BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING

William Owen "Buckey" O'Neill (main photo) is prominent in Arizona's history books, but Buckey's story would be very different if not for his wife, Pauline, and brother, Brady. SHARLOT HALL MUSEUM

BIG BROTHER WATCHING

William Owen “Buckey” O’Neill was a captivating character. That his nickname was derived from “bucking the tiger,” or going against the odds, in faro games speaks to a confidence verging on recklessness a trait that ultimately cost him his life. And whenever he occupies the stage of Arizona history, it’s hard to look away. But two supporting actors - his wife, Pauline, and his brother, Brady are worthy of attention for their significance in Buckey’s life and Arizona’s journey into statehood.

Buckey was a man of many roles: sheriff, soldier, law student, reporter, publisher, miner, posse member, fiction writer, mayor, builder, judge, surveyor, politician, Rough Rider. All this before dying in battle at age 38. Truly, he embodied Rudyard Kipling’s entreaty to “fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds’ worth of distance run.” Compared with what we know about Buckey, Pauline’s and Brady’s folders are a bit thin. Personal accounts and anecdotes are spare. So, we opine by reading between the lines. For instance, the brother’s name. In historical descriptions, Eugene Brady O’Neill is always referred to with all three names. Buckey was formally William Owen and was called Owen until he acquired his famous nickname. For our purposes, we can imagine his brother went by “Brady,” because it sounded more like “Buckey” than did the stiffer “Eugene.” Buckey was 10 when his brother was born, so Brady was 8 when Buckey finished reading law in Washington, D.C., and came in first out of 72 applicants to be a U.S. Navy assistant paymaster. Restless at how long it took to begin work, Buckey decided to go West instead. Imagine the hero worship Brady, then a small boy, might have felt reading letters better than any story, because the hero was his big brother. He would have been 11 reading about Buckey possibly covering the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral as a young reporter. At 16, he might have read Buckey’s account of being in an honor guard at a hanging.

It was around then that Pauline Schindler entered Buckey’s life. An only child born in San Francisco, she first set foot in Arizona Territory around age 19, when her father was transferred to Fort Whipple as a purchasing agent. She taught school briefly and met Buckey, who by then had moved to Prescott, founded the newspaper Hoof and Horn and donned the dashing uniform of a Prescott Grays militia captain.

Pauline would write of meeting the town’s most eligible bachelor: “He was so nervous he almost dropped his white cowboy hat in the dust. ... I later discovered he was always like that when first meeting strangers, and very inclined to blush.” In public, though, Buckey was commanding, appealing and adventurous. Even before he was an official judge, someone recalled: “The miners came to him to settle their brawls; the rangers accepted him as the court of final appeal, so equitable and just were his rulings.” Buckey and Pauline married in 1886. He scandalized the more proper people of Prescott with a freewheeling soliloquy as a wedding announcement in his own newspaper, including a string of 19 adjectives in his paean to marriage. “Sensations? Describe them? Impossible!” he wrote. “Elysian, enchanting, divine, glorious ... ecstatic, seraphic, magnetic ... the vocabulary fails us.”

ON MAY 16, 1901, A LITTLE SHORT OF THREE YEARS AFTER BUCKEY'S DEATH, PAULINE SCHINDLER O'NEILL BECAME ... WELL, STILL PAULINE SCHINDLER O'NEILL. BUT NOW SHE WAS MRS. BRADY, INSTEAD OF MRS. BUCKEY.

But even heroes don't always win. The following year, their baby son, referred to as “Buckey Jr.” in newspaper accounts, lived for only two weeks, and some sources say he was born prematurely. Whether it's true, or whether decorum dictated saying so because the baby was born less than nine months after the wedding, we don't know. But we do know the couple was heartbroken.

Subsequent years saw Buckey serve as a Yavapai County judge, then as sheriff, before he was elected mayor of Prescott; according to one legend, the only vote not cast for him was Buckey's own vote, which he cast for his opponent. In 1890, he built what now is called Buckey O'Neill Cabin at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. He tried some mining there, but his big strike was being the force behind bringing the Grand Canyon Railway into existence.

When he was at home, Buckey liked to write while Pauline played the piano. But Pauline's passion was political: getting women the vote. She and fellow suffragette Frances Munds had met in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in Prescott and would remain friends for life.

A decade after losing baby Buckey, in 1897, Pauline and Buckey adopted a 4-year-old boy. We know he had been Maurice Piles, son of Conrad and Maggie Piles. We don't know what led to the legal adoption and his new name, Maurice Owen O'Neill.

