Father Solanus Casey, Revised and Updated. Catherine Odell
Barney may also have been paying some attention to family prayer, a nightly custom. Slowly, he was learning to recognize certain prayers, including the prayers of the Rosary. Though he would not have understood the meaning of such a prayer, little Barney even heard the older Caseys ask “for a happy death and a favorable judgment.” During these evening prayers, the Casey toddlers undoubtedly moved around the table from the laps of father and mother. One can imagine the impression becoming fixed in the consciousness of the children: Prayer was talking. Adults talked a lot. Adults talked to one another and to children. Prayer was simply talking to an unseen God.
Children living on the land in the last quarter of the nineteenth century would have had no doubt about the reality of unseen powers. Summer storms, winter whiteouts, blazing prairie fires, abundant harvests, the flowing river nearby — all these things were the result of great powers that could not be comprehended, though their work could be seen. And, in the Casey home, the God spoken to was regarded as a God who loved his children, just as Bernard and Ellen loved their own.
This daily routine included many intentions for prayer. Like other nineteenth-century pioneers, the Caseys were aware of their need for “daily bread.” Practically, it was fashioned from the wheat and other crops they raised and harvested. But they understood that behind that “bread” was also a merciful Father, the Creator who gave growth to the wheat in the first place. Therefore, in the Casey cabin, prayers were recited for rain; for protection from ravaging insects, blights, or molds; and for dry days to harvest when the crops were ready. They also prayed to be spared from prairie fires and even for the protection of livestock — chickens, cows, the team of oxen, horses, and pigs. The Caseys never really finished praying, as their needs were many.
Living in western Wisconsin in those days wasn’t easy. Cabins like the one the Caseys were living in were, literally, rough. Logs were unhewn, chinked in between with mud. The cabins were roofed with shakes and floored with rough planks. Furniture was also scanty and crude.
By 1873, Bernard Casey Sr. had begun to set his heart on a larger place since good harvests for several years gave him the chance to save some money. But the main reason he craved more space was that his family was still growing. Since the birth of little Barney in 1870, Patrick had been born March 22, 1872, and a new baby was due in the spring of 1874. The head of the family had discovered a more spacious place for sale not far from his Prescott farm. Before the end of 1873, he bought it and moved his clan and all their belongings to a new homestead in Trimbelle Township, just a bit to the east.
With the family’s move to the new property, three-year-old Barney Junior’s world naturally expanded. The new Trimbelle homestead was close to a river of the same name which flowed into the Mississippi just north of Redwing, Minnesota. This farm had a larger house and was closer to a Catholic church and school.
Little Barney would remember this second place more clearly. The house near Trimbelle, Wisconsin, he estimated later, was about twelve by thirty feet with a partial loft for sleeping. The Casey boys had the run of the loft. Their sisters, far fewer in number, bedded down on one side of a divider on the ground floor. The parents slept on the other side of the divider. Otherwise, the cabin was entirely open, with no other rooms.
Much of the country surrounding the Caseys must have seemed quite rugged. “Wild beasts and rattlesnakes seem to have been the most common cause of such anxiety,” recalled Bernard Casey Jr. later. He was thinking of the worries his parents had about the safety of their children in this Wisconsin wilderness. Once, some of the boys even came face-to-face with a bear that chased them.
Some of the dangers of this area, however, had nothing to do with wild animals.
One summer Sunday in the mid-1870s, a prairie fire licked its way across the grasslands in the direction of the Casey homestead. Black smoke billowed toward the house and was blown ahead by stiff winds. Prairie fires terrorized homesteaders. Houses, barns, and crops were sometimes consumed in an hour’s time.
Barney Sr. and about half of the children were away at church. Since the Casey wagon would carry only about half of his large family to Mass six miles away, the other half remained home and prayed. (Thomas had been born March 11, 1874, Martha on May 5, 1875, Augustine on June 14, 1876, and Leo on March 10, 1878.) On the following Sunday, the children who had remained home the previous Sunday went with their mother while the others stayed home with their father.
As soon as she saw the fire, Ellen gathered up her children, took them out of the house, and huddled with them near a tree in one of the fields. For a while, it looked as though the house would be lost. She told young Ellen, her oldest child, to quickly hoe a firebreak in front of the house and pour holy water along it as a prayer. Though the barn was burned to the ground, the fire stopped short of the house.
Little Barney hid his face in his mother’s skirts to avoid the stifling smell of the smoke. Finally, he heard her nervous breathing change. “Thank God,” she murmured. One of the neighbors had run over to let the hog out of the pen adjacent to the barn. The frantic animal escaped just before the barn exploded into flames. When little Barney’s father and the other children came home at about noon, it was all over. The barn was destroyed, but nothing else, including field crops, was lost.
Life on the frontier had its risks, but it also had compensations. Among them was a wild beauty that all the Casey children remembered long into adulthood when most of them lived in cities.
“How rich [it was] in its variety and abundance of wild flowers and fruits and nuts and berries,” wrote Barney Jr. years later, when he was a priest. “There was a pasture field for cattle as well as deer and other animals.” In apparent curiosity, deer would often stop in twos and threes to watch the strange things being done by the two-legged Caseys as they went about their farming chores.
In 1878, however, a different kind of disaster hit the Caseys. The loss was much more devastating than any loss by prairie fire could have been.
Twelve-year-old Mary Ann, the second daughter, was struck with “black diphtheria.” A highly contagious disease seen often in this era, diphtheria was common in the United States and Western Europe. The upper respiratory system was typically affected, with a thick membrane forming up and down the air passages. Victims — usually children — ran high fevers, had sore throats, and sometimes died when the deadly membrane literally shut down their ability to breathe.
Bernard and Ellen could do little for Mary Ann. She died after struggling for several days for breath. But the tragedy was not over. Within three days of Mary Ann’s death, three-year-old Martha also died in the same way. Two children dead in less than a week! The Caseys were grief-stricken but had little time to mourn their daughters. Several of the boys, including eight-year-old Barney, had also come down with the disease.
Trying to isolate their sick children, the parents hovered over their sons who were struggling to catch their breath. The prayers of the parents were answered. All of the boys recovered, although not without some side effects. Barney was left with injured vocal cords where the membranes had infected his throat. From then on, his voice was weak, somewhat high-pitched, and wispy, even into manhood.
Life continued in the face of losses for frontier families. In the 1880s, more than 20 percent of frontier children died before they reached five years of age. Death was usually due to primitive housing conditions and poor sanitation. And, even though their family still numbered nine children after the death of the girls — and although they believed very firmly that Mary Ann and Martha were with God — the loss always felt sharp for the Caseys. But Bernard Casey Sr. did his best to house and feed his children well. Unlike many farmers, he fed his milk cows over winter and always had a large garden to provide fresh fruits and vegetables.
There was an order to the Casey life. In part, it was set by the seasons and the need to gain a living from the land. In addition, Ellen and Bernard Sr. saw to it that another order, the spiritual order, was clearly visible to their children.
By the early 1880s, the Casey family circle had expanded with more children, apparently crowding the little house to its limits. After the death of the little girls in 1878, Edward was born in July 1879, and Owen was born in January 1881. By the summer of 1882, eleven-year-old Barney was in the older half of