropping of the fabulous Comstock lode had been identified as silver; to the north there were rumors of hidden treasures in Montana and Idaho. Isolation was a dream which reality would successively dispel. And the Irishman was there to help dispel it.

He came to Utah in the ranks of Johnston's Army. Use had already been found for him in the Mexican War, and it was part of his tradition to enlist whenever there was a likely war at hand. How many of him were there in that strange and futile expedition, to spend the winter freezing on the top of Wyoming, and to march, with the coming of spring, through the deserted streets of Great Salt Lake City and out to Camp Floyd? There is no roster to tell us; we only pick up stray references to Irish names in the journals of Albert Tracy, Wolcott Phelps, and Jesse Gove. We know that one, by name Harrington, decamped and deserted, and was heard of as having married a Mormon lass, somewhere south of Provo. We know that one died in the summer of 1859, and that a Catholic priest—what we would give to know his namel—was there to bury him with surplice and stole, to Captain Phelps's intense disgust. As for the rest, it is reasonably possible that they occasionally got drunk on Valley Tan and raised ructions in the City of the Saints. It was fairly normal for soldiers.

One year earlier, in the summer of 1858, Father Joseph Gallagher, commissioned by Archbishop Alemany of San Francisco, offered Mass in a cabin at Genoa at the foot of the Sierra for as many of the Irish miners of the area as could be gathered in. A year later, from Leavenworth, Kansas, that hardy frontier missionary, Bishop John Baptist Miege, S. J., set out to visit a camp on Cherry Creek, near the Rockies. He decided that the Bishop of Santa Fe, the John Baptist Lamy of saga and fable, would be a better man to take care of Colorado than himself. Bishop Lamy had no choice but to send his fidus Achates, Father Joseph Machebeuf, to save the souls of these turbulent Irishmen who were pouring into Denver en route to Central City, Georgetown, and all the other camps of the Parks area.

In 1860 another Irishman, though actually a native American, rode into Salt Lake City. His name was Edward Creighton, and he was a man with a mission. His job was to map the route of the transcontinental telegraph from the Missouri to California, and he did it as much on foot as on horseback. The next year he was back, building the line, one of the most spectacular achievements in Western history and one of the most immediately successful. The university that honors his name owes more to him than an endowment; it owes him the memory of a valiant Christian gentleman.

By then, on the slopes of Mount Davidson Virginia City had been founded, and the tremendous potential of the Comstock was beginning to be realized. Father Hugh Gallagher, theologian of parts, had come as its first pastor and had built his church, forerunner of that "Queen of the Comstock," St. Mary-in-the-Mountains, which still stands as the memorial and monument of the Irish pioneers of Nevada. If there be truth in the claim that the silver of Nevada's storehouse tipped the scales for Northern victory in the Civil War, then some part of the credit must go to his parishioners, those Kellys and Burkes and Sheas who went down into the mines to dig it out. They may not have had the genius of a Sam Clemens, jotting down notes for Roughing It at his desk at the Territorial Enterprise office, but they supplied the stuff he wove into his legend.

Came 1862, with the war blasting the orchards of Antietam and the forests of Shiloh. Word went the rounds in Washington that the Indians were restive along the Holy Road, and that it might be just as well to keep an eye on the Mormons out in Utah. So ordered, and who better fitted for the job than Patrick Edward Connor, the Kerryman out in Stockton, California, who had been drilling his California Volunteers in hopes of just such a break as this. Colonel Connor was commissioned, and by autumn the Colonel had his men snugly quartered at Camp Douglas, overlooking Salt Lake City. En route the men of his command, being Californians, had not overlooked the possibilities of a little mining activity to leaven the tedium of army life. Indeed, outside of its quite criminal and brutal massacre of a group of Bannocks and Shoshonis at the ford of the Bear River near modern Preston, and its somewhat inglorious role in the Powder River campaign of 1865, Connor's Utah Expedition is chiefly notable for its part in opening up the mining history of the territory. Connor himself is rightly called the father of Utah mining. Though its development had to wait on the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, he and his men, a number of them bearing distinctly Irish names, mapped out many of the key areas which were later to produce undreamed-of wealth.

