The Irish are not a simple lot, I’ll give you that. We carry around layers of history and behavior that will no doubt give psycho-archeologists of the future cause to drink. Kick up any stone, even one with a “blarney” affiliation, and there’s no telling what you might find.
Each tunnel into our past provides both lightness and darkness in almost equal proportions as part of the tour. You can find your way but it’s oftentimes a murky proposition. As one-time Park City miner Loran Larsen warned prior to his passing, “When you go into a tunnel, look out for the ‘shaft,’ if you catch my ‘drift.'”
My latest foray started out innocently enough while planning my annual trip down to Salt Lake City’s quite festive St. Patrick’s Day parade and gathering of the flock. Beginning at the Hibernian Society’s website, I discovered that the theme of this year’s always-well-over-the-top procession would be “From Kerry to Promontory.”
The obvious allusion pointed toward the immigration of Irish from the “ould sod” of County Kerry to America and their involvement with the building of the Transcontinental Railroad and the joining of the rails at Promontory Summit. It was at this point that I got mired in the peaty bogs of Irish America.
The announcement of the parade theme quickly got a bit more specific. “This year, we honor the memory of Patrick Edward Connor whose contributions to mining and railroading did so much to enhance the development of the commerce of the State of Utah. He was a preeminent figure in mining, railroading and politics.”
“Oh no, say it ain’t so,” I thought. Let’s not go there. All I wanted to do is toss back an Irish coffee and a Guinness or two while allowing my DNA to make a spectacle of itself. Connor brought guilt by association into play. There’s not all that much light in his tunnel.
As the commander of the Third California Infantry during the Civil War, however, he did establish Fort Douglas so as to protect the overland mail route from Indian harassment and to keep an eye on the Mormons. He is also credited with jump-starting Utah’s mining industry when his troops came upon ore outcroppings near Park City.
And there was his work supplying the Transcontinental Railroad endeavour with rail ties milled from timber harvested in the Uinta Mountains. He had all that going for him. But there is much more to the Connor story. The further you fall into Alice’s rabbit hole, the “curiouser and curiouser” it all gets.
He and his forces in Utah were bored. They had volunteered to fight the troops of the Confederacy, not to watch over the Mormons and the Overland route. So when the chance came to “chastise” plundering Indian tribes, they were quite motivated.
The Battle of Bear River featured Connor and 200 troops from Fort Douglas negotiating deep snows and subzero temperatures to attack an encampment of 450 Northwest Shoshoni near the confluence of the Bear River and Beaver Creek in what is now the Idaho side of the Utah line.
Outflanking the Shoshoni with some quite competent military strategy, Connor’s forces would win the day. But they didn’t stop there. Connor’s announcement to his men prior to heading north that they would “take no prisoners” played out as the battle became a massacre. The plundering shoe was now on the other foot.
Of the six major Indian massacres during the Western wars, including Sand Creek and Wounded Knee, the most brutal took place at Bear River on January 29, 1863. It may have been properly catalogued as a “Civil War” battle, but the final hours of the conflict could only be defined as, purely and simply, a bloody massacre.
Then there was the incident years earlier during the Mexican-American War when he reportedly took part in the hanging and “branding” of captured Irish troops who had deserted en masse from the Americans to the Mexican side on what they saw as moral grounds. He also had all that going for him.
So, heading on down to celebrate St. Patrick last Saturday, I had visions of a few of the floats being sponsored by the Shoshoni tribe and, maybe, survivors of the St. Patricio Battalion complete with 2-inch branded “D”s on their cheeks.
But as it turned out, the day lent itself more to coffee with proper ratios of Irish Cream and Jameson Whiskey, to reels and jigs and Celtic dancing girls, and to members of the Hibernian Society who turned out to be quite aware of the can of worms they were opening. We are multi-layered, we Irish, and, for the most part, we know it!
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.