BIOGRAPHY: Don Maguire; Ogden, Weber co., Utah

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History of Utah
The Storied Domain
A Documentary History of Utah's Eventual Career
by J. Cecil Alter
Vol. 2, published 1932 (expired copyright)
The American Historical Society, Inc.

DON MAGUIRE. To say that Don Maguire is one of the most brilliant and
versatile citizens of the great West is to give only a modest praise to his
tremendous labors and researches as a mining engineer, explorer, traveler,
mountain trader, writer, antiquarian and gem expert. Mr. Maguire has claimed
his home in Utah for nearly half a century and during most of these years he
has had a residence in Ogden.

He was born at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, June 13, 1852, son of John and Sarah
(Conwell) Maguire. His mother was born in Northern Ireland and was related by
blood to James G. Blaine, the great American statesman. John Maguire became a
political exile from Ireland because of his participation in the revolutionary
uprising of 1848. On coming to the United States he located in Vermont. He
engaged in the sheep and cattle trade, buying over all New England for the
Boston and New York markets. In 1855 he visited Kentucky, Illinois and Iowa,
and by means of soldier scrip and other Government land warrants purchased
large tracts of land in the Southern Iowa counties of Wapello, Decatur and
Clarke. A few months later he moved his family to Iowa, settling on the Grand
River in Decatur County. Here he built up a considerable fortune. During the
Civil war four of his sons went into the Union army and after the war became
successful merchants in different parts of the great West from Montana to
California.

Don Maguire was the youngest member of his father's family. He was too young
to get into the army during the war. During that time he was attending a
select school. The blood of Irish Revolutionists was in his veins, and this,
coupled with the spirit of boyhood adventure, made him rebel against the
monotonous routine of school and home. Shortly after the close of the Civil
war he started for Mexico, with a view to joining the army under Diaz and
Juarez in fighting against the Emperor Maximilian. He had reached the borders
of Texas when news came that Maximilian had been captured and shot. On two
other occasions, between 1866 and 1870, he enlisted in the Fenian Brotherhood
for the purpose of invading Canada with the ultimate design of liberating
Ireland from British rule. For a time he was assistant to an army
quartermaster, purchasing horses and mules for the artillery, cavalry and
transportation service of the regular army on the plains. This work took him
through Southern Iowa, Northwestern and Northern Missouri, and Northern and
Northwestern Kentucky.

Realizing that the army did not satisfy his adventurous instincts, he
responded to the lure of the great West, went to California, then to Nevada
and Utah, and in these several states was connected with different parties
engaged in mining and commercial lines. For forty-five days in 1873 he was
with Major Powell's party of the United States Geological Survey on the
Colorado River.

Having accumulated a little capital, he invested it in an education. He
entered the college at Santa Barbara, California, conducted by the San
Franciscan Fathers. There he labored hard in the studies of engineering,
mathematics, and in the mastering of the French, Spanish and Arabic languages.
The Arabic tongue was taught by Father Romo, who had been for many years
Father Superior of the Franciscan Order in Jerusalem. Mr. Maguire subsequently
made use of this language while he was among the Arabs in Morocco. One
vacation he boarded a Pacific Coast steamer, the Orizaba, and visited
Nicaragua and Costa Rica, studying the resources of this wonderful region and
also following in the footsteps of the noted filibuster, Gen. William Walker.
For years Mr. Maguire has been a close student of Central American history.

After he left college he made a student's pilgrimage along the west base of
the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range in California, the El Dorado of the days of
forty-nine. This pilgrimage brought him first hand contact with many of the
men who still lived in the old camps. He gathered a heterogeneous collection
of relics, such as bowie knives, pistols, Mexican spurs, rifles, gold nuggets,
quartz crystals, rare minerals, photographic views of two hundred dead or
active gold mines of California, from Kern River in the south to Siskiyou
County in the north. It was also his good fortune to mingle with many of the
surviving adventurers of 1849, men still living in the half deserted mining
camps. He met Mexicans, Spaniards, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, Irishmen,
Missourians, Digger Indians, Squaw men and Americans. He studied placer mining
from the incipient methods of the wooden bowl, the gold pan, the rocker, the
Long Tom, to the hydraulic method by which mountains of gold bearing gravel
are lifted and torn from their bedding and their gold saved in miles and miles
of riffled sluice boxes.

After this pilgrimage in the California gold regions Mr. Maguire began his
labors in Nevada on the Great Comstock Lode and at other points of the Silver
State and in Southeastern California. During one of these years he was
fortunate in accumulating a small fortune. For a short period he was assistant
geologist to Prof. Frank Stewart, then state geologist of Nevada. This
required his visiting every mining camp of the state. He helped in collecting
the state's mineral exhibit for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in
1876.

Following this he went to Europe. The outbreak of a war thwarted his plan to
visit Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and instead he went into Egypt, going up
the Nile as far as the famous Temple of Carnak. He spent some weeks in Greece,
sailed to Malta and Sicily, made a tour of Spain, and then with James W.
Gardner of Toledo, Ohio, joined a caravan going from Tangiers, Morocco, to
Fez. He also went into the Atlas Mountain range on a tour of trade and
investigation for gold and silver mines. They were driven out by rogues and
barbarians which at that time made this a dangerous region for civilized men.

After returning to the United States Mr. Maguire organized an expedition for
trade and exploration into Arizona and Northern Mexico. The expedition ended
at Guymas, on the Gulf of California. The next two years he led two other
expeditions, starting from Ogden, crossing Utah and Arizona deserts in Central
and Southern Arizona, and going as far south as Durango and Zacatecas in old
Mexico. These three expeditions were immensely profitable, but were attended
with tremendous risks from Apache Indians, Mexicans and American highwaymen.

