By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
(Editor’s note: This is the second article in a two-part series about the traumatic gunshot cases at the old Holy Cross Hospital in Salt Lake City during the first decade after the Holy Cross Sisters founded it 150 years ago. Part 1 is available here.)
The Holy Cross Sisters watched many traumatic stories unfold in their small Salt Lake City Hospital after it opened in 1875. And given their Civil War nursing experiences, they’d not lived lives sheltered from the ugliness of the world.
The good Sisters probably never expected, however, to navigate the tragic aftermath of a dramatic public gun battle between two of the city’s most prominent citizens.
On the morning of September 8, 1880, Dr. Bradford C. Snedaker boarded a train leaving the Utah Southern Railroad depot for Little Cottonwood canyon. Snedaker and his brother hoped for some temporary respite from a conflict brewing between the doctor and another local man.
Unfortunately, just after he got settled in his seat, Snedaker looked up and saw his new nemesis—Captain Robert T. Smith—board the same train and walk towards him. Without a word, Snedaker leaped up, pulled out his pistol, and shot Smith.
Smith crumpled to the train car floor. Railroad Detective William Calder and other stunned bystanders rushed to restrain and disarm Snedaker before he could shoot Smith’s companion too.
As they were removing the doctor from the train, Smith—said by local newspapers to be “breathing his last”—somehow staggered to his feet. Smith then shot Snedaker twice with his Colt revolver before collapsing back into the arms of his travel companion.
Snedaker died almost immediately at the train station and his body was brought back to his home on 3rd South and Main Street. Officials transported Smith to the Holy Cross Hospital (then known as St. Mary’s) where he also died a few hours later.
The news shocked all of Salt Lake City. The local newspapers were perplexed too, noting that the two dead men were not “brawlers” but instead were “above average citizens” and “gentlemen in the purest sense of the word” who “do not shoot on account of trifles.”
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Snedaker had “been in this city for about two years, coming to Salt Lake in 1879. His school of medicine was that of the Eclectics and he had built up a considerable practice in this city.”
According to the Tribune, Smith was a Civil War veteran and “widely known throughout the Territory as a miner and mine operator. He was formerly connected with the Stormont mine, at Silver Reef…and was a splendid specimen of vigorous manhood…”
It turned out there were two other key players in the deadly drama—Agnes Davidson, who was Smith’s young fiancée, and her father Daniel Davidson. Daniel Davidson was Snedaker’s patient, Smith’s close friend, and a fellow native of Scotland.
On the fateful morning, Daniel Davidson also was Smith’s train travel companion. Over the next several days, there was rampant speculation around town and wildly conflicting stories about the cause of the gunfight.
Salt Lake Police Chief Andrew Burt—who just three years later would also die violently from gunshot wounds—said Snedaker had approached him earlier in the week. The doctor had asked for protection and assistance in response to alleged threats and warnings from Smith that Snedaker should “get out of town.”
Snedaker’s friends claimed that Daniel Davidson, a wealthy local sheepman, owed the doctor a large sum of money but refused to pay up. His recalcitrance caused deep tensions between the parties and Smith took up the side of his friend.
Smith’s camp told a very different story. They alleged that young Agnes had visited Snedaker for medical treatment but instead the doctor had drugged and abused (i.e., according to the papers, “ravished” or “outraged” or “ruined”) her while she was incapacitated.
Allegedly, Snedaker admonished her, “Now my life and reputation are in your hands and if you ever tell anyone, I will kill you and I will kill your father.” Despite the alleged warning, Agnes supposedly confessed these circumstances to her fiancé Smith.
About a week before the shootings, Smith confronted Snedaker and slapped him. The doctor denied the sordid allegations but Smith did not believe him, thus leading to the gun battle a few days later.
A steady stream of friends visited Smith on his deathbed at Holy Cross Hospital, where all the Holy Cross Sisters could do is offer comfort. Despite many words of encouragement, Smith told his visitors, “I’m dying now. I bleed internally.”
Smith asked that Agnes be brought to the Hospital. When she arrived at his bedside he told her, “Aggie, this is a sad ending to our affairs.” She wept and fled from the room as Smith died.
The two men’s funerals were held on the same day.
Snedaker was buried in the morning, with a service conducted by his fraternal group—the Odd Fellows. Smith was interred in the afternoon by the Masons, with music supplied by the Fort Douglas military band.
Both of their graves are in Mount Olivet cemetery, which had opened just three years earlier after Congress and President Ulysses S. Grant donated 20 acres of land owned by the U.S. Army’s Fort Douglas.
When I visited the gravesites, I was stunned to learn that Snedaker and Smith now perpetually rest a mere 50 paces apart, within wary spectral eyeshot of each other.
Snedaker’s wife was in their hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, at the time of the 1880 shooting. She apparently left for Kentucky when she learned about Smith’s threats and never returned to Salt Lake City.
Daniel Davidson inherited Smith’s estate and carried on a successful business career for the next two decades, albeit with times of both steep decline and economic recovery. He died in 1901, but not before erecting a graveside monument at the Salt Lake City cemetery to honor Detective Calder, who had saved Davidson from Snedaker’s bullets.
Agnes Davidson eventually married and had a daughter, but the events of September 1880 haunted her for the rest of her life.
By 1895, Agnes suffered from regular suicidal urges and homicidal rages, and even tried to throw herself out of an upstairs window. When she appeared before a probate court in 1895, a newspaper said her eyes were “dull and sunken.”
The court declared her insane and dangerously violent.
Her father Daniel Davidson testified that due to business setbacks he could not assist his daughter. Agnes spent the next 60 years confined in the new Territorial Insane Asylum (later known as the Utah State Hospital) in Provo.
She died there in 1953 at age 94. Ironically, she is buried at Mount Olivet cemetery too, just a few feet from where both Smith and Snedaker rest.
In the weeks and months after the shocking September 1880 gun fight, as the smoke dissipated and the community tried to make sense of the situation, The Deseret News offered this fitting coda to the tragic story:
“It is likely no further light will be thrown upon the matter. The facts, as far as known, are before the public with the two opposing versions. From these, persons must deduce their own conclusions. The homicide was a fearful circumstance, as sad and bloody as it was shocking and unusual.”
(Photo: L to R, Snedaker and Smith.)
*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.
