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Don Maguire was one of the most colorful, yet significant, figures in Utah history. As a peddler in the mining camps and Indian reservations of Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona, Mexico, Idaho, and Montana, Maguire was the first to utilize the expanding transcontinental railroad system in establishing a series of supply points to increase and diversify his inventories. As an amateur archeologist, Maguire assembled a vast collection of Indian and pioneer artifacts, many of which found their way eventually to the Temple Square Museum in Salt Lake City. As a mining engineer and entrepreneur, Maguire was less successful -- in fact, he was accused of swindling wealthy Eastern investors on an unproductive mine in Weber Canyon -- but he was a knowledgeable mineralogist and possessed an important collection of mineralogical specimens from Utah. Finally, Maguire was a skilled writer who published several essays and stories and left many more, including an autobiographical account of his trading expeditions, unpublished at his death.
Dominick Maguire was born 13 June 1852 at St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to Irish immigrant parents, John and Sarah Conwell Maguire. Maguire had two older brothers, Charles and John, both of whom were also peddlers, and it is likely that their father had followed that line of work as well. At some time in the early 1870s, the Maguire family followed the transcontinental railroad to Ogden, Utah. They were Catholics rather than Mormons, and evidently settled in Ogden for business purposes, because it was close to fertile Western trading opportunities and supplies could reach them easily from either East or West.
Don Maguire did not join his family in Ogden until 1876. His whereabouts immediately prior to that date are somewhat obscure. He mentions having attended a Franciscan school in California and being engaged in business in that state, and we know that in 1875 he and a companion traveled throughout Europe and North Africa, as both students and traders. The North African trading expedition was not profitable, and Maguire began writing to friends in the American West to inquire about trading opportunities and methods. It was their encouraging responses that brought him back to the United States and eventually to Ogden, Utah in October 1876.
Maguire remained with his family in Ogden only two weeks before beginning a series of four trading expeditions, three of which took him into the American Southwest and Mexico, and one into Idaho and Montana. Maguire returned to Montana in either 1881 or 1885 (sources conflict regarding the date) to marry Agatha B. Wells who, like Maguire, was born in this country to Irish immigrant parents. They had a son, Charles, in 1885, and by the end of the century they had taken up residence at 549 25th Street in Ogden where they would spend the rest of their lives in a Victorian duplex which has subsequently been placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
By the turn of the century Maguire was devoting most of his time to mining in the Ogden area, and his name turns up repeatedly in the
Maguire's activities once again become obscure until the late 1920s. From what we know of his last years, we may assume that he spent his time in archeological investigations and mining exploration as well as writing. He had done very well in his trading ventures, and evidently lived on that money and fees for mining work. Two tragedies marred his life in the 1920s: his wife died in 1927, and a fire at his home in 1929 destroyed many of his archeological finds and manuscripts.
We know a great deal about the last years of his life because he met the printer, historian, and archeologist Charles Kelly in the fall of 1929 and carried on frequent correspondence with him which is located in the Utah State Historical Society's Charles Kelly Papers. From 1929 until his death as a result of a car accident on 9 January 1933, Maguire and Kelly met frequently to visit and discuss historic and prehistoric sites. Maguire provided Kelly with a constant stream of advice, leads for investigation, and reports of his own travels many years previously which probably aided Kelly significantly in preparation of his many books and articles. As he grew older, Maguire became less mobile and spent increasing portions of his time working with stenographers who helped him transcribe and edit his memoirs and stories.
The Don Maguire papers were given to the Utah State Historical Society by Maguire's son Charles, who was contacted by John James following a suggestion by Charles Kelly. A reference in the Charles Kelly papers indicates that the Don Maguire collection as presently constituted represents only a small fraction of the manuscripts originally held by Maguire. The 1929 fire may have destroyed a large amount of Maguire's papers (the diary of 1876-1878 in the collection shows scorching around the edges and may have been rescued from the fire in the nick of time). Surviving family members who might have had other papers appear to have dispersed or died.
Following two folders of correspondence, the first of which concerns the acquisition of the collection by the Utah State Historical Society and the second of which concerns Maguire's discovery of a chlorutahlite deposit, the first item of real significance is the diary mentioned above. It is the most immediate primary source for Maguire's Arizona trading expeditions, for it was evidently carried by Maguire and written in occasionally during the trips. Internal evidence suggests, though, that Maguire's entries were sporadic and often designed to catch up on long periods when he had written nothing. The entries, for example are not always in chronological order: he seems to have begun writing in the midst of the book, then filled other entries in at the beginning. The diary is interesting and significant because it records different events and in different ways than Maguire reported them several years later in his formal account of "The Arizona Expeditions," and the diary is the only source extant for Maguire's expedition into Idaho and Montana. The diary itself is extremely fragile, showing both water and fire damage. Some pages were partially stuck together and all are very brittle. The book was cleaned and the pages separated as carefully as possible and the diary transcribed. The original was then removed for safekeeping, but may be examined by special permission of the Curator of Manuscripts.
The next series in the collection is Maguire's formal narrative of his Arizona expeditions which he prepared in the early 1880s and had typewritten shortly before his death. The narrative, which runs to about six hundred pages, is both exciting and historically significant. It contains some of the earliest descriptions of many mining towns and settlements in the Southwest, it describes Maguire's meetings with a number of important figures in Western history, including Orrin Porter Rockwell, Lot Smith, John C. Fremont (his meeting with Jim Bridger in the Arizona desert is recorded in his diary, but is curiously missing from the prepared account). Perhaps most significantly, it describes his trading techniques (including the sale of condemned army muskets to Indians), identifying Maguire as the first American Indian trader in Arizona and the first to exploit the developing railroad network as a supply source. Finally, it gives financial summaries and price lists, which reveal that his markups, which reach as high as one thousand percent, produced very great profits.
Both the diary and the formal narrative contain eloquent testimony to Maguire's lifelong interest in American prehistory, an interest that also dominates the correspondence of Charles Kelly. Maguire is an excellent example of the kind of person who characterized most archeological work before the fairly recent development of the profession. Artifacts, in Maguire's view, were exploitable resources that could be freely taken, collected, or sold by whomever discovered them. Maguire's writings are full of speculation regarding the historical context of the artifacts he found, but he had little conception of systematic scientific work that would consider the artifacts as related objects within an archeological setting. He was, in short, something of a curio hunter. In addition, he held some very fanciful theories regarding the people who had left the artifacts. He considered, for example, the prehistoric ruins as far north as Paragonah to be Aztec cities, and regarded a certain site in the desert west of Ogden to be an ancient city which he named "Kublik."
An essay of Maguire's entitled "Chlorutahlite Mining in Utah" is next, then the remainder of the collection consists of short stories. The stories occur in two major collections, "Gold and Silver Tales," and "Tales of the Wide West," with several miscellaneous stories placed at the end. "The Arizona Expeditions" contains several stories also, interspersed throughout the narrative as a story within a story in the manner of the
Dominick Maguire Papers, 1876-1933, Utah State Historical Society.
Donated by Charles Maguire
Manuscript diary water and fire damaged. Use by special permission only.
The Dominick Maguire Papers are the physical property of the Utah Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah. Literary rights, including copyright, may belong to the authors or their heirs and assigns. Please contact the Historical Society for information regarding specific use of this collection.
The Charles Kelly Collection, Mss B 114, USHS - contains letters from Don Maguire, 1929-1932