But he was Buckey's boy for less than a year. In June 1898, Buckey sailed to Cuba to fight in the Spanish-American War as part of the Rough Riders, Teddy Roosevelt's force made up of men who could withstand extreme heat and rugged conditions.

Roosevelt wrote about his good friend's last moments: “As O'Neill moved to and fro, his men begged him to lie down, and one of the sergeants said, 'Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you.' O'Neill took the cigarette out of his mouth, and blowing out a cloud of smoke laughed and said, 'Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn't made that will kill me.' ... As he turned on his heel a bullet struck him in the mouth and came out at the back of his head, so even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.” Initially buried near where he fell, Buckey was later reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery. His epitaph reads, “Who would not die for a new star in the flag?” — a testament to Buckey's commitment to achieving statehood for the Arizona Territory. But the same article states that Buckey had written, perhaps to Pauline, “Who would not gamble for a new star in the flag?” Was the quote sanitized for posterity? Was gambling considered too flip a reference? No one knows.

Then comes, to me, the most intriguing chapter of

the three O'Neills. On May 16, 1901, a little short of three years after Buckey's death, Pauline Schindler O'Neill became ... well, still Pauline Schindler O'Neill. But now she was Mrs. Brady, instead of Mrs. Buckey. What must that have been like? Maybe Pauline felt that Maurice needed a father. Brady had been a decade younger than Buckey, so he was five years younger than Pauline. Both were immersed in the statehood effort. It's possible their shared grief over Buckey's death drew them together. Maybe loving him in each other's company became, or felt like, loving each other.

This is conjecture, since no record exists of what Brady or Pauline thought. But imagine fearing that your new wife was comparing you to the martyred hero - because, perhaps, you were doing the same. Maybe you would wonder, and then be unable to stop wondering, if your wife was comparing you after the bedroom door was closed. Was there a ghost in the room for one of them? Or for both?

In 1907, Prescott's Buckey O'Neill statue was dedicated. While the man astride the huge horse was not an exact likeness of Buckey, the statue was one more reminder that Brady's wife had been married to someone larger than life. But in spite of, or perhaps because of, the large shadow cast by Buckey's legacy, the couple stayed involved in state politics. Brady, who worked as an attorney in Phoenix, was a power player for the Democratic Party. He served in the Territorial Legislature and supported the statehood push in the early 1910s. Since that movement had been part of Buckey's life and death, Pauline surely supported Brady's efforts.

Those efforts included a noteworthy piece of correspondence: a 1911 night letter - which, despite the romantic name, was a telegram cheaper than daytime rates - to Morris Goldwater, uncle of future Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, in Prescott. From Washington, D.C., Brady wrote that President William Howard Taft had promised not to admit to the union any state that allowed its citizens to recall judges. Brady asked Goldwater how the people of Yavapai County felt about the matter. He sent similar telegrams to dignitaries around the Territory, and Arizona responded to Taft's opposition by abolishing judicial recall; after being admitted to the union the following year, the new state promptly reinstated the practice.

With statehood achieved, it was Pauline's time to shine. She threw her effort into a ballot initiative giving Arizona's women the right to vote. It passed overwhelmingly in the 1912 election - eight years before women's suffrage was enacted nationwide. And in 1917, Pauline was elected to the Legislature, where she continued to support women's issues. She also played a key role in turning Prescott's old Governor's Mansion into Sharlot Hall Museum. In In her later years, she moved to Los Angeles, where she died in 1961, at age 95.

Brady was less fortunate. According to newspaper accounts, while he'd served admirably as a volunteer in the Phoenix Fire Department's Aztec Hook and Ladder Company - and later helped establish a firefighter section at what's known today as Greenwood/Memory Lawn Mortuary and Cemetery - he was plagued by poor health, and possibly business difficulties, in his 40s.

In 1917, Brady died by suicide in Los Angeles at age 47. The particulars of his relationship with Pauline at the time of his death are unclear, but newspapers reported he had written to her that he could not bear to live any longer, then shot himself in the head. Thus, Pauline again found herself widowed by an O'Neill.

Did the younger brother remember what his older sibling had written in his soaring wedding announcement? “There is some satisfaction,” Buckey declared, “in knowing that the party of the second part has it worse.... Get the right kind of a girl and she will see that your head doesn't get underwater and at the same time teach you that there are some things in this life that border very nearly, if not within, the boundary of unalloyed bliss.” But one man's bliss may have been another brother's misery.

It would be nice, though, to think all three O'Neills derived great satisfaction when Arizona celebrated its Centennial in 2012. They loved Arizona. They loved each other. They cared about and served the state in ways that have not disappeared. That's no small legacy. AH