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Chapter Two


Growing Up Well-Rooted (1882–1891)

In the summer of 1882, Bernard Casey Sr. was forty-two years old, a well-respected man who had farmed the Trimbelle place for almost nine years. During those years, the Casey crops were bountiful. The family, too, had grown to thirteen, with eleven living children, and Ellen was expecting another baby in September.

It was that same year that Barney Sr. heard of a 345-acre spread for sale just to the north of Pierce County, in St. Croix County, and rode up to look at it. The place had a six-room clapboard house, two barns, a large icehouse, a root house, and a lake on the property. Looking it over was like entering a dream.

The Willow River, which flowed close by the good-sized farm, intrigued the Irish homesteader. Equally intriguing to Barney Casey was the fact that a railroad line ran through the property and made a stop just two miles away. This meant easy transportation, by rail or by river, for his crops. He went home to think about it, but in a short while, the deal was made. The Caseys would be moving again.

As the family prepared for their relocation, young Barney’s baby sister, Margaret, was born on September 23, 1882. As always, there was plenty of rejoicing over the new baby. But Margaret’s birth was even more special. Since Mary Ann and Martha’s deaths, there had been only one girl among the eleven living Casey children — the oldest child, eighteen-year-old Ellen.

After the baby was born, and the harvesting was completed, the awesome task of moving began. Household supplies, farm equipment, chickens, cattle, horses, pigs, and assorted pets had to be transported, and all with one eye to the calendar and the other on the sky. The family needed to move before a sudden snowfall could block the roads and make traveling treacherous.

Fortunately, the Caseys were tucked in at their new home before the Wisconsin winter could catch them on the open road. Bernard Casey Sr. must have smiled broadly at the blessings from heaven. He had been given such a fine farm and a healthy, happy family, including a second daughter.

Like the rest of the family, Barney Jr. was thrilled with the new spread. Though he knew he would miss the place where he had spent most of his childhood, the lake, larger fields, and sheer size of the new property better fit the scope of his twelve-year-old tastes for adventure and outdoor fun.

Except for tending to the livestock, winters meant some time off for Midwestern farmers. Bernard Casey wasted no time finding a way to turn the slack season to good purpose. He became a distributor of religious books and sold subscriptions to the Irish Standard and Extension Magazine. He would travel to St. Paul by train and return with the books, heaving full canvas sacks off the train into the snowbanks as the train passed near the Casey homestead. Knowing about what time the train passed through, several of the older Casey boys would pick up the heavy sacks and put them on the wagon, while their father walked back home from the Burkhardt train stop, two miles away.

The Caseys enjoyed literature and music. In addition to the religious books they were allowed to read (if they didn’t soil them!), they enjoyed other literature. The works of James Fenimore Cooper, especially The Deerslayer, were family favorites. After dinner, Barney Sr. would often push his chair back from the table after prayer was concluded, hoist the youngest child up on his lap, and read aloud.

Years later, the younger Caseys could remember hearing stories about Abraham Lincoln, the verses of Irish poet Thomas Moore, and the poems of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In particular, the Casey children loved one long poem by the American poet John Greenleaf Whittier called “Snow-Bound”:

And ere the early bedtime came

The white drift piled the window-frame,

And through the glass the clothes-line posts

Looked in like tall and sheeted ghosts.

It was a lovely vision the Caseys saw, winter after winter.

Ellen and Bernard Casey also made sure that their American-born children were well-acquainted with their Irish heritage. They passed on the stories and legends of their homeland. With a fiddle bought somewhere along the way, the head of the house would play and lead his household in singing Irish ballads. His children quickly learned that anything he lacked in musical polish, their father compensated for with enthusiasm.

If the railroad was helping to expand literary horizons for the Caseys of St. Croix County, it was also responsible for some other very practical benefits. Before the expansion of the railroads in the 1880s, all time throughout the country was local time. A clock in Milwaukee might be read 11:05 at the same moment that a Chicago timepiece struck 11:00. On Sunday, November 18, 1883, however, railroads throughout the United States adopted “Standard Time” to allow trains to run “on time.” People commonly went to railroad stations after that to get the exact time when the signal came over the telegraph.

Life on the Casey farm was running on its own schedule, and the patterns of religious practice and faith were unchanging. The weekly Sunday trip to Mass was now a bit farther than it was from the Trimbelle property. St. Patrick Church at Hudson, Wisconsin, was nine miles from the Casey home. Each Sunday, some members of the Casey family started out for church a full two hours before the scheduled Mass. And, as the family settled into its new home during the winter of 1882–83, the tradition of evening prayer continued. As soon as dinner was over, Bernard Sr. called for quiet and began the prayers, including the Rosary.

