Colorado

I have tended to pay more attention to those Ommannies who remained on the eastern side of the Atlantic (or went further east still) than those who drifted in the other direction. As anyone who has googled the name will know, however, there are certainly Ommannies in North America. This is the partial story of one of the earliest of them. 

Arthur Ross Ommanney was born on