Bourke serves as an aide to GeneralGeorge Crook in the Apache Wars from 1872 to 1883. As Crook’s aide, he has the opportunity to witness every facet of life in the Old West — the battles, wildlife, the internal squabbling among the military, the Indian Agency, settlers, and Native Americans.
During his time as aide to General Crook during the Apache Wars, Bourke keeps journals of his observations that are later published as On the Border with Crook. This book is considered one of the best firsthand accounts of frontier army life, as Bourke gives equal time to both the soldier and the Native American. Within it, he describes the landscape, Army life on long campaigns, and his observations of the Native Americans. His passages recount General Crook’s meetings with Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Geronimo as the General attempts to sign peace treaties and relocate tribes to reservations. He provides considerable detail of towns and their citizens in the Southwest, specifically the Arizona Territory.
In 1881 Bourke is a guest of the Zuni tribe, where he is allowed to attend the ceremony of a Newekwe priest. His report of this experience is published in 1888 as The use of human odure and human urine in rites of a religious or semi religious character among various nations.
Bourke marries Mary F. Horbach of Omaha, Nebraska, on July 25, 1883. They have three daughters together.
John Bourke dies in the Polyclinic Hospital in Philadelphia on June 8, 1896, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. His wife is buried beside him after her death.
Lonergan immigrates to the United States with his family in 1848. It is said that the Lonergans were on the run from the Great Famine, as well as British oppression. Settling in Vermont, he works alongside his father as a cooper.
In 1862, Lonergan forms a company of fellow Vermont Irishmen to volunteer to fight the Confederates. He does so with the mindset to gain more military skill to help the cause of Irish freedom. He is also leader of the Vermont branch of the Fenian Brotherhood, a forerunner to the Irish Republican Army.
Lonergan serves for the Union Army in two stages, 1862-1863 and 1865. Serving as the captain of Company A, 13th Vermont Infantry, his efforts on July 2, 1863 at the Battle of Gettysburg earn him the Medal of Honor, which cites him for “Gallantry in the recapture of four guns and the capture of two additional guns from the enemy; also the capture of a number of prisoners.”
Following his services in the Civil War, Lonergan helps organize a pair of failed raids into Canada from staging areas in St. Albans. The Fenians’ quixotic aim is to pressure Britain, which rules Canada as a colony, to surrender control of Ireland.
Lonergan dies in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on August 6, 1902. In 2013, a memorial is erected to him in Burlington, Vermont.
A baptismal certificate from St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church indicates that Cohan was born on July 3, but Cohan and his family always insist that he had been “born on the Fourth of July!” His parents are traveling vaudeville performers, and he joins them on stage while still an infant, first as a prop, learning to dance and sing soon after he could walk and talk. As a child, he and his family tour most of the year and spend summer vacations from the vaudeville circuit at his grandmother’s home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts.
In 1904 Cohan produces his first successful musical play, Little Johnny Jones, in which he plays the character The Yankee Doodle Boy. As a songwriter, he is a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP). His popular song catalog includes “The Yankee Doodle Boy,” “Venus, My Shining Love,” “I Guess I’ll Have to Telegraph My Baby,” “My Musical Comedy Maid,” “Revolutionary Rag,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “You Remind Me of My Mother,” “Life’s a Funny Proposition After All,” “Mary’s a Grand Old Name,” “So Long, Mary,” “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway,” “I Was Born in Virginia,” “Harrigan,” “Over There” (the song of World War I which earns Cohan the Congressional Medal of Honor), “In the Kingdom of Our Own,” “Nellie Kelly, I Love You,” “When June Comes Along With a Song,” “Molly Malone,” “Where Were You, Where Was I?,” “The Song and Dance Man,” “Billie” and the patriotic theme song and 2002 Towering Song Award winner, “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”
The more than 40 musical dramas Cohan writes, produces, directs and stars in on Broadway include The Governor’s Son, Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway, Little Johnny, George Washington, Jr., The Honeymooners, The Yankee Prince, The Little Millionaire, Hello, Broadway, The Talk of New York, Fifty Miles From Boston, The American Idea, The Man Who Owns Broadway, The Cohan Revue (1916, 1918), The Royal Vagabond, The Merry Malones, Little Nellie Kelly, The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly, Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, Seven Keys to Baldpate, The Miracle Man, Hit the Trail Hailday, Broadway Jones, A Prince There Was, The Song and Dance Man, American Born, Gambling, Dear Old Darling, The Return of the Vagabond, The Tavern, Elmer the Great, The O’Brien Girl, Ah, Wilderness! and I’d Rather Be Right.