At age twelve, young Barney was starting to grow much faster. Even though the bout with diphtheria had left his voice weakened and wispy, and he did not seem as strong as his brothers, he was strong enough to love the outdoor life. Outwardly, he looked much like the other Casey boys, but there was something a bit gentler about his face and behavior. Barney played baseball aggressively, especially as a catcher, but refused to take part in the boxing matches the other Casey boys set up near the barn. His coolness to the sport mystified his brothers. This was, after all, the era of the great prizefighter John L. Sullivan! Barney wouldn’t touch the gloves that his brothers had pooled their money to buy. He gave no reasons for his distaste, and after a while his brothers did not pressure him.

In the spring of 1883, the Caseys saw Maurice leave home to enter St. Francis Seminary in Milwaukee. At the same time, Barney eagerly traveled to Hudson to spend two weeks in preparation for his first holy Communion. (Twelve was the customary age for first communicants in this era.) Fr. Thomas A. Kelley, the pastor of St. Patrick at Hudson, wanted to make sure that his communicants were well-drilled in the faith before they received the sacrament.

Barney also “took the pledge,” agreeing to abstain from alcohol until he was twenty-one years of age. It was the custom then in Irish communities to ask young boys to make that promise before receiving first Communion. In 1840, the Fourth Provincial Council of Baltimore had recommended the establishment of “temperance” societies in all parishes to curb alcohol use, and the first statewide Wisconsin meeting of the Catholic Total Abstinence Society was held in 1871. But the enthusiasm to spread the “pledge” was primarily an Irish interest. German Catholics didn’t participate, and one German priest offered a somewhat slanted explanation for their attitude. The “pledge” movement was a good idea for the English and Irish, he said, because “as everybody knows, they drink solely to get drunk,” while Germans knew how to drink with moderation.

At the time of his first Communion, Barney had a powerful experience of the Blessed Virgin. Thus, during the summer and autumn following his first Communion, he began to say his own Rosary each night, in addition to the family’s recitation. He would kneel by the side of his bed and pray it quietly.

After one particularly exhausting day, Barney, aching with muscle strain and fatigue, headed toward bed with the thought that he might skip his Rosary just for that night. The Casey house was growing quiet. His brothers were already in bed and the teenage Barney wanted only to go to sleep. Instead, he dropped to his knees. He knelt upright, not leaning on the bed. He had seen his mother and sister Ellen pray that way as long as he could remember.

Wishing to keep the commitment to this prayer, Barney had determined to recite at least one decade of the Rosary. To his surprise the weariness left him, and he completed the full five decades. Later that night, he dreamed that he was hanging over a huge pit with flames licking up toward him. Desperately, he looked around to see a way out. Finally, he realized that a large rosary was dangling just above his head. In the shadowy reality of dreams, he grabbed onto it and suddenly felt secure. The dream impressed the boy greatly.

This Casey farm at Hudson was much larger than the Trimbelle property had been. Barney’s older brothers, Jim and John, began to share the heavier farming jobs with their father. In turn, Barney “inherited” some of the chores his older brothers had always done. Some, he relished. He was constantly devising ingenious ways to snare prairie chickens or rabbits. It was also Barney who knew right where the wild berries were and where to get the wild hops his mother needed for yeast.

When eighteen-year-old Jim got a new rifle, Barney began to shadow him and showed a keen interest in hunting. Since small game and even an occasional deer helped to feed the large Casey clan, hunting was serious business, not merely sport. Eventually, Jim turned his rifle over more and more to Barney who went hunting regularly with a friend, Chris Adams. He became a good shot and could typically be counted upon to bag rabbits, wild ducks, geese, or prairie chickens. With perhaps a bit less enthusiasm, he also chopped wood, weeded the garden, looked for eggs the chickens laid, and fed and watered the stock.

By the time he was fourteen, Barney was slender, strong, and wiry. He had not yet completed his elementary schooling. That was not unusual in agricultural communities where schooling had to follow a different sort of schedule. Fields had to be planted in the spring and crops harvested when the time was right. Children, especially the boys, were needed to help. Schooling had to conform around the needs of agriculture.

