Born in 1828 in Sligo, Ireland, Mary Jane Gallagher was the incorrigible child of a priest and a nun. Her father disowned her, when at 16, she took passage on a ship bound for Massachusetts as a nanny.

Married a year later to James Montieth, Mary Jane bore four children. One, her namesake, died as a child. Not long after, James was fatally injured when thrown from a horse.

By 1853, Mary Jane married again, now to James Jackson, a man of the cloth and circuit rider from Illinois. Two more children came of that marriage. Discovering too late that he was a drunkard, she divorced him.

In 1860, now with five children, Mary Jane met Thomas Edwin Campbell of Atchison, Kansas. There, she tied the knot for the third time. Two more children later, and finally with an enduring marriage, they planned to move to Colorado. Thomas went on ahead to claim a homestead while the children and Mary Jane stayed temporarily behind.

When summoned to rejoin her husband in 1862, she joined a 30-unit wagon train going west. One night in Fort Dodge, Kansas, Mary Jane’s oxen wandered off from the wagon train. In retrieving them, she was left behind. Fainting in the oppressive summer heat, Mary Jane was fortunately discovered by two whiskey runners who befriended her and got word to Thomas. According to the legend, he traveled 100 miles eastward to her and then accompanied her to Colorado.

While in Colorado, Thomas had migrated to Denver but then claimed a homestead on Indian Creek in Sedalia. Prior to the family reaching Colorado, he had been helping build a boarding house in downtown Denver. When the family joined him, they lived briefly in a tent nearby. After the boarding house job was completed, he and Mary Jane built a cabin on the Sedalia land.

Thomas was still very much the cowboy, and his life was as wild as the land he had claimed for his family. An 1871 account has him and friend Joseph Harrison chasing horse thieves down in Fort Lyon. When the locals refused to jail the varmints, they sought to return their prisoners to their home turf. On returning to Sedalia, one escaped and was hunted down and killed.

There were also numerous encounters with Native Americans. In one instance, Thomas and a friend narrowly escaped an ambush by hiding in local hayfields. In another, after cutting lumber for railroad ties near Roxborough Park, a friendly Ute named Washington advised them that the local Cheyenne tribe was out for their scalps. They wisely acted on the warning, hiding among rocks in the area. As it happened, fate offered Thomas and his friend a front row seat for the deadly clash between the local tribes that ensued. In the aftermath, while the Native Americans carted off their dead, Thomas and his friend recovered their lumber and rode away.

Local lore has it that Thomas was a fine father to Mary Jane’s surviving children and hero to nearby friends and relatives. Few would argue today that their lives were indeed movie material, emblematic of the “wild, wild west.”

By Joe Gschwendtner; photos courtesy of Sedalia Museum and Gardens and Our Heritage: The People of Douglas County