I’ve written before that my ancestor, Cyrenus Hooker, was the first person murdered in Polk County, Oregon. His murder took place in February 1852. I recently came across an article about another killing that took place in May 1852, when Nimrod O’Kelly fatally shot Jeremiah Mahoney in Benton County, Oregon, as a result of a dispute over land boundaries.
My latest novel, My Hope Secured, has some violent episodes involving theft and murder. The incidents in my novel are more reminiscent of Cyrenus Hooker’s death (which occurred during a theft of property) than Jeremiah Mahoney’s (which involved land). Yet, as I researched the O’Kelly/Mahoney dispute, I realized that the themes in my novel were eerily the same as in this factual case I’d known nothing about.
Nimrod O’Kelly came to Oregon from Missouri in 1845. He said he was married, but his wife and children did not accompany him on the journey. When he arrived in Oregon, he claimed a full 640 acres of land (one square mile), as the law permitted at the time. In 1850, the land laws were changed to reduce the amount if free land that an unmarried man could claim to 320 acres (a half square mile). Married men could still claim a full square mile.
This legal change in how much land single men could claim drove much of the plot in My Hope Secured.
A letter from Nimrod O’Kelly to Congress dated August 30, 1851, regarding his Oregon land claim. I’m impressed by his beautiful handwriting, though less so by his spelling.
In 1852, O’Kelly was still claiming to be married, though no one had seen his wife yet. He claimed to have written his wife to tell her to come to Oregon, but she had not responded. He said it took four years for his letter to get to his wife in the States. (The slow communications from the West to the States is another theme in my novels.)
As one article describes the situation,
“as the years rolled by, other settlers came and set up claims nearby, and several of them were very skeptical about his marital status.
“This was a thing that single men did somewhat regularly in those days—claimed a double portion, and then went looking for a woman, any woman really, that they could marry in order to keep it—before a neighbor got wise and filed a competing claim. O’Kelly, though, wasn’t looking for a wife; he claimed he already had one.”
So much as my character, Zeke Pershing, needed a wife, so did actual settlers in Oregon in the 1850s, and the O’Kelly situation gives me more confidence in the historical accuracy of my book.
Jeremiah Mahoney was one of the Oregon settlers who doubted Mrs. O’Kelly’s existence. Mahoney filed a competing claim on the 320 acres her husband had claimed for her and began improving that land. O’Kelly and Mahoney argued repeatedly over this land claim until one day the arguments escalated, and O’Kelly shot and killed Mahoney.
O’Kelly claimed self-defense and defense of his property, but he was convicted of murder. He went to the gallows three times, but his execution was stayed twice, and the third time then-Governor John Gaines commuted his sentence to two years in prison.
But there is some dispute whether Governor Gaines actually commuted the sentence or whether Mrs. O’Kelly saved her husband when she belatedly arrived in Oregon.
“O’Kelly’s allegedly-imaginary wife, Sarah O’Kelly, left Missouri on the Oregon Trail in the spring of 1854 to join her husband. Word reached them en route that O’Kelly was about to be hanged for murder. So their oldest son took a horse and raced ahead of the wagon train.
“He beat the clock, appearing at the Benton County sheriff’s office and introducing himself to Sheriff T.J. Right, and letting the lawman know the rest of the family was on the way.”
This version states that the sheriff let O’Kelly go as soon as the son arrived, just before O’Kelly was scheduled to be hanged. Another version states that he was pardoned in 1856 by a later governor, Governor George Curry.
Such a last-minute rescue would definitely qualify as stranger than fiction. But regardless of how O’Kelly was saved from hanging, it is clear that O’Kelly eventually went free. So the true story of the Nimrod O’Kelly/Jeremiah Mahoney argument over land and O’Kelly’s later legal battles is at least as odd as the murder and trial that I wrote about in My Hope Secured.
After his reprieve, O’Kelly trekked to Washington, D.C., to try to resolve his land claim. However, he was unsuccessful, and he and Sarah still didn’t have clear title when he died in 1864 of natural causes. It wasn’t until 1881 that his descendants received the full square mile of land that O’Kelly had claimed.
My very first post on this blog, back in January 2012, dealt with how the French word “histoire” means both history and story. Perhaps the French have it right in using the same word for both truth and fiction. I am always surprised at how fiction—often designed to be sensational—is no match for history.
What strange historical events top fiction in your mind?