Until the 1880s, wheat was the principal crop for Wisconsin farmers such as Bernard Casey Sr. Within that decade, however, the soil on many farms was becoming depleted through the continual use of fields for wheat. Plagues of chinch bugs began to threaten wheat’s prominence. Farm prices were falling and had been falling for some time. To add to the farmers’ grief, their hard times were arriving at a time when American industry was booming and manufactured goods were becoming more expensive.

Barney Jr. gradually became aware that the usual family petitions for good crops carried a tone of greater and greater need. Clearly, his father was increasingly concerned about the situation. During the later months of 1882, a special petition was added to the Caseys’ night prayer, asking the Lord to spare the crops from total disaster.

Although these months were difficult, a day would occasionally come along to provide Barney with excitement and fun. That compensated for his heavy load of responsibilities.

On one particular day, while out in the fields with three of their younger brothers, fifteen-year-old Barney and fourteen-year-old Pat suddenly froze in their tracks. Rover, the family dog, bounded into view, excited and bleeding from a slash down his shoulder. Barney and Pat understood what all the fuss was about when they heard a wildcat snarling from a tree not far from where they stood. Brave Rover had tangled with the cat and been cut up for his efforts.

Barney knew that there was no way to keep Rover from going at it again. Having a wildcat so close to the house and smaller children was dangerous. Without his rifle, he’d have to bag the cat some other way. “Go on up to the top of the bank and stay up there,” Barney warned his two little brothers. He and Pat would handle the cat with Rover’s help.

Immediately, Rover returned to snap at the cat. The cat leapt down on him, and dog and wildcat tumbled over and over. Pat picked up a big stick with which to hit the cat, while Barney circled to within two feet of the scrapping animals and cautiously lifted a large rock. Holding it poised, he waited for Rover to move away from the cat. At just the right moment, Barney heaved the rock and hit the cat squarely on the head. The wildcat dropped dead where it was. The little boys whooped from the top of the bank and came running down to their brave brothers.

The two older Casey boys found some vines and a tree branch and strung the dead animal from it. Thinking perhaps of Natty Bumppo, the frontier woodsman they had “met” in the books of James Fenimore Cooper, the bigger boys proudly carried the cat home. There was a bounty on wildcats, so Barney and Pat knew that the carcass would bring a needed ten dollars into family coffers. But on the way home, Barney thought of a way to also get some fun out of the dead cat.

A little later, a ferocious wildcat was “ready to spring” just outside the family home. Propped up just a bit, the animal looked menacing enough. Pat raced into the house and told his parents that a wildcat was crouching outside. The whole family edged just outside the door to peek. When the rest of the Caseys were ready to rush for the door, Barney and the other boys ran from behind the trees, laughing. At the end of the day, four Casey boys were still hooting with delight at the terror their “dangerous” wildcat had caused.

With disappointing harvests in 1885 and 1886, Barney’s studies were pushed back even farther. Along with his older brothers and sister, the boy had to look for extra work to help support the family. Barney Casey Sr. was worried but thanked the Lord for his children, who could now help save his family from desperate need. Each evening during the bleak winter of 1885 he added a prayer to the evening family devotions, asking for some profit from the crops the Caseys had worked so hard to raise. (During this time of uncertainty, Grace, the Caseys’ fifteenth child, was born on March 3, 1885. The last of the Casey children, Genevieve, would be born almost three years later to the day: March 7, 1888.)

In 1886, young Barney went to Stillwater, Minnesota, a town about twenty miles from the Casey homestead, to look for work like his brother Jim had done before him. Stillwater was a good choice, Barney’s parents thought, because Fr. Maurice Murphy, Ellen’s younger brother, was pastor of the parish there. Ellen, who was very close to her brother, had actually rowed up and down the St. Croix River raising pledges for the church he was trying to build. With the security of family around him, Barney could live in Stillwater with his uncle.

Barney found a job at the lumbermill in Stillwater. Lumbering, a massive enterprise in the white pine forests of Wisconsin during the last half of the nineteenth century, provided seasonal work for farmers. Some say that four-hundred-year-old pines up to ten feet in diameter weren’t uncommon, but they were cut down in the same fashion as thousands of much younger trees. Working on the catwalks built above the water in Stillwater, young Barney became a “river driver” and guided the logs floating down the St. Croix River from lumbering camps toward the mill. When temperatures plunged and the river froze over, Barney went home. The logs would remain frozen upriver in massive logjams until the spring thaw. At home, he wanted to continue to work at his schooling.

