by Beau Yotty
On the transport to Cuba, Captain William Owen O’Neill leaned on the rail with Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and hunted the Southern Cross. The Prescott mayor asked if Whitman was the one who wrote of vultures plucking the eyes of princes. Then he said the line Roosevelt wrote down and never improved: Who would not risk his life for a star? A month later a Mauser found him under Kettle Hill with a cigarette in his teeth. He was thirty-eight. Troop A had to finish the hill without him.
That is the Buckey the bronze remembers. The rest of the man, faro, sheriff’s posse, Populist tickets, a faint at a hanging, is how he got to the rail.
He was born February 2, 1860, in St. Louis, Irish parents, a father wounded at Fredericksburg. Gonzaga and a taste of Georgetown law, then an advertisement calling men to Arizona. Nineteen years old, 1879, Phoenix on a burro. Tombstone next, copy for the Epitaph while the Earps still owned the street. Phoenix after that, where he earned the name that stuck: Buckey, because he bucked the tiger at faro. bet into the house as if the cards had insulted him. Prescott took him in 1882 and kept him sixteen years.
He stacked jobs until the pile looked like a dare. Court reporter. Editor of the Miner. Founder of Hoof and Horn for the cattle trade. Short stories in the San Francisco Chronicle. Mining. Volunteer fireman. Captain of the Prescott Grays. Probate judge and school superintendent in the same election. Sheriff. Mayor. Twice he ran for territorial delegate as a Populist and lost, which is the correct result when you tell both machines they are useless and talk a forty-hour week in a gold-dust town. Opponents ran him as a gambler. The smear elected him. Whiskey Row already knew the cigarette and the faro layout in the Cabinet, the Diana, the Sazerac, later the Palace.
He married Pauline Schindler in 1886. They lost a premature son. They later took in a boy, Maurice. Buckey had less than a year with that child. There is a story that as captain of the Grays he stood honor guard at a hanging and fainted when the trap fell. If it is true, file it next to the star on the rail. Nerve is not iron. Nerve is what you do after the blank.
Three months into the sheriff’s star, four Hashknife cowboys robbed the Atlantic & Pacific at Canyon Diablo. O’Neill took three men and rode them into Utah. Three weeks, hundreds of miles, Lee’s Ferry two days late. A canyon near Beaver. The outlaws came out shooting. A round killed his horse between the eyes and pinned him under it. The posse pried him loose and took the four alive. That is the lawman Roosevelt later advertised to the East.
February 1898: the Maine goes down. O’Neill is mayor and adjutant of the Arizona National Guard. He resigns both and starts raising cowboys. With Alexander O. Brodie and James McClintock he tries for a whole Arizona regiment. Washington allows three troops. Arizona becomes A, B, and C of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. O’Neill takes Troop A. First Lieutenant Frank Frantz is his second. The recruiting table goes up on Courthouse Plaza, on the grass where the statue stands now. Prescott fills the paper.
May 4, 1898, the depot. The whole town in the street. Hams, mutton, pickled pigs’ feet, three barrels of bottled beer. Someone calls Take care of yourself, Buckey. He starts the line about the Spanish bullet. The engine drowns it. Handkerchiefs and parasols. The train slides through the cut toward San Antonio, where a sign at the station already reads This Way to Camp of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders even though Leonard Wood is the colonel and Roosevelt is only just arriving in a fawn uniform with canary-yellow trim.
The fairgrounds are dust and raw horses sold as broken. Arizona ponies bolt the line and buck in defiance of drill. The newspapers try Teddy’s Texas Tarantulas and a few other brands before Rough Riders sticks. Roosevelt looks at O’Neill and writes the inventory later: mayor of Prescott, famous sheriff, a man who can talk Aryan word-roots and slide into Balzac, then throw Apache signs that remind the New Yorker of Sioux and Mandan. Kindred. The kind of officer you hunt stars with.
Three weeks of that and they load 1,060 men and more than twelve hundred animals onto seven trains for Tampa. It takes until after midnight to shut the last car. Four days across the old Confederacy. Tampa is a wreck of overlapping orders. Only eight of twelve troops will get ships. Most of the horses will not. The regiment that trained as cavalry will fight as infantry. Regulars start calling them Wood’s Weary Walkers. Arizona still carries the colors.
