Background Material for Chapter 8

What was Your Name in the States?

from Family Stories …and How I Found Mine

by J. Michael Cleverley

How do you track an ancestor who doesn’t want to be found? Actually, not a few of those migrating to the Old West came for that reason, to disappear. That was Richard McGuire. He was my great-great-grandfather, not so far back. When I was young, I even knew his and Mary Ann’s daughter, Mary Emma. Yet several generations have tried to track their stories. And it has been a lot of work. For one reason, someone trying to remain undetectable often changes their name. And that is what Richard McGuire (or was it Joseph Wilson? or, Richard Wilson?) did. Only a very few knew his real name, and when they did, they didn’t tell. He told freely the day he was born, but we still are not 100% sure what year.

Mary Ann Taylor and Joseph Richard McGuire Wilson

Richard McGuire deserted the 8th Infantry at Ft. Russell, just outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1873. It was not the same kind of radical decision it might seem today – the Army’s desertion rate during the Plains Indian Wars was 25%-40%. Still, a deserter was someone sought by the law. He was not exactly on the run for the rest of his life, because it was relatively easy to blend into the West’s bustling remote communities. But he did not want to be caught, either. He changed his last name to Wilson and thereafter went by Richard or Joseph Wilson.

When Richard and his Company K, 8th Infantry Regiment arrived in the fall of 1873 in Cheyenne, it had progressed only slightly from being the wild, lawless “Hell-on-Wheels” railroad town shown in this 1870 illustration (Ft Russell is in the background, north of the town). He and the men had just come off the long, hard 2nd Yellowstone Expedition where they had fought running skirmishes with Sioux Chief Sitting Bull on the North Dakota and Montana plains. The Company settled into Ft. Russell’s barracks, and started to prepare for new battles as soon as Spring came. (illustrations of 1870 Cheyenne and Fort Russell courtesy of wyomingtalesandtrails.com)

1870’s Cheyenne and Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming Territory

The day Richard and his older sister Mary Ann arrived from Ireland on the “Great Eastern,” the ship docked in a New York undergoing some of the greatest riots America has ever known. The uprising was a revolt of Irish Americans, what Richard now was. Hardly a great start, we can imagine Richard’s life was not easy afterward either, for in 1872 he enlisted in the Army, probably hoping for something more stable. A colossal mistake, he soon realized. Within months, his family petitioned their Congressman for help getting Richard discharged. He had lied about his age, they said, and was in fact too young legally to join. Secretary of War Belknap wrote back to Congressman Brooks ten days later saying he was not underaged, but 18 when he enlisted. A few weeks later Richard’s unit was on its way to Ft. Rice, North Dakota, to join an expedition the Sioux had promised to destroy.

Disillusionment with the Army almost from the beginning, marching and fighting on the northern prairies, and two illnesses that put him in the hospital pushed Richard past endurance. On March 16, 1873, he and a friend walked off, after getting their month’s pay. In isolated Wyoming, there weren’t many places to go, except up or down the Union Pacific line running through Cheyenne. The next we hear of him is in Utah.

The Second Yellowstone Expedition (1872)

The expedition’s job was to complete the survey for the Northern Pacific Railroad route from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean. Most of the men were soldiers protecting the surveyors. The plan was for two columns to start on either end of the survey and meet on the Yellowstone. Maj. Baker’s column departed west from Ft. Ellis, Montana. Col. Stanley and 800 men marched east from Ft Rice, North Dakota. Sitting Bull eagle-eyed both sides, and finally attacked Baker, forcing it to retreat.

Richard McGuire and his company were part of the Stanley Column. It was a summer’s long trial with sun, storms, dust, insects, and hostile warriors often on the flanks or the horizon. He went through three pairs of shoes.

I found the expedition’s colorful details at the National Archives in Washington. Boxes full of notes and reports written by the officers revealed the day-to-day progress of the Stanley column.

When Army headquarters in St.Paul, Minnesota, learned of Baker’s battle on Prior’s Creek, it telegraphed Ft. Rice ordering a fast riding Indian scout warn Stanley and his prong. I found the telegram in one of the Archive’s boxes.

What did Richard do when he got to Utah? My grandfather Wayne, Richard’s daughter’s son and one of the very few who knew Richard’s story, said he worked on the railroads. In fact, those years there was a frenzy of railroad construction, especially from Salt Lake City into the Tintic mine region. Richard’s second wife Louie, whom I knew, said he worked in Tintic. He probably got work laying rails into the Tintic mines.

Richard also met Mary Ann Taylor, whose family had joined the Mormon migration from Birmingham to Utah only a few years before. They were married on Nov. 1, 1891. She was young, just shy of 16 years old. He was much older. Where they wed is a mystery still, but there is a wedding picture of the couple. They left immediately for Arizona. Mary Ann made entries in her Bible for their two sons who were born and died on the same days in Arizona.

Where exactly the boys died is also a mystery, but I discovered Mary Ann and Richard in St. Joseph, Arizona, from an Arizona Territorial Census taken in early 1882. St. Joseph was probably the most unlikely place on the planet one would expect find Richard and Mary Ann. It was part of a Mormon settlement that lived a communal order (the “United Order”) on the Little Colorado River, and the most desolate of all Mormon settlements. I was puzzled until I finally came upon the apparent key to this mystery: that winter a big railroad project was moving through St. Joseph. Later that year, I again found Richard, in Kingman where the project ended.

Emma Louise (“Louie”) Holden

Mary Ann and Richard were back in Salt Lake City by 1884 when Mary Emma, my great-grandmother, was born. Mary Ann was not even 20, and it had already been a hard life. She had lost two children, was to lose still a third the day it was born a year later. If she did not already have tuberculosis when she returned from Arizona, it was not long until she did. Just a few years after, she died leaving Richard and Mary Emma.

Six years later, Richard married Mary Ann’s cousin, whom he met at Mary Ann’s mother’s home. He and Emma Louise Holden, who went by “Louie,” and whom I knew as Grandma Eddie, moved to Dubois, Idaho, to start a new life, hopefully a more stable one.

It was not to be. Richard contracted lung cancer, and Louie was left a young widow with a baby not even a year old. When they slowly lowered Richard’s coffin into the ground, the answers to scores of questions about the quiet unassuming man were buried with him. With no little irony, however, Richard’s mysteries born from secreting his stories kept him alive in the memories of many of his children and grandchildren. As far as I could tell, however, his mourners on that day in 1902 would probably have never heard or guessed about all this.