With what Barney and his brothers had made and with the proceeds from the harvest, Bernard Sr. was able to pay off debts and end the year with a surplus. By then, Maurice was also contributing toward this effort. After three years, the nineteen-year-old had left the seminary due to a condition called neurasthenia. It was a type of neurosis marked by fatigue, weakness, irritability, and localized pains. The return of Maurice from the seminary was a great disappointment to his parents, but they tried not to show it.

As he was finishing up his schooling, Barney met a girl named Rebecca Tobin, who lived with her family on a neighboring farm. She was a soft-spoken girl with dark hair and dark eyes. Barney may have known her for some time, but a new feeling developed between them following a debate he participated in near his sixteenth birthday in November 1886.

Public debates were community entertainment in those years. Barney and the district schoolmaster, a Mr. Hughes, challenged Barney’s father and older brother John. The subject of the debate was: “Resolved that the intemperate consumption of alcohol has been a greater evil than war.” Bernard Sr. was serving then as township treasurer and a school trustee. People liked him and his family. A crowd turned out to see the Caseys square off against one another in a battle of words and wits.

Rebecca and Barney dated for some time after that. Barney completed his schooling and decided to return to Stillwater for work, though the couple agreed to exchange letters. For a short time, Barney had a job in Stillwater as a handyman and relief guard at the state prison. The environment was a bit unsavory and rough. Nonetheless, the young man was thrilled to meet the notorious Younger brothers, members of the Jesse James gang, who were prisoners there. Before Barney left prison work, Cole Younger gave him a clothes trunk, which he treasured. Then, Barney went to look for another job.

Barney worked hard and was well liked on his jobs, yet he couldn’t seem to settle down to anything he really enjoyed. Finally, he found employment at a brick kiln in Stillwater. The other men working there, he soon discovered, were primarily of German backgrounds and had German tastes.

One day, when Barney had no lunch, one of his coworkers at the brickyard offered him an extra sandwich with Limburger cheese. Barney ate it but apparently did not think too highly of its strong flavor. “Have you ever eaten that kind of cheese before?” one of the men asked Casey later. “No, I never ate it,” quipped the young Irishman, “but I’ve often stepped in it.” The German brickmakers roared with laughter. That young Irish fellow was all right, they agreed.

But a strange and sad experience at the kiln, a few weeks later, moved Barney to think more and more about his future. While he was at work, a man fell into a deep pit filled with water. Seeing that he couldn’t swim, Barney jumped in after him and soon found himself struggling with the desperate man at the bottom. Barney quickly realized that he could not calm or overpower the fellow in order to haul him to the surface. He could see that he was in danger himself because the drowning man would not release him.

For some unknown reason, Barney thought to grab for the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel hanging around his neck. His mother had given him the scapular a short time before. At just the moment he grabbed the scapular, he later told others, he felt himself being pulled up with the man in tow, seemingly by the scapular.

Another man had jumped into the pit to relieve Barney. He could not get the drowning man to stop struggling either, and finally had to let him drown in order to save himself. Barney later believed that Our Lady would have saved him and the drowning victim through some miracle with the brown scapular. Disturbed and restless again, he looked for another job. While still working at the prison, Barney had heard that future jobs might be available with the new streetcar line Stillwater was planning. When he heard about openings at last, he applied immediately. His eye was taken by the swift, sparkling contrivances. He was hired, trained, and was soon working as a part-time motorman on Stillwater’s electric trolley. He wrote to his family about his new work with great satisfaction.

Stillwater’s streetcar system predated similar projects in most American cities. From the 1890s on, streetcar systems could be found all over the country. They rapidly updated a city — replacing horse-drawn cars, connecting towns together through interurban lines — and were inexpensive. Young Casey was surely one of the first motormen in the country, and possibly the youngest on the job.

At some point during this period, Barney received an emotional setback that may have actually contributed to his restlessness at some of his jobs. Enough affection had developed between Barney and Rebecca Tobin to prompt a proposal from the young man. Marriages between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds weren’t so unusual in this era, and Barney was sure he could make a good living as a motorman in Stillwater.

In a disturbing return letter, however, Rebecca informed Barney that her mother had refused to approve the engagement. In the fall, Rebecca was to continue her studies at a boarding school in St. Paul. Whether it was clearly stated or spelled out “between the lines,” Barney seemed to realize that the relationship was ended.

