Capt. Francis O'Neill
By Michael O’Malley
Biography
Daniel Francis O’Neill lived a remarkable life by any standard. He was born in Tralibane, near the town of Bantry in Cork, in 1847. The youngest son of a “strong farmer” family of some means, he was educated in the National Schools. He excelled at school, especially at mathematics, and by his early teens served as a classroom monitor and eventually even taught some classes himself. His family wanted him to become a priest, but he had a thirst for adventure and Ireland offered very limited opportunities, so at seventeen, with a flute and a small stack of books, he shipped as a cabin boy on an English merchant vessel.He spent four years at sea, circling the globe once and enduring shipwreck on a desert island the South pacific. He made lengthy stays in Yokohama, Honolulu, New York and California, where he spent months herding sheep. He lived for a year on the prairie in Edina, Missouri, teaching mathematics and attending weekly barn dances. While living in Edina he reconnected with Anna Rogers, a young woman he had met while working on an emigrant ship. They married in 1871 and moved to Chicago, settling in the heavily Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport.
Working first in unskilled labor jobs and then as a clerk, O’Neill joined the police force in 1873. O’Neill began a steady rise through the ranks, based on a combination of education, coolness under pressure, and the help of aldermen, judges, and political allies from the city’s business class. In 1901 Mayor Carter Harrison II appointed him General Superintendent of Police: he served two full terms and part of a third.
Police work was rough, and exposed officers to the worst side of human behavior. He navigated saloons and backroom politics; he got into a street brawl with a notoriously thuggish alderman that put him on the front pages, and he pulled bodies from the wreckage of the Iroquois theater fire, which killed 600 people. He worked on behalf of the city’s business class to break strikes organized by his fellow Irish Americans, and defended harsh interrogation methods. But he also promoted African American officers, and strongly supported reforming the police department on the basis of merit rather than political connections.
Throughout his police career O’Neill played Irish music, with his fellow officers and Chicago’s large Irish community. More than once he got a good musician a job on the force. O’Neill especially loved the dance music of Ireland, the instrumental tunes he had heard growing up in Cork. He began systematically collecting tunes in the 1890s, working with a network of people, especially Edward Cronin and James O’Neill, who could read and write music fluently. By 1901 he had seven large notebooks full of tunes, many heard on the streets of Chicago, others learned from published collections.
In 1903 he published his first book, O’Neill’s Music of Ireland, which included almost 2000 songs, airs and dance tunes. In 1907, after he retired, he refined that collection down to 1001 tunes in the Dance Music Of Ireland. O’Neil wrote two large and unique histories of Irish music and musicians. The books put him in an international community of folklorists and scholars. He published his last book in 1924, but continued to write occasional pieces on Irish music for Irish and American audiences until his death in 1936, at age 87.
Book Recipients
Capt. Francis O'Neill sent copies of multiple books to a number of people - collaborators, friends, etc. Here are a few prominent figures who received multiple copies.Selena O'Neill
Irish Literary Scene
Clergy