Although Mulholland later claims that at the Battle of Gettysburg on July 2, 1863 he personally took command of the 140th Pennsylvania Infantry and led it into action, this fact is mentioned in neither his own official report of the battle, nor that of the lieutenant colonel commanding the 140th. When the 116th is returned to full strength in early 1864, he is promoted to colonel. He is wounded a second time at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House he is wounded a third time, but remains in the hospital only ten days. Resuming his command, he is dangerously wounded again at the Battle of Totopotomoy Creek. He recovers rapidly and commands his brigade in all the actions around the Siege of Petersburg, particularly distinguishing himself by storming a fort on the Boydton Plank Road. He is mustered out of the volunteer service on June 3, 1865.
On May 4, 1866, PresidentAndrew Johnson nominates Mulholland for the brevet grade of brigadier general of volunteers to rank from March 13, 1865 for his conduct at the Battle of the Wilderness and the U.S. Senate confirms the appointment on May 18, 1866. On January 13, 1869, President Johnson nominates Mulholland for appointment to the brevet grade of major general of volunteers, to rank from March 13, 1865 for his actions on the Boydton Plank Road and the Senate confirms the appointment on February 16, 1869. The brevet is issued February 20, 1869. It is the last brevet of major general issued for service during the Civil War.
Returning to civilian life after the war, Mulholland is appointed Chief of Police in Philadelphia in 1868, and signalizes his administration by the good order in which he keeps both the force and the city. President Grover Cleveland appoints him United States Pension Agent, in which office he is continued by Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. He is considered an authority on the science of penology, and also devotes much of his leisure time to art studies, and as a lecturer and writer on the Civil War and its records. He compiles a history of the 116th Regiment, and another of those to whom Congress voted the Medal of Honor. In the Catholic affairs of Philadelphia, he is always active and a leader among the best known laymen.
St. Clair Augustin Mulholland dies on February 17, 1910 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is buried at Old Cathedral Cemetery, Philadelphia.
As a child, Murphy is a loner with mood swings and an explosive temper. He grows up in Texas, around Farmersville, Greenville, and Celeste, where he attends elementary school. His father drifts in and out of the family’s life and eventually deserts them. He drops out of school in fifth grade and gets a job picking cotton for a dollar a day to help support his family. After his mother dies of endocarditis and pneumonia in 1941, he works at a radio repair shop and at a combination general store, garage and gas station in Greenville.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Murphy’s older sister helps him to falsify documentation about his birthdate in order to meet the minimum-age requirement for enlisting in the military. Turned down by the Navy and the Marine Corps, he enlists in the Army. He first sees action in the 1943 Allied invasion of Sicily. Then, in 1944, he participates in the Battle of Anzio, the liberation of Rome, and Operation Dragoon, the invasion of Southern France. He fights at Montélimar and leads his men on a successful assault at the L’Omet quarry near Cleurie in northeastern France in October.
Murphy receives every military combat award for valor available from the U.S. Army, as well as French and Belgian awards for heroism. He receives the Medal of Honor for valor that he demonstrates at the age of 19 for single-handedly holding off an entire company of German soldiers for an hour at the Colmar Pocket in France in January 1945, then leading a successful counterattack while wounded and out of ammunition.
After the war, Murphy embarks on a 21-year acting career. He plays himself in the 1955 autobiographical film To Hell and Back, based on his 1949 memoirs of the same name, but most of his roles are in westerns. He makes guest appearances on celebrity television shows and stars in the series Whispering Smith. He is a fairly accomplished songwriter. He breeds American Quarter Horses in California and Arizona and becomes a regular participant in horse racing.
Suffering from what would today be described as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Murphy sleeps with a loaded handgun under his pillow. He looks for solace in addictive sleeping pills. In his last few years, he is plagued by money problems but refuses offers to appear in alcohol and cigarette commercials because he does not want to set a bad example.
William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, a United States soldier, lawyer, intelligence officer, and diplomat, dies on February 8, 1959. Donovan is best remembered as the wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, during World War II. He is also known as the “Father of American Intelligence” and the “Father of Central Intelligence.”
