HON. O. J. SALISBURY.

 

            MR. SALISBURY was born and educated on the shore of Lake Erie in New York, a few miles from Buffalo. He was early tossed on the frontier, and was first known in the west as a contractor on the Union Pacific road when that road was under construction.

            When the Star Route Stage company was organized by his brother Monroe and J. T. Gilmer, he was the office partner and had the direction of the details of the company. It was he who had to see that the stages ran on time, that the stock had to be at the right place at the right moment, that the horses were fed and the drivers fed and paid. This he had the administrative ability to perform apparently without effort, though he was carrying in his mind day and night the whole machinery of the business, which was extended over half a dozen states. His work was that of a commander who handles the details of half a dozen armies, and on him rested the responsibility of making no mistakes.

            He was stationed for a time at Deadwood; there with clear judgment he secured mining interests which are still paying steady dividends ; and when the staging was crowded out by the encroaching locomotive, he went to Bayhorse, Idaho, securing the great mine there. Without much previous knowledge in the reduction of rebellious ores, he built smelters and in two years made another fortune.

            What that means no one who has not been through a like ordeal and won out knows.

            The vigilance required, the details to be anticipated and provided for ; the ground to be studied and its faults met ; the reserve strength needed to work when other tired men are asleep ; the patience and the nerve to wear a smiling face before employees when the burden reaches almost to the breaking point; to meet and oust all the guards which nature has stationed to conceal and hold her treasures, until the very mountains are melted into obedience and the stars above smile ap-

HON. O. J. SALISBURY. 347

proval ; then to find and conquer the rebellious elements which are hidden in the ores ; to do these things when a hundred miles from any transportation save the crudest, and to do them in a way that will leave a profit, are problems that a thousand men have failed to solve to every one man who has succeeded.

            Mr. Salisbury had the business training to meet this, but the more difficult part he was obliged to learn while the work audits inexorable demands were in progress. He succeeded ; and while it was going on an insidious disease was preying upon his vitality in a form which the physicians could not arrest, and which in a few months would have killed him, except that the accidental coming of a great specialist from abroad and who was taken to see Mr. Salisbury by his local physician, saved his life. This specialist, after a long practice in a great foreign city had never seen but one similar case. The resolution which under such a weight bore up Mr. Salisbury until he made the great business a success, showed the nerve that carried on that fight.

            He bought a home in Salt Lake City in the eighties and lived all the rest of his life there. He was active in politics from the first ; he did more to build up his party than perhaps any other man. He was long national committeeman and as such perfected the organization of his party, and by the will of his party would have been elected United States senator, had not a fatal illness come upon him.

            In private life he was a quiet but most genial gentleman ; in his home a most devoted husband and father and as winsome a host as ever received a friend under his roof.

            He had great plans for Utah when his honorable ambition should be gratified, but it was not to be.

            His summons came too early, and the great grief is that when his friends sorrowingly laid him at rest, not one in a hundred of them had any comprehension of how strong and true and high-souled was the man they were saying their farewells to.