Even worse, this letter was gleefully uncovered by three of his younger brothers some weeks after he received it, when they opened his suitcase during his visit home. Just what effect this breakup with Rebecca (and the teasing that no doubt went with the letter) had on the young man isn’t clear. Barney was deeply emotional, as the Caseys knew, but for the most part, he concealed his feelings. He continued to circulate generally among the young people of the area and appeared to enjoy the give-and-take of social mixing, even if he remained a bit remote. For a while, he seemed to be attracted to Nell O’Brien (although Nell later married his brother John). But after Rebecca, there was no serious girlfriend apparent in his life again.

In mixed groups, the young man would grin, tell a few stories, and pull out his harmonica or the violin he had learned to play. His brothers, sisters, and friends would laugh with enjoyment. Years earlier, during his first attempts at the fiddle, his brothers had insisted that he practice in the barn. Barney’s playing still wasn’t good, but it was lively, and he knew the latest tunes.

When a new motorman’s position opened with a streetcar line in Appleton, Wisconsin, 230 miles from the farm, Barney took it. He seemed to want to get away, to travel a little farther from the west central areas of Wisconsin that he knew so well. The Appleton job would give him that change of scenery.

By 1890, however, Barney wanted to move closer to his family again. He took a job with a streetcar line in Superior, Wisconsin, about 125 miles from the Caseys’ homestead. After jumping from job to job, Barney had more or less settled into work as a motorman. Streetcars — although quickly catching on from city to city — were still new enough that two or three years of experience still gave him a sort of “seniority” in this line of work.

The Caseys were elated to have Barney closer to home, even if he couldn’t really help with problems there. It was 1891, and American agriculture was suffering from a widespread depression. Drought and insects had devastated crops for several years in succession. When Barney Jr. saw that there were plenty of jobs in Superior, he wrote to his family to tell them of the opportunities.

Barney’s three older brothers, Jim, Maurice, and John, moved to Superior almost at once. The four Casey boys rented a house together, and their sister Ellen temporarily quit her teaching position to care for the house and them. Barney wrote to his parents again and urged them all to come to Superior. Finally, later that same year, the head of the family sold the farm near Burkhardt to a real estate company in exchange for ten city lots in Superior. Before long, Bernard Casey Sr. moved the remaining Caseys, the family belongings, and all of the livestock north to Superior. With a new rented farm and their older sons working at good jobs in the city, the family was soon on better financial ground, so much so that Bernard and Ellen could build a ten-room house to accommodate the family.

The three little girls — Margaret, Grace, and Genevieve — were enrolled in Sacred Heart Church’s parochial school, while the older Casey children began to attend high school. Even John, a year older than Barney, went back to school. Thinking of a profession as a lawyer, he took up the study of law during the evenings. Life was settled and satisfying for the Caseys. Except for Barney.

One autumn afternoon in 1891 he was at work and his streetcar was making its usual run when, as he rounded a corner, the young motorman spotted a cluster of people on the tracks ahead of him. He hit the brakes immediately, and the streetcar screeched to a halt. Barney and his passengers poured out to see what had happened.

Lying on the tracks in a pool of blood was a young woman. A drunken young sailor hovered over her, cursing and clutching a knife dripping with blood. As policemen pulled away the murderer at gunpoint, others lifted the woman’s lifeless body off the tracks. At almost twenty-one years of age, Barney Casey Jr. had lived most of his years on the farm among peaceable people. The dead body and the drunken words of hatred introduced him to something new, something sad and evil. The event was a shock to his psyche. Barney gathered his passengers and went back to work, but, at a deeper level, the young man couldn’t stop brooding about the senseless murder on his tracks.

Of the many sons of Bernard and Ellen Casey, this namesake son was one of the most introspective, and Barney agonized about the direction of his life as never before. Since the broken romance with Rebecca Tobin, he had had few goals for his future. While the family had needed financial help, Barney put concerns about his own future aside. He felt obliged to help his family. But now, the family was secure again, and old questions that had preoccupied him from time to time resurfaced.

Barney began to debate something deep in his heart. He’d done plenty of rhetorical debating in the past. This time, however, the exercise was not for fun. Ellen and Bernard Sr. weren’t sure what was going on inside the handsome young man, but after a long time, Barney himself was finally sure. He went to see Fr. Edmund Sturm, the pastor of Sacred Heart Parish in Superior, to discuss the priesthood. Quietly but quickly, the young streetcar motorman was starting to move his life onto an entirely new track, and in a new direction.

Father Solanus Casey, Revised and Updated

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