By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
July is rodeo season in Utah, as well as the month for the raucous Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona made famous by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. The Trappist monks from the old Huntsville monastery never had to attend these events for bovine adventures. They witnessed the running of the bulls right on their own abbey grounds.
Holy Trinity Abbey, founded in 1947, occupied 1,800 lush acres in the south east corner of the Ogden Valley, a mountain oasis in Northern Utah surrounding by towering 9,000 foot peaks. The monks farmed and ranched there for many years, so it’s not surprising that they have bulls in their history.
Some of these bulls were invaders from the outside. A large wild elk herd grazed in the same vicinity as the abbey, and so the monks constantly fended off determined incursions into their winter hay supplies.
This job fell primarily to the cattle monk, Brother Nicholas Prinster. Brother Nick had a love/hate relationship with the local deer and elk. He loved all God’s creatures, but he did not always like them.
According to newspaper reports from the 1970s, Brother Nick let a young elk named “Edgar” graze with the monks’ cattle herd when the mixed up animal thought it belonged there. Yet, Brother Nick also grumbled about having to repair the monastery fences and enclosures that Edgar’s marauding siblings and cousins had trampled.
One late night, trying to sleep on the simple cot in his monastery cell, Brother Nick heard unusually loud elk bugling coming from the hay barn. The next day, he discovered that during a battle there, two bull elk had locked their antlers together with fence wire, and collapsed with exhaustion.
The monk and the local state game agent tried to separate and help the huge beasts. It turned out, however, that the prone bulls were just on a break—only resting between rounds of their colossal encounter.
When the monk and the game warden approached, the powerful entangled animals snorted, rose, and resumed their combat. They even tossed the poor state agent, who flew past Brother Nick and clear of the scene!
Other bull problems came from within the monastery farm operations. Roger Buhrley, son of the monks’ good friend and neighbor Lou Buhrley, once told me that his father and the monks owned a bull together. One day, the bull went berserk and attacked Lou.
Lou held the angry animal at bay by grabbing its nose ring. Two of his sons then shielded their father with a truck and started hitting the bull with a crow bar until it broke off the attack. Lou later told the monks, “I don’t know what you guys want to do with your half of that bull, but my half is going to the stockyards!”
The best and saddest bull-monk story happened in 1962, just after the July 4th holiday, and featured a well-bred but ill-mannered 2,600 pound monastery bull named Carnation Madcap Loyalty.
The bull won the junior champion title at the prestigious Plain City Dairy Days competition in 1959. The next year, Madcap won the coveted grand champion blue ribbon. In 1961, local newspapers billed him as a “star attraction” at the annual competition as the bull vied to defend his grand champion title.
Another bull won instead.
Perhaps losing made Madcap cantankerous. He was a different bull afterwards. He acted up and injured several monks, none seriously, but as a result the monks stopped showing him.
In one close call, the bull charged a monk/veterinarian who scaled a fence to escape. Brother Nick helped by grabbing his brother by the belt and hauling him up and over the fence before the bull could gore him.
Brother Henry Barry, however, was not so lucky.
He grew up as Victor John Barry, born in 1908 in Toronto, Canada. His father was a tailor born in Ireland and his mother a French-Canadian girl from Ontario. Henry joined Gethsemani Abbey in 1939.
The Kentucky monks sent him to the new Utah abbey in 1947 where he worked as a general repairman. On the morning of July 5, 1962, Brother Henry did not show up for breakfast. The monks searched for him.
Brother Stanislaus found Brother Henry dead, under the bullpen gate. The monks called their friend and neighbor, Weber County Deputy Sheriff Halvor Bailey, commonly known as the John Wayne of the Ogden Valley.
Deputy Halvor investigated, and learned that the dead monk had been working near the bull pen the prior evening. Halvor found some interesting evidence: the monk’s belt was inside the pen, the gate was badly damaged, and the bull’s horns were splintered. An autopsy confirmed the bull had rammed the poor monk to death.
To this day, no one knows exactly how or why it all happened, but the story still became a monastery legend. I heard about it a decade later, during one of my first visits to the abbey as a boy. As recounted in my 2021 memoir Monastery Mornings, two young monks gave me a tour of the place and shared the tale.
The young monks told me that Brother Henry was very interested in the bull, and that his strong curiosity about the animal overpowered his cautionary instincts. Apparently, on the day he died, Brother Henry was trying to lure the bull over and pet it.
The monks thought he used his belt to catch the bull by the horn and try to guide it over. Unfortunately, the bull jerked his head and the belt flew into the middle of the pen. When Brother Henry went inside to retrieve his belt, the bull charged him. The doomed monk ran to the gate, but the much faster bull crushed him against it.
Years later, I also learned what happened to Madcap. The monks sold him to the slaughterhouse. Halvor Bailey agreed to ship the animal there in his cattle truck. Halvor’s oldest son Brad helped.
A few years ago, Brad told me that after they got the big vicious bull into the truck and drove down Abbey Road, the beast started snorting and thrashing around. The truck rocked. One of the bull’s horns even crashed through the truck cab’s back window. “I was afraid,” Brad reported.
The next year, a new and calmer abbey bull—named Naches Royal Duke—won the junior champion title at Plain City. Maybe at least some of the Trappist bulls that followed in Madcap’s hoofsteps were less like Madcap, and more like the gentle Ferdinand from the famous children’s story.
The monks’ neighbor Ed Rich confirms this point. Ed kept sheep on his land, and one time a little lamb escaped. Brother Nick from the abbey called Ed and said they had found the lamb. Ed drove over and the monk led him to the monastery’s bullpen.
Somehow, the little lamb had squeezed under the fence and was standing right beneath her large new friend, a huge bull. The little lamb was eating the feed that the bull spilled from the trough.
The bull was gentle and affectionate with the lamb. The two were inseparable, and so the monks let Ed keep the lamb there all summer until they finally were able to extract her without riling up her massive protector.
I love that for a time, the Utah monks had their own little version of the peaceable kingdom:
The wolf shall live with the lamb; the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall graze; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den. They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:1-9).
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
