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,
