Father Solanus Casey, Revised and Updated. Catherine Odell
pray it quietly.
After one particularly exhausting day, Barney, aching with muscle strain and fatigue, headed toward bed with the thought that he might skip his Rosary just for that night. The Casey house was growing quiet. His brothers were already in bed and the teenage Barney wanted only to go to sleep. Instead, he dropped to his knees. He knelt upright, not leaning on the bed. He had seen his mother and sister Ellen pray that way as long as he could remember.
Wishing to keep the commitment to this prayer, Barney had determined to recite at least one decade of the Rosary. To his surprise the weariness left him, and he completed the full five decades. Later that night, he dreamed that he was hanging over a huge pit with flames licking up toward him. Desperately, he looked around to see a way out. Finally, he realized that a large rosary was dangling just above his head. In the shadowy reality of dreams, he grabbed onto it and suddenly felt secure. The dream impressed the boy greatly.
This Casey farm at Hudson was much larger than the Trimbelle property had been. Barney’s older brothers, Jim and John, began to share the heavier farming jobs with their father. In turn, Barney “inherited” some of the chores his older brothers had always done. Some, he relished. He was constantly devising ingenious ways to snare prairie chickens or rabbits. It was also Barney who knew right where the wild berries were and where to get the wild hops his mother needed for yeast.
When eighteen-year-old Jim got a new rifle, Barney began to shadow him and showed a keen interest in hunting. Since small game and even an occasional deer helped to feed the large Casey clan, hunting was serious business, not merely sport. Eventually, Jim turned his rifle over more and more to Barney who went hunting regularly with a friend, Chris Adams. He became a good shot and could typically be counted upon to bag rabbits, wild ducks, geese, or prairie chickens. With perhaps a bit less enthusiasm, he also chopped wood, weeded the garden, looked for eggs the chickens laid, and fed and watered the stock.
By the time he was fourteen, Barney was slender, strong, and wiry. He had not yet completed his elementary schooling. That was not unusual in agricultural communities where schooling had to follow a different sort of schedule. Fields had to be planted in the spring and crops harvested when the time was right. Children, especially the boys, were needed to help. Schooling had to conform around the needs of agriculture.
Until the 1880s, wheat was the principal crop for Wisconsin farmers such as Bernard Casey Sr. Within that decade, however, the soil on many farms was becoming depleted through the continual use of fields for wheat. Plagues of chinch bugs began to threaten wheat’s prominence. Farm prices were falling and had been falling for some time. To add to the farmers’ grief, their hard times were arriving at a time when American industry was booming and manufactured goods were becoming more expensive.
Barney Jr. gradually became aware that the usual family petitions for good crops carried a tone of greater and greater need. Clearly, his father was increasingly concerned about the situation. During the later months of 1882, a special petition was added to the Caseys’ night prayer, asking the Lord to spare the crops from total disaster.
Although these months were difficult, a day would occasionally come along to provide Barney with excitement and fun. That compensated for his heavy load of responsibilities.
On one particular day, while out in the fields with three of their younger brothers, fifteen-year-old Barney and fourteen-year-old Pat suddenly froze in their tracks. Rover, the family dog, bounded into view, excited and bleeding from a slash down his shoulder. Barney and Pat understood what all the fuss was about when they heard a wildcat snarling from a tree not far from where they stood. Brave Rover had tangled with the cat and been cut up for his efforts.
Barney knew that there was no way to keep Rover from going at it again. Having a wildcat so close to the house and smaller children was dangerous. Without his rifle, he’d have to bag the cat some other way. “Go on up to the top of the bank and stay up there,” Barney warned his two little brothers. He and Pat would handle the cat with Rover’s help.
Immediately, Rover returned to snap at the cat. The cat leapt down on him, and dog and wildcat tumbled over and over. Pat picked up a big stick with which to hit the cat, while Barney circled to within two feet of the scrapping animals and cautiously lifted a large rock. Holding it poised, he waited for Rover to move away from the cat. At just the right moment, Barney heaved the rock and hit the cat squarely on the head. The wildcat dropped dead where it was. The little boys whooped from the top of the bank and came running down to their brave brothers.
The two older Casey boys found some vines and a tree branch and strung the dead animal from it. Thinking perhaps of Natty Bumppo, the frontier woodsman they had “met” in the books of James Fenimore Cooper, the bigger boys proudly carried the cat home. There was a bounty on wildcats, so Barney and Pat knew that the carcass would bring a needed ten dollars into family coffers. But on the way home, Barney thought of a way to also get some fun out of the dead cat.
A little later, a ferocious wildcat was “ready to spring” just outside the family home. Propped up just a bit, the animal 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