Wood and Roosevelt scramble for a hull and take the Yucatan, Roosevelt’s version is they found her assigned to somebody else and got there first. Officers drink a toast on the way south that sounds like a joke until it isn’t: The officers; may the war last until each is killed, wounded, or promoted. O’Neill is about to collect the first clause.
June 22, 1898. Daiquirí. A ruined dock, a surf that does not care about volunteer cavalry. While Roosevelt works the landing, a boat of Colored Infantry from the 10th Cavalry, Buffalo Soldiers, capsizes. Two men go under. O’Neill goes after them in full uniform, saber and all, and stays down two minutes before he has to come up. He does not get them. Roosevelt puts it in the book without varnish: Bucky plunging in, in vain. The landing goes on. By late afternoon the regiment is ashore with what ammunition and rations the men can carry. Ready for whatever turns up.
What turns up is Las Guasimas, June 24. Jungle, smokeless powder, Spanish on ground they know. Troop A is toward the front. O’Neill sees figures across a road, shouts Hostiles on our right, fire at will, and finds after the volley that he has been shooting at Cuban rebels. The outpost falls anyway. Eight Rough Riders dead, thirty-one wounded, Captain Allyn Capron among the lost. The road toward Santiago is open. The Arizona flag, the accounts say, is at the head of the column.
July 1, about ten in the morning. Rough Riders and the 10th Cavalry are packed below Kettle Hill, San Juan Heights above them, Mausers working the brush. The men are in what cover there is. O’Neill will not use it. He has a theory that an officer in a volunteer regiment ought never to take cover, wrong, Roosevelt says later, but useful on green troops. He is addicted to cigarettes. He strolls the road in front of Troop A and smokes.
They beg him down. A sergeant: Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you. O’Neill takes the cigarette out, blows a cloud, laughs. Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me. He turns to talk direction of fire with a regular officer. As he turns on his heel the round goes in the mouth and out the back of the skull. Roosevelt’s sentence is the one that survived the century: even before he fell his wild and gallant soul had gone out into the darkness.
Roosevelt called it the most serious loss he and the regiment could have suffered. Troop A still had to go up the hill. Privates James Boyle, Fred E. Champlin, and Lewis Reynolds of that troop were killed in the same fighting. The regiment took Kettle Hill, then the San Juan blockhouses, then the trenches before Santiago. O’Neill was already in the dirt on the slope. He was the only officer among the Arizona volunteers killed in the regiment. After the war they lifted him and sent him to Arlington, Section 1, Lot 294.
Prescott did not wait on Washington. Schoolchildren, cowboys on the Row, a Buckey O’Neill cigar, a check from Roosevelt with the amount never printed. Solon Borglum took the commission cheap, walked the hills, chose a twenty-eight-ton granite boulder, and set an equestrian on it that still looks ready to come off the rock. Unveiled July 3, 1907. The plaques name the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry and Captain William O. O’Neill and the comrades who died in the war with Spain. The town just says Buckey. Both are correct. In 1948 the Post Office put his face on the Rough Rider commemorative stamp. Roosevelt never stood in front of the bronze. He had already written the better monument.
He asked who would not risk his life for a star, and then he did it in full view of the men who had to watch. Buckey O’Neill left a mayor’s chair, a wife, a boy barely his, and a faro layout on Montezuma Street to walk a Cuban hillside with a cigarette and no cover, because that was the only way he knew how to lead Troop A. The Mauser that took him did not unmake the ride from Prescott, the plunge off the Yucatan after drowning soldiers, or the flag Arizona carried into the smoke. It only proved the bet. They buried him on the slope and finished the hill without him. Roosevelt wrote that his wild and gallant soul was gone before he hit the ground. Prescott answered the only way a frontier town can: they put him back on a horse, in bronze, facing the plaza where he signed the regiment, so no one coming off Whiskey Row would have to ask what a captain of the Rough Riders looked like when the bullets were real.