The ending of the war released energies in America which were soon felt in the Intermountain West. Work was speeded on the epic construction of the Pacific railway, as the gangs of Irish laborers bent their backs toward the setting sun, and gangs of Chinese Coolies faced its rising. The decade was uncertain, tentative, as though the nation were striving to find its pace again. For the Bishops of the United States, meeting in Baltimore in 1866 for their Second Plenary Council, it was clear that something would have to be done about the vast area between the mountains. Reports reached them of scores of mining towns springing up overnight, of thousands of Irish immigrants pouring into them, needing the services of their religion. One such report would have come from Father Machebeuf in Denver, who had dispatched his assistant, Father John B. Raverdy, on a scouting expedition in the summer of 1864 which had taken him through Salt Lake City and on north into the Idaho camps. Another would have come from the harassed Vicar Apostolic of Marysville, California, the Right Reverend Eugene O'Connell, who had even more immediate knowledge of the situation.

For in the late spring of 1866 Bishop O'Connell had commissioned one of his priests, the Reverend Edward Kelly, who was serving as missionary pastor of the mining camp of Austin, Nevada, to investigate conditions in the heart of the Mormon empire. By June, Kelly was in Salt Lake City making a census of the Catholic population and planning a permanent residence and chapel. He must have been a personable young man with a flair, for he had little difficulty in raising funds for his undertaking, in spite of the fact that his congregation was microscopic, a mere matter of a dozen families or so. But he seems to have sensed the possibilities of the future, and he certainly must have known something of the mining prospects that were opening up.

The decision of the Council was manifest two years later, in 1868. It was to erect the Vicariate of Denver, with Machebeuf as Bishop, with jurisdiction over Colorado and Utah; to erect the Vicariate of Idaho and Montana, with Louis Lootens, a Belgian priest then working in the Diocese of Monterey, as Ordinary; and to transfer Nevada from the care of the Vicar Apostolic of Marysville (now named Bishop of the new Diocese of Grass Valley) to that of the Archbishop of San Francisco. There were several obvious flaws in the decision: it left Nevada and Utah somewhat in the position of spiritual step-children; it was clearly premature in the case of Idaho; and it gave charge over an overwhelmingly Irish immigrant Catholic population to a Frenchman, Machebeuf; a Spaniard, Alemany; and a Belgion, Lootens. In the last case, poor Bishop Lootens struggled for a hopeless decade with the constant fluctuations of the Idaho mines, and then resigned. Nor was Bishop Machebeuf at all happy with his Utah inheritance. One of his first acts as Bishop was a visitation of Salt Lake City, where he confirmed in Father Kelly's little chapel and at Fort Douglas, and he was careful to send priests to Utah when and as he could. Of one of these, a Father Honore Bourion, fresh over from France, he remarked in a letter to his sister, "Father Bourion could not make a living among the Mormons, and has returned home." Perhaps it would have been more accurate if he had said that the priest had failed to make a living among his Irish parishioners! At any rate, matters dragged on until 1871, when Bishop Machebeuf prevailed upon Archbishop Alemany to take over Utah as well as Nevada. With an audible sigh of relief he wrote his sister again, "At last I am disembarrassed of the Mormons." Could it be that he failed to appreciate them?

This new decade of the 'seventies, nevertheless, was to be the most significant in the history of the Irish group in the intermountain country. It was to consolidate them, spiritually and economically; it was to give them status; and it was to lay the foundations of their future wealth. In Nevada it was the era of the Mackays, the Fairs, and the Floods, the Irish-born terriers who were to emerge as the moguls of the Comstock. In Utah, if that galaxy cannot be matched, it was the decade when young men like Marcus Daly, later to make history as the genius of the Anaconda, were learning the ways of mines and mining men at such places as Ophir, Alta, Tooele, and Parley's Park. As good fortune would have it, it was the decade, too, that brought to prominence two great spiritual leaders, Patrick Manogue and Lawrence Scanlan.

The biography of Bishop Manogue is itself a summary of Irish achievement in the West. Irish born and bred, he came to America as student for the priesthood for the Diocese of Chicago, but his health failing, he shouldered family responsibility as a breadwinner, found his way to the Mother Lode country of California, and wore callouses on his hands as a hard-rock gold miner. Yearning still for the priesthood, he was accepted by Bishop O'Connell of Marysville, who sent him to finish his course in Paris, where he was ordained in 1861. A year later he was named pastor of Virginia City, where for eighteen years he ruled his flock with that combination of mercy and justice which made him both feared and loved. When, in 1880, he was named co-adjutory to his ailing Bishop, he, no less than his monumental church, was the "Pride of the Comstock." A legend has grown up about him; but indeed, his portrait needs no legend, strong, manly, powerful. He stamped his personality on the whole of Nevada, a great part of which he was to continue to govern in later years as Bishop of Sacramento.

