By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
It’s hard to fathom, as my 65th birthday fast approaches in May, that I may not be the most interesting person with my name. Yet, my online searches on this topic raise that very possibility.
Google confirms that some of these other Michael O’Briens are contemporaries. One website says there are as many as 71 of us living in Utah today.
One is a banking and financial services lawyer from Park City. I know this because every once in a while I get his calls or mail. There’s also a well-known local fly fisherman and a retired radio personality who use my name too.
And my search of Newspapers.com uncovered several stories about men from many decades ago with the same name.
The oddest anecdote is a precursor of the wildly popular mystery surrounding the fate of Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov of St. Petersburg. But that’s a tale for another day.
The other stories, however, are fascinating too.
A couple (especially, for some unknown reason, in the late 1890s and early 1900s) involve Utah Mike O’Briens in trouble with the law for such offenses as petty larceny, drunkenness, or public “mendicancy” (begging).
The other historic Mike O’Briens were a wee bit more upstanding. And they are good examples of how and why the Irish came to Utah.
One was a sick miner who drowned at a nearby hot spring. The other two were soldiers who died in uniform and now rest at the historic Fort Douglas cemetery.
It’s hard for me to ignore a newspaper headline—even an old one— that reads: “The Peculiar Death of Michael O’Brien.” And so I read The Salt Lake Herald story dated May 28, 1891.
The Michael O’Brien in question was a miner who came to Salt Lake City from the town of Frisco near the old Horn Silver Mine in Beaver County. Now a ghost town, back in 1885 Frisco was one of the largest settlements in Southern Utah with double the population of St. George.
Due to a rapid influx of fortune seekers, one newspaper described Frisco as Dodge City, Tombstone, Sodom, and Gomorrah, all rolled into one. The boom lasted only a few years.
News accounts say Michael O’Brien the miner had been “leaded” and was staying in Salt Lake City for treatment (likely at the old Holy Cross Hospital). The treatment for lead poisoning included frequent dips in the local hot springs.
One of them—the Warms Springs Baths—was located just north of Salt Lake City. Known as a good swimmer, one day O’Brien visited and bathed with some companions.
When the companions left the pool, O’Brien was sitting on the edge. When they came back a few minutes later, he was gone. They later found his body under the water.
The Herald reported, “O’Brien was a temperate man, seldom drinking with the crowds.” Before the swim, however, he “took several drinks.”
An inquest later concluded that the combination of strong drink and hot water caused “a sort of apolectic fit.” O’Brien likely fell, hit his head, rolled into the water, and slipped away. He now rests at Salt Lake City’s Mount Calvary Catholic cemetery.
Just over a mile away, two other Michael O’Briens rest at another historic graveyard—the Fort Douglas cemetery on Salt Lake City’s east bench. Both men were soldiers.
In 1862, obeying instructions from President Abraham Lincoln, Colonel (later General) Patrick Edward Connor (born in Ireland) arrived in the Utah Territory to establish what became known as Fort Douglas. Connor’s stated mission was to protect overland mail routes, but local Mormon settlers suspected the feds wanted to keep an eye on them too.
The Union soldiers also were dragged into other local controversies. After several deadly skirmishes between settlers and native peoples up north, Connor led some of his troops to a site near Preston, Idaho.
Once there, the Army confronted armed Shoshone warriors in a battle. In addition to warriors, however, Shoshone women and children were killed too in what since has become known as the Bear River massacre.
One injured soldier was named Michael O’Brien, a thirty-year-old cavalry enlistee from San Francisco, California who was born in County Cork, Ireland. Pvt. O’Brien was shot in the left lung during the January 1863 battle and then moved to the Fort Douglas hospital for treatment.
He died there about a week later and is one of the first men buried at the Utah military cemetery. Ironically, he is not the only Michael O’Brien buried there.
On September 30, 1890, The Herald reported that a 47-year-old infantry soldier named Michael O’Brien had been laid to rest there too. The story said he received full “military honors” before “an immense throng” gathered at the Fort Douglas graveyard.
This O’Brien also hailed from Cork, Ireland, and had served in the U.S. Army for twenty-three years. Although he had seen several battles (including against Native Americans), he was vexed with poor health just before his passing.
He died just a few days after a blood vessel burst in his lung. Without any explanation, The Herald called this Michael O’Brien a “A faithful soldier, true to the country of his adoption.”
Some sons of Ireland—like Thomas Kearns and John Judge—came to Utah and made a fortune, usually in mining. Most others, however, were not so lucky. Instead, they worked in the mines or enjoyed the steady paycheck that came with Army life. Or they helped both miners and soldiers by taking religious vows as priests (or if women, as nuns).
Why did they come to Utah?
Historian (and Utah Catholic priest) Robert Dwyer perhaps says it best in his 1957 Utah Historical Quarterly article “The Irish in the Building of the Intermountain West”: “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…[Michael O’Brien] 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.”
Indeed, ‘tis quite the story.
(Photo: the Michael O’Briens at Salt Lake City’s historic Fort Douglas cemetery.)
*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. Mike’s new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026
