July 31, 1950-The Shawnee Herald-Guthrie, Ok.-After resting thirty-one years in a coffinless grave, the bones of Pat Hennessey, the Irish hero from whom the town of Hennessey, Oklahoma takes its name, have been disinterred, placed in a casket and buried in a park in the edge of the town. The pile or rough stones, gathered and piled over his grave by cowboys, still mark his resting place, and is now surrounded by an imposing railing built by the workmen of the Hennessey Relief Corps. For several years the grave of Pat Hennessey has been in the edge of a wagon road. The town council of Hennessey recently provided for the digging up of the bones of the Indian fighter and moved them to a place where they would be undisturbed.
Pat Hennessey was killed by a tribe of Cheyenne and Arapaho during the outbreak of 1874. He was an army freighter and traveled back and forth between Caldwell, Kansas and Fort Reno, in old Oklahoma. He well knew of the angers of carrying supplies across country, but he was a typical Irishman and absolutely fearless.
One day in the spring of 1874 he announced that he was about to start from Caldwell with a load of oats, which was needed at the fort. It was well known the tribes of the Southwest were on the warpath, and people warned him against such a hazardous trip at that time.
"It's not me to be a shirkin' my duty now," declared Hennessey and protests were of no avail.
At Caldwell there was a youth from Boston, out in the West to regain his health. Pat Hennessey was surprised himself when the Boston youth announced that he was going to make the trip with him. The army freighter protested, but the Boston lad said he had not long to live anyway, and that he wanted to have one fight at least with Indians during his lifetime.
Sixty miles north of Fort Reno, Hennessey, the Boston youth, whose name has been forgotten, and one other person with the wagons were warned that the Indians were holding the ford at Turkey Creek, a few miles north of where it emptied into the Cimarron, but the freighter refused to heed the warning.
The details of the fight are not known, for all three of the party was killed. That it was a long and desperate one is certain. Travelers the next day found the body of Hennessey, where it had been piled with the ruins of the wagon and partially burned. His rifle, which the Indians had not taken and which lay beside him, showed that a bullet had lodged in a heated barrel. Near the place where the front wheel had stood was a pile of more than 150 cartridges of different caliber, which showed all three men had taken part in the battle.
Two days afterward, when the soldiers from Fort Reno had driven the Indians back to the westward, W. E. Malaley, then in the employ of the Government, found and gave the body of Hennessey a burial as best he could with an ax and his hands for a shovel. He said that after Hennessey's gun had become useless he must have stood and fought them single handed, for his body had been pierced by a dozen arrows. More than twenty of the Indians' horses had been killed. How many Indians is not known, for their bodies were carried away by tribesmen.
For years before the Strip was opened cowboys passing up and down the trail carried stones and laid them at the head of his grave, and when the town of Hennessey was located fifteen years after the death of the Irish army fighter, the monument of rough stones stood fifteen feet high. On one of the stones was roughly chiseled the letters: "P. H."
That the particular grave over which the monument stood was that of Pat Hennessey and not that of the Boston boy or his companion has been disputed, but that is traditional, and it will go down so in history.
But a handful of bones were found in the shallow grave when it was opened. With them were a decayed spoke and a scrap of iron, the part of a wagon wheel. The relics of one of the bloodiest Indian fights will now without doubt remain in quiet as one of the oldest historic landmarks of Oklahoma.
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