Samuel O'Connell was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1850, the son of Samuel and Mary O'Connell. At the end of the Civil War he went to work as a clerk for Brigadier General Myers. In 1869 he began working as a bookkeeper for A.C. Leighton in Omaha, Neb. He also served as a bookkeeper on the Yellowstone Expedition of 1873 and the Black Hills Expedition of 1875. He served as a bookkeeper for Leighton and Jordan, which operated the Juneaux trading post at the junction of Frenchman Creek with the Milk River. O'Connell left the service of the post in 1876. He built a hotel in Miles City which burned in 1883, and later had a ranch and hotel near Rosebud, Montana.
Letter, written by Samuel O’Connell to Frederick Linfield, in Bozeman, Montana, that describes the arrest of the Lakota warrior Rain-in-the-Face by Captain Thomas Custer in 1874. In the letter, O’Connell also points out inaccuracies of an accompanying newspaper clipping regarding the topic.
This collection is open for research.
An original letter from Samuel O'Connell of Rosebud, Montana was transferred to Special Collections in 1977 from Collection 172 and assigned collection number 1184.
This collection was processed 2017 July 12