Lawrence Scanlan was much less spectacular than Manogue. When he came to Salt Lake City in 1873, succeeding Father Patrick Walsh, he was already acquainted with the hardships of mining camps, with two years at Pioche, Nevada, behind him. He faced an enormous task, the care of a flock scattered widely over the whole of his parish—the entire territory of Utah. Seven years later he could survey with some satisfaction a record of significant progress, of churches built in a dozen mining towns, of schools and hospitals opened and flourishing from Park City to Silver Reef, and a Catholic population, predominantly Irish, welded together into a vigorous unity. A plain man, not highly gifted, he nevertheless exerted a magnetic influence over his people and managed to live on terms of cordiality with the Latter-day Saints who formed the overwhelming mass of his neighbors.

He was not particularly interested in politics. For an Irishman, this seems to be an indictment. Nor was his attitude altogether typical of his Irish flock. One of the earliest gentile organizations in Utah was the Fenian Brotherhood, organized by men of Colonel Connor's command as early as 1862. Delegates Ivere sent from both Utah and Nevada to the convention held in Cincinnati in 1865, when plans were laid for the projected invasion of Canada—that extraordinary effort at twisting the British Lion's tail. But western interest in the Brotherhood died quickly after the humiliating fiasco which resulted. More germane were affairs at home, where the gentile minority was embarked on its long career to disfranchise the Mormons on the score of polygamy. The Liberal party was launched in 1867, with a William McGroarty as candidate for delegate to Congress. He received a bare 105 votes as compared with a crushing tally for Captain Hooper, his Church-sponsored opponent, but nevertheless attempted to convince the federal House of Representatives that he was entitled to the seat. Another Irishman to figure in this unpleasant business was a certain "Judge" Dennis Tuohy, somewhat of a rabble-rouser from Corinne. For the most part, however, it would seem that relatively few of the Irish in Utah were active in the fortunes of the Liberal party.

By 1880 Father Scanlan could report to his Archbishop that Utah Territory, his deanery, counted approximately five thousand Catholics, most of them of Irish birth or parentage. Of these only four hundred were settled in Salt Lake City, some eight hundred in St. Mary's parish, Park City, and the rest broadcast over the area, in the mining towns and railroad centers. There are, unfortunately, no comparable figures preserved for Nevada, though it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of the population of Virginia City, Austin, Eureka, and the other even less permanent mining towns, that fifteen thousand would be a conservative estimate. If all or even a fair percentage of these people had remained, their descendants today would form a very considerable segment of the population of the Intermountain West. Their tragedy, if such it be, was that they had allied themselves with the mining fortunes of the region. To some few it would bring wealth and social esteem; to the majority it was only a means of livelihood, and the rapid and unpredictable fluctuations of the economy would in time prove disheartening to most of them. Without permanent roots in what was to them always more or less of an alien soil, they tended to look to greener pastures elsewhere, to the California coast where San Francisco beckoned as a surrogate for Dublin, or to the other mining centers of Colorado or Montana, as opportunity opened these up. A highly instructive study might be devoted to the Irish "mining circuit," where the flow and interchange of population would include such stopping points as Virginia City, Tonopah, Gold Field, Park City, Butte, Eureka, and Leadville and Cripple Creek, Colorado.

With relatively few exceptions, the Irish builders of the Intermountain West fought shy of agriculture or ranching. Irish colonization of the land, where it was projected or attempted, came to nothing. Judge E. F. Dunne, a resident of Salt Lake City during the late 'seventies, was active in the promotion of such schemes, and was urgent in his plea for the establishment of a National Bureau of Catholic Colonization. Some years later an ambitious plan was announced for an Irish colony to be located in the Bear River Valley, north of Corinne. John Dillon, long an outstanding figure in Irish politics, was reported as having "thrown himself into the scheme with great vigor," and a tract of 100,000 acres was supposed to have been secured. A contract to build a dam was let, but for whatever reason, never fulfilled. It is a strong likelihood that the plan died a-borning for lack of interest among the Irish it was intended to serve.

So it is, that if we were to look for a symbol and an epitome of the contribution of the Irish to the building of the Intermountain West, it is the mining man who emerges. And we could hardly do better, as we conclude this highly tentative and introductory study, than to recall the life of the man whose initials are carved at the entrance to this mansion, Thomas Kearns. When, in 1899, he had the plans drawn for his fine new Florentine villa on Brigham Street, Salt Lake City, he had already fulfilled the Horatio Alger epic, from rags to riches.

Like Tom Fitzpatrick before him, he was born in Upper Canada of immigrant parents, Thomas and Margaret Maher Kearns, April 11, 1862. When he was still a child the family moved to the vicinity of O'Neill, Nebraska, one of the more promising of the Irish colonization settlements, named for General John J. O'Neill, Fenian patriot and one of the leaders in the ill-starred invasion of Canada. But farming and ranching were not to the growing boy's taste. He was still a strippling when the gold strikes in the Black Hills country to the north acted as a magnet, and he acquired his first taste of mining experience in the rough and tumble of Deadwood. Back home again he tried another adjustment to the ways of his ancestors, only to give them up finally before he was twenty.

The early 'eighties found him out in Tombstone, Arizona, engaged in what his obituary notice euphoniously calls "employment with a transportation company," or more plainly, driving a team. He was in Utah by 1883, seeking work at Tintic and gathering a grub-stake in a road gang for the Rio Grande Railway. Butte, Montana, was his goal, but he was not to fall under the tutelage of Marcus Daly. Instead, he was persuaded to turn back to the Park City mining district where fortune was waiting for him thousands of feet under the Wasatch Mountains.

For seven years he worked in the mines—the Ontario, the Daly, and the Woodside—the while deepening his knowledge of the district and crystallizing his own estimates of its hidden possibilities. He was fortunate in his contacts with other mining men as canny as himself, David Keith, John Judge, and James Ivers. He was still more fortunate in his marriage with Jennie Judge Wilson, like himself sprung from Irish immigrant stock. There is no doubt that she gave to him the stability his somewhat mercurial and irascible temperament) needed, and spurred him on to his best efforts. She also kept him) close to Mother Church and the little stone sanctuary of St. Maryof-the-Assumption, Park City, where Father Patrick Blake and Father Thomas Galligan wrestled with sin and demon rum for the souls of their "boys."

It was only in 1890 that the big opportunity came. Successive leases had brought him and his associates closer to the bonanza of their dreams. Then it happened: the Silver King came through, and they were on their way to name and fame. It is instructive to recall that he was, at that date, twenty-eight years old.

The decade of the 'nineties marked the climax of Utah's politicoreligious struggles. Seemingly somewhat against his will he was prevailed upon to enter the arena. He sat in the Constitutional Convention of 1895, and at the turn of the century announced his candidacy for the United States Senate. He was not one to hide his antipathies under a bushel, but at the same time it was realized that he stood for interests which Utah could ill afford to neglect and that his honor could be trusted. He won by a narrow vote in the state legislature and served an unexpired term of four years with reasonable distinction. It was soon after he had been named senator that he bought out the Salt Lake Tribune from another Irishman, Colonel Patrick H. Lannan, with the avowed intention of providing the gentile mining inetrests with an organ voice.

Ambitious though he was for his family, he was not insensitive to the call of charity. The Keams-St. Ann's Orphanage, in its day one of the outstanding institutions of its kind in the West, was his most conspicuous benefaction, but he found other ways as well in which to discharge his stewardship. Whereas a pattern had been established, certainly in Nevada, of pilfering the land and leaving it, Thomas Kearns recognized something like a moral obligation to use his riches to build the commonwealth whose native resources had furnished his endowment. He was foremost among those who found Salt Lake City an overgrown village and left it a modem city.

If he fell short of being a devout man in the sense of wearing his religion on his sleeve, he was nevertheless firm in his Catholic loyalties. Bishop Scanlan, prematurely aging in the years after the opening of the new century, found in him a willing co-worker in the ambitious program he had inaugurated for his Diocese. There was no prouder day for his family and his house than when, in the summer of 1909, he was host to that prince of the American hierarchy, James, Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, here for the dedication of Bishop Scanlan's dream, the towering St. Mary's Cathedral.

Somehow we think of him as having attained a great age, so much is he a part of our own past, and for the writer, of his own remembered boyhood. Yet he was a bare fifty-six, a man in his presumptive prime, when, in October, 1918, a minor accident brought on a series of strokes from which he died on the eighteenth of that month. The influenza epidemic was raging, and the world was poised breathlessly at the dawn of peace, that peace which, we were told and hopefully believed, would make democracy forever safe. His obsequies as a result were quiet, and he was laid to rest in Mount Calvary, in the soil of the land he had made his own.

There is, we believe, a peculiar fitness in the chain of circumstances which has led to the dedication of his home, still palatial, as the headquarters of the Utah State Historical Society. It is itself a historical monument, eloquent of a vibrant chapter in the development of a great state. We may be excused for thinking that he, the son of Irish immigrants, who himself played so prominent a role in that development, is with us in spirit to assure us that the task, not yet finished, is worth all our effort.

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