December 7, 1941: ‘A date that has lived in Infamy’
By Tom Morrow
It’s been 80 years this week since the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor which drew this nation into World War II. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress and the American people Dec. 7, 1941, was “a date that will live in Infamy.”
While World War II officially began on Sept. 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the U.S. managed to stay on the sidelines until Japan’s Dec. 7, 1941 attack. The U.S. Navy’s bases in Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines were major obstacles in keeping Japan from dominating all of the western Pacific region.
The U.S. stopped Japan’s aggression six months later with the June 4-6, 1942 U.S. Naval victory in the Battle of Midway. It would take another four years for a final victory.
Arizona’s ‘Rough-Riding’ Legend
Out of the untamed Wild West came a number of tales, legends, and an equal number of true stories. Few of those accounts would top the ones told about William Owen “Bucky” O’Neill – newspaperman, town marshal, judge, county sheriff, local militia leader, city mayor, and, captain in the famed “Roosevelt Rough Riders” of 1898.
O’Neill was born the first of four children on Feb. 2, 1860, in St. Louis, Missouri. During the first part of 1879, when he was 19years old, O’Neill answered an item in the Washington Star newspaper calling for men to migrate to the Arizona Territory. He arrived in Phoenix riding a burro in September that same year. Upon arrival he was hired as a printer by the Phoenix Herald. By late 1880, O’Neill had become bored and sought to experience the “Real West” in the notorious town of Tombstone in southern Arizona.
O’Neill took the opportunity to experience the local saloons before taking a job with The Tombstone Epitaph newspaper. By early 1882, he was back in Phoenix working as a deputy marshal. Later that year, O’Neill moved to Prescott, his home for the next 15 years.
O’Neill arrived in Prescott, continuing in his journalistic career, starting as a court reporter. He soon founded his own newspaper, Hoof and Horn, a paper for cattlemen and ranchers. In 1886, O’Neill became captain of the Prescott Grays, a local unit of the Arizona Militia. In 1888, while serving as Yavapai County judge, O’Neill was elected county sheriff, running on the Republican ticket.
After his term as county judge was up, O’Neill was unanimously elected mayor of Prescott. In 1894 and 1896 he ran for Delegate to the Legislature of the Arizona Territory.
During this time, one of his best friends was the infamous cattle regulator Tom Horn, who was hanged for murder in the Wyoming “Johnson County War.”
In 1897, O’Neill helped introduce a bill in the Territorial Legislature allowing women to vote in municipal elections, however the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed the bill.
In 1898, war broke out between the United States and Spain. O’Neill joined Teddy Roosevelt’s all-volunteer Rough Riders, becoming Captain of Troop A.
The Rough Riders landed at Daiquirí, Cuba on June 22, 1898. On July 1, 1898, the Rough Riders and the U.S. Army’s 10th Cavalry were stationed below Kettle Hill where O’Neill was killed. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, commander of the Rough Riders, wrote in his report about the death of his captain:
“The most serious loss that I and the regiment could have suffered befell the captain just before we charged. O’Neill walked up and down his troops. His men begged him to lie down, and one of the sergeants yelled, ‘Captain, a bullet is sure to hit you.’”
As the story was told by his men, O’Neill took his cigarette out of his mouth, and blowing out a cloud of smoke laughed and said, “Sergeant, the Spanish bullet isn’t made that will kill me.” Soon after a bullet struck him in the head killing him instantly.
O’Neill’s men buried him on the slope of San Juan Hill. After the war, his family and friends asked the War Department to find and recover his body. Despite it being eight months since his death, O’Neill’s well-preserved body was found, exhumed, placed in a coffin, and returned to the United States. He was reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery. The epitaph on his gravestone reads: “Who would not die for a new star on the flag?”
On July 3, 1907, a monument by sculptor Solon Borglum was dedicated to O’Neill and the other Rough Riders in their memory on the lawn of the Yavapai County courthouse in Prescott. Some 7,000 people gathered to witness the unveiling. Borglum’s dynamic sculpture of O’Neil depicts a “Rough Rider” on horseback. This monument is a “must-see” when visiting Prescott, the one-time capital of the Arizona Territory.