Great-Uncle John was twice a hero
News | Published on June 3, 2025 at 5:46pm GMT+0000 | Author: Tucker Henderson
0By Tom Hintgen
Otter Tail County Correspondent
On Memorial Day weekend this writer visited the gravesite of Tom Hintgen’s Great-Uncle John McAuliffe at Holy Cross Cemetery in north Fargo. He served his country in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and 1899. To family members he is a hero, and there’s another story that makes him twice a hero.
After the war John, 22, worked at the Daly-West mine near Park City, Utah. A mine explosion took place and he went inside to help rescue fellow miners but died when a second explosion took place. The story of his heroic but fatal effort in July 1902, just short of his 23rd birthday, was passed on from one McAuliffe family generation to the next.
I t was a sad day when John, Sr., and his wife, Mary, had to bury their son, the youngest of nine children, at Holy Cross Cemetery following the funeral at the Catholic cathedral in Fargo. John, Sr. died seven years later, in 1909, and the mother of John, Jr., died in 1916. A sister of John, Jr., was Tom Hintgen’s grandmother, Nora, who is buried at St. Otto’s Cemetery in Fergus Falls.
John, born in 1879, was part of a large Irish family that first farmed near Mapleton, southwest of Fargo, during the 1880s in Dakota Territory. After North Dakota became a state, in 1889, John’s father, John, Sr., ran a feed store in Fargo
The Spanish-American War was a conflict that started in 1898 between the United States and Spain, triggered by tensions over Cuba and the sinking of the USS Maine. The war resulted in the United States acquiring Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines.
In May 1898 John enlisted in Company B of the First North Dakota Infantry. They were with military forces in Cuba and later were transferred to the Philippines. John served in the military until September 1899.
Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, part of the First United States Volunteer Calvary, gained fame during the Spanish-American War in Cuba for their role in the Battle of San Juan Hill. Roosevelt, who a short time later became president of the United States, had previously lived as a rancher near Medora in what was then Dakota Territory.
Whenever this writer hears reference to the Spanish-American War, two names always come to mind: Theodore Roosevelt and John McAuliffe.