Of Irish descent, Donovan is born in Buffalo, New York, to first generation immigrants Anna Letitia “Tish” Donovan (née Lennon) of Ulster and Timothy P. Donovan of County Cork. His grandfather, Timothy O’Donovan, Sr., is from the town of Skibbereen, and marries Mary Mahoney, who belongs to a propertied family of substantial means who disapprove of him. They move first to Canada and then to New York, where their son Timothy, Jr., Donovan’s father, attempts to engage in a political career but with little success.
William attend St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute and Niagara University before starring on the football team at Columbia University, where he earns the nickname “Wild Bill”, which remains with him for the rest of his life. He graduates from Columbia in 1905. He then attends and graduates from Columbia Law School, after which he becomes an influential Wall Street lawyer.
In 1912, Donovan forms and leads a troop of cavalry of the New York National Guard, which is mobilized in 1916 and serves on the U.S.-Mexico border during the American government’s campaign against Pancho Villa.
During World War I, Major Donovan organizes and leads the 1st battalion of the 165th Regiment of the 42nd Division. For his service near Landres-et-St. Georges, France, on October 14-15, 1918, he receives the Medal of Honor. By the end of the war he receives a promotion to colonel, as well as the Distinguished Service Cross and Purple Heart.
Donovan serves as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York from 1922 to 1924. Due to his energetic enforcement of Prohibition in the United States, there are a number of threats to assassinate him and to dynamite his home but he is not deterred. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge names Donovan to the United States Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division as a deputy assistant to Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty. Donovan runs unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of New York (1922) and for Governor of New York (1932) as a Republican.
During the years between the world wars, Donovan earns the attention and friendship of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Although the two men were from opposing political parties, they were very similar in personality. In 1940 and 1941, Donovan traveled as an informal emissary to Britain, where he is urged by U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Roosevelt to gauge Britain’s ability to withstand Germany’s aggression. During these trips Donovan meets with key officials in the British war effort, including Winston Churchill and the directors of Britain’s intelligence services. Donovan returns to the U.S. confident of Britain’s chances and enamored of the possibility of founding an American intelligence service modeled on that of the British.
On July 11, 1941, Donovan is named Coordinator of Information (COI) where he is to oversee America’s foreign intelligence organizations which, at the time are fragmented and isolated from each other. He is plagued over the course of the next year with jurisdictional battles as few of the leaders in the intelligence community are willing to part with any of their power. Nevertheless, Donovan begins to lay the groundwork for a centralized intelligence program.
In 1942, the COI becomes the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Donovan is returned to active duty in the U.S. Army. He is promoted to brigadier general in March 1943 and to major general in November 1944. Under his leadership the OSS eventually conducts successful espionage and sabotage operations in Europe and parts of Asia. By 1943, relations with the British are becoming increasingly strained, partly due to British concerns that OSS operations are sometimes regarded as ill-disciplined and irresponsibly managed. MI6 chief Stewart Menzies is extremely hostile towards the idea of OSS operations anywhere in the British Empire and categorically forbids them to operate within the U.K.
After the end of World War II and the death of President Roosevelt in early April 1945, Donovan’s political position is substantially weakened as he finds himself opposed by President Harry S. Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and others. Truman disbands the OSS in September 1945 and Donovan returns to civilian life. Several departments of the OSS survive the dissolution and, less than two years later, the Central Intelligence Agency is founded.
Donovan does not have an official role in the newly formed CIA but he is instrumental in its formation. His opinions meet strong opposition from the State, War, and Navy Departments, as well as J. Edgar Hoover. President Truman is also unenthusiastic about some of Donovan’s arguments but he prevails and they are reflected in the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949.
After the end of the war ended, Donovan returns to his lifelong role as a lawyer and serves as special assistant to chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal in Germany. On August 3, 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower appoints Donovan Ambassador to Thailand and he serves in that capacity from September 4, 1953 until his resignation on August 21, 1954.
Donovan dies from complications of vascular dementia on February 8, 1959 at the age of 76, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He is buried in Section 2 of Arlington National Cemetery. President Eisenhower remarks, “What a man! We have lost the last hero.”
John Gregory Bourke, a captain in the United States Army and a prolific diarist and postbellum author, dies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 8, 1896. He writes several books about the American Old West, including ethnologies of its indigenous peoplesindigenous peoples.