Following his third expedition in Arizona and Mexico, Mr. Maguire turned to
trade and mining in Idaho, Montana and Oregon. He had made a study of
crystalography and precious stones for some years. Subsequently he discovered
the jet mines of Utah; opened the Chloruthalite and Sabalite gem mines
southwest of Salt Lake City; also discovered the opal fields in Central Idaho,
the Iolanthite and Jasper fields of Oregon. As a practical science he also
gave some attention to the presence of pearls in some of the rivers of Utah.

His versatile gifts were not entirely absorbed by these practical activities.
He was a correspondent and contributor to various magazines, newspapers and
scientific journals. In 1879 he issued a volume of poems that had a wide
circulation, and in the same year published a novel The American Adventurer,
both of which volumes have been long out of print. In later years his literary
work has comprised a number of volumes of fiction, including Days of
Forty-nine, Tales to the Wide West, Hidden Treasure Tales, Woman's Book of
indian Activities, Life and Times of the Great Filibuster, General William
Walker, Conqueror of Nicarauga, and in manuscript The Life and Times of
Brigham Young, the Great Mormon Leader and President of the Mormon Church, a
work which he has specified is not to appear in print until the year 1950.

His scientific labors alone would have absorbed the energy of a normal man. He
has done much to attract the attention of the world to the general wealth of
Utah. He represented Utah's mineral resources and the prehistoric treasures of
the state at the Columbian Exposition of Chicago in 1893, at the Mid-Winter
Fair at San Francisco in 1894-95, at the Omaha Exposition in 1898, and the St.
Louis Fair in 1904. In his research and work of discovery in mineralogy he has
covered the Utah field more exhaustively than any one before him. This work
has included metals, carbons, hydro-carbons, non-metallic minerals,
crystalography, gem material, building and decorative stones. He was the
discoverer of the first jet deposit in the United States, located on a
tributary of the Colorado River in Southeastern Utah. In 1886 he discovered
the wonderful Jasper deposits of Oregon and the unique gem stone lolanthite,
which also occurs in Oregon. In 1887 he brought to notice the opal bearing
country in the wilderness of Central Oregon.

As an antiquarian his researches have extended through Northern Mexico and
over most of Arizona, Northwestern New Mexico and all of Utah. During the late
`90s he made excavations in the prehistoric fortress of Pahragoona in
Southwestern Utah and in the other valley ruins of the state. These
investigations proved that the prehistoric or lost races of pre-Columbian
tribes carried their labors and semi-civilization as far north as the ruined
Pueblo of Kublik on the site of the present town of Willard, near the east
shore of Great Salt Lake. He did much work among the ruins of the Cliff
Dwellers in New Mexico, Arizona, Southwestern Colorado and Utah. The Federal
Department of Ethnology has frequently given him credit for these researches.

In 1894-95 Mr. Maguire and Senator Frank J. Cannon and Charles K. Bannister,
civil engineer, undertook and completed the building of the electric car line
in Ogden Canyon. At that time this was the largest hydro-electric plant in the
United States, and was the foundation or initial work of the present Great
Rocky Mountain Electric Company.

After an investigation of the bed and islands of Great Salt Lake in 1890 Mr.
Maguire realized that it was possible to carry a railroad line across the
lake, thus cutting down grades and shortening the distance by rail by
forty-six miles between Ogden and San Francisco. Having accumulated this data,
Mr. Maguire associated himself with Lieut. Frederick Van Gorp, a Dutch
engineer of Rotterdam, Holland. They planned a new line of railroad to be
known as the "Ogden & San Francisco Short Line," the funds for which were to
be produced by men in London, Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Preliminary surveys
were made, maps of the route prepared; an office was opened at London. Then
the failure of the great house of Baring Brothers threw a cloud over railroad
building schemes in both North and South America. After the death of Lieut.
Van Gorp, Mr. Maguire, being without financial backing for the project,
decided to take the public into his confidence. He gave to Frank J. Cannon,
then editor of the Ogden Standard, a three-column article carefully describing
the intended work. The project was denounced by Salt Lake papers as the
wildest and craziest scheme ever suggested by man. Nevertheless, officials of
the Southern Pacific Railroad in San Francisco became alarmed, and after an
investigation by their engineers the undertaking was pronounced practicable.
The death of C. P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific, delayed the
construction work on the route surveyed from Ogden to Lucin Junction, but when
the late Edward H. Harriman came into power, the work was at once pushed
forward, and after three years of labor completed at a cost of $13,000,000.
The work has since been described as one of half a dozen of the greatest feats
of railroad engineering in the world. Mr. Maguire, himself, has had the
satisfaction of realizing that had he not discovered its possibility, then in
all probability no one else would have attempted to built it.

As this very brief sketch indicates, Mr. Maguire has lived a life made up of
countless contacts with men and affairs and with the physical and scientific
aspects of nature. He has participated in romance also, and while in Montana
he met Miss Agatha B. Wales, who was visiting in that state. She was born at
East Arcade, near Buffalo, New York. They were married June 12, 1881, and had
a happy life for forty-six years. Her grave is at Ogden, under the shadow of
the Wasatch Peaks. Mr. Maguire has one son, Charles A. Maguire, a resident of
Salt Lake City.

In the course of his travels and work during a period of half a century Mr.
Maguire has been a collector of books and manuscripts from many lands; of
minerals and fossils, crystalizations and gem materials from the four corners
of the earth; and of offensive and defensive weapons of all the periods of
man's dwelling on the globe. An article of his creed, generated by vast
experience throughout the world, is that mankind in general, irrespective of
creed, color, politics or religion, are good men, worthy of respect and
praise. Mr. Maguire is a Republican, a Catholic, and a firm believer in a wise
and all merciful God.