An Historic Workplace Genealogy

By Michael Patrick O’Brien

Many of us add meaning, understanding, and context to daily life with genealogy research about our family ancestors. Our personal lives seem more interesting when we know some details about those who came before us. 

I think the same is true about our professional lives. We spend almost a third of our lives on the job. As a result, I’ve started to research my own workplace genealogy.

During four decades in the legal profession, I’ve worked at just two law firms. I always knew both were woven inextricably into the history of Utah. My research, however, revealed some surprises.

The founders of the two different firms knew each other, apparently quite well, over a century ago. They also shared a common client, Thomas Kearns, perhaps the state’s best-known Catholic. Today, I still do legal work for an entity on which Kearns made an indelible imprint. 

Kearns, who lived from 1862 to 1918, served on the Utah state constitutional convention and as a United States senator. He was personal friends with three presidents. Utah’s governors live in Kearns’ old mansion on South Temple. 

Along with his wife Jennie—and their relatives John and Mary Judge—Kearns helped build Utah’s iconic and enduring Catholic institutions, including the Kearns-St. Ann’s orphanage and school, the Cathedral of the Madeleine, and Judge Memorial High School. Kearns also started two of Utah’s best-known businesses. 

In 1889, Kearns and partner David Keith started the Silver King Coalition mine in Park City, which eventually produced some $42 million worth of ore. In 1905, after leaving the Senate, Kearns diversified his business interests and purchased The Salt Lake Tribune, still Utah’s independent news voice today and a recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Kearns hired skilled and interesting lawyers to assist his businesses. One was my first law firm, known in recent years as Jones Waldo Holbrook & McDonough. The firm started way back in 1875—in what then was the Territory of Utah—at about the same time Wyatt Earp began his career as a law officer and just before Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn.  

Founding lawyers Benjamin Sheeks and Joseph Rawlins set up a partnership together. Rawlins was a native son. Although his parents had followed Brigham Young west in 1849, by the time Rawlins was a young man he had drifted away from the church of his pioneer family. As a lawyer, he tended to represent interests outside the local power structure.

Sheeks was born in Indiana and was not a Latter-day Saint. He followed the Union Pacific railroad west and ended up in Wyoming and then Utah. He served as personal legal counsel for Brigham Young and represented defendants in Reynolds v. United States, a famous polygamy case decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1879.

One of the first employees of Sheeks & Rawlins was a young man with excellent penmanship skills. The law firm hired him to hand-write legal briefs and other documents. A few years later in 1918, that same man—Heber J. Grant—was called to serve as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Sheeks went on to serve as a judge for seventeen years in Washington State. When he died there in April 1929 at age 87, President Heber Grant issued a poignant public statement mourning him.

Rawlins did well too. In 1892, he served as Utah’s territorial delegate to Congress. He introduced the Enabling Act that provided for Utah’s admission into the Union. After Utah achieved statehood in 1896, Rawlins was elected by the Utah State Legislature to the United States Senate. 

He served there from 1897 to 1903, two of those years with fellow Senator Thomas Kearns. After Rawlins returned to his private law practice, Kearns hired his firm to represent The Salt Lake Tribune. 

When Rawlins died in May 1926, the newspaper eulogized him: “Another giant has fallen in the front rank of Utah’s Old Guard. In the legal and political battles of the past no native son wore brighter armor, wielded a keener sword or fought more valiantly than did Joseph L. Rawlins. He became a party leader at home and a leader in the highest legislative assembly in the nation. When the motives and good faith of his constituents were assailed and questioned, he stood as their champion. His place in the esteem and gratitude of the people of Utah is secure.”

The only other law firm where I’ve worked is now named Parsons Behle & Latimer. Founded in 1882 by William Howard Dickson, Parsons also has deep roots in Utah history and the Old American West.

Dickson was born in 1847 in New Brunswick, Canada. In June 1874, he moved to Virginia City, Nevada and practiced law for eight years. In 1882, shortly after the shootout at Tombstone’s OK Corral and just as Annie Oakley made her first appearance at a Wild West sharpshooting show, Dickson relocated his law practice to Salt Lake City.

President Chester A. Arthur appointed him United States Attorney for the Utah Territory in 1884. He held that job for three tumultuous years—when Utah’s future was in turmoil regarding the legal status of polygamy—and prosecuted a number of polygamy cases. He was both respected and vilified for enforcing the controversial laws against the local religious practice of plural marriage. 

Yet, Dickson’s skills as a lawyer were undeniable, and later even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints hired him to assist in some of its legal matters. He also served for many years as chief legal counsel for Thomas Kearns’ Silver King Coalition Mine in Park City, and helped start the Bingham Canyon copper mine.

Commonly known as Judge Dickson, he died in Los Angeles on January 18, 1924. After he passed, The Salt Lake Tribune said his “fame extended from coast to coast” and described him as a “picturesque and heroic figure of the early west.” The newspaper also said Dickson “was never known to refuse aid, often to the limit, to anyone who came to him for assistance. He was kindly, considerate, and just.”

Old newspaper archives confirm that the founders of my two law firms—Rawlins and Dickson—knew each other quite well. They were contemporaries, part of a small cohort of lawyers in pre-statehood Utah. They served on bar committees together, acted as co-counsel in several cases, spoke at the same political rallies, and faced off against each other in the courtroom. 

We can speculate that they even might have been friends. The most that the archives confirm, however, is that they owned shares of a gold mine together in the famous Mercur mining district of Western Utah.

The “name partners” that followed them at their two law firms were amazing in their own right. At Jones Waldo, Latter-day Saint Joseph Jones was a World War II navy commander and a fixture on Utah’s corporate boards. Hal Waldo was expert in bonds and banking, as well as a Mason and an elder in the Presbyterian church. 

For many years, Don Holbrook was the recognized go-to-lawyer for tough cases and a tireless community servant. His good friend and soon-to-be Church President Thomas S. Monson attended and offered a blessing at Don’s Catholic Church funeral. Fellow Catholic Roger McDonough helped found the Utah Hibernian Society and could cite chapter and verse of the Utah Code without cracking open a book.

The same was true for the “name partners” at Parsons Behle & Latimer. Charles Parsons, the keen legal mind behind major Utah developments like the Bingham Canyon mine and Deer Creek reservoir, also was a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. 

Calvin Behle, an Episcopal Church Chancellor, worked as a Nuremberg trials investigator, and was a talented mining and corporate lawyer. George Latimer—born in Draper and raised in a Latter-day Saint family—served on the Utah Supreme Court and was an original member of the United States Court of Military Appeals.

Many other skilled and remarkable lawyers also worked at both firms, including two former Utah governors.

A century and a half after it all started, here I am at Parsons, working at a legacy Utah firm, bringing the spirit of Joseph Rawlins to the law practice started by his colleague William Dickson, and still doing legal work for the Thomas Kearns-inspired Salt Lake Tribune.

The great Issac Newton once said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” With my own rich professional heritage, I understand exactly what he meant.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here: https://michaelpobrien.com/) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (https://www.amazon.com/Monastery-Mornings-Unusual-Boyhood-Saints/dp/1640606491), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press in August 2021 and chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best non-fiction book of 2022.