Glennon-Wiener, a mother of two who is a retired substitute teacher and truant officer in the Worcester Public Schools. Tim Donnelly has become like a member of her family, said Ms. Townsend came out for a visit last year, they left an American flag marker for veterans of the Indian Wars, and a couple of small memory stones, as in Jewish tradition, markers of their visit. None have been left in the past six or seven years, she said. She said she left a note wrapped in plastic for whomever was leaving the feathers. The Custer Battlefield is located on what is now the Crow reservation in Montana. Glennon-Wiener said, as the Crow Indians were scouts for the 7th Cavalry, and the shell was the type the cavalry would have used. “Obviously there was a connection” to Little Bighorn, Ms. Who left the crow feather and shell casing remains a mystery. In later years, before her father passed away in 2007 at the age of 93, she said, they regularly would find on their spring visits something unusual left at the Donnelly family grave: a black crow’s feather inside a rifle shell casing, tucked under the lip of the stone. ARMY, DIED IN CUSTER’S MASSACRE, 1876, BURIED IN S. The inscription reads: “1857 TIMOTHY U.S. Glennon-Wiener would accompany her father on his visits to the cemetery, and noted with interest an inscription on the back of the Donnelly family stone, commemorating Miss Donnelly’s uncle. Glennon would bring flowers to the Donnelly family grave at Holy Rosary Cemetery in Spencer. Miss Donnelly was a mentor of his and became almost like a member of the family.Īfter Miss Donnelly passed away, Mr. She said her late father, Leo Glennon, a Worcester school teacher, became good friends with a teaching colleague, Mary Donnelly, at the old Elizabeth Street School. Glennon-Wiener explained how she came to be interested in Timothy Donnelly’s story. Two from Worcester County died at the Little Bighorn, she said. He was one of 268 officers, men and scouts of Custer’s 7th cavalry killed June 25-26 in the brutal engagement by the Little Bighorn River in the Montana Territory with Lakota (Sioux), Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors led by Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Donnelly strikes a cocky, devil-may-care pose, his kepi tipped back, a cheroot in his mouth. In a photograph taken not long before the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, a mustachioed Pvt. She said she imagines him responding to a Pony Express-style recruiting poster seeking men who could ride for cavalry service out West. He was born in 1857 in Darlington, England, the first of 11 children born to John and Ann (McGuire) Donnelly, Irish Catholics who moved first to England in the years following the Great Famine, and then to the United States, settling in Spencer, where John Donnelly was a supervisor in a wire mill.Īt 18, apparently looking to avoid the need for parental permission, Tim Donnelly added three years to his age when he signed his cavalry enlistment papers in Boston in 1875, Ms. They have done their research in collaboration with a website, Men With Custer UK, created by historian Peter Russell as a biographical resource on the men born in the British Isles who fought at the Little Bighorn. Townsend, a military re-enactor, is from Darlington in County Durham, England, where Timothy Donnelly was born. Donnelly, “I Ride with the 7th,” currently in the editing stages.Ī shared interest in Custer’s Last Stand led to their serendipitous meeting on the internet. Glennon-Weiner and a fellow history buff from England, Patrick Townsend, have partnered on a novel about Pvt. “Custer has met with a fearful disaster,” reported the dispatch from a Helena, Mont., correspondent carried on the front page of the Worcester Evening Gazette on July 6, 1876. News of the massacre in the Montana Territory, reaching the East two weeks after the event, cast a pall over the grand Centennial Exposition that had opened on Independence Day in Philadelphia. On July 4, 1876, the United States, a brash, growing young nation a decade removed from civil war, was marking its 100th birthday. And he did - it just wasn’t the one he thought.” He thought he was going on some big adventure. “This was a kid who left home having hopes and dreams. “I think he was very arrogant and got all of these people killed. “This kid along with so many other people died - for what?” says Patricia Glennon-Wiener, of Worcester, an amateur historian and genealogist who has researched Pvt. He was one of two cavalrymen from Worcester County to die at Custer’s Last Stand. George Armstrong Custer in the epic battle June 25-26, 1876. Donnelly had lied about his age on his enlistment papers the year before, and may have been the youngest member of the U.S. Timothy Donnelly of Spencer was just 19 when the armed might of the Sioux Nation descended upon him 142 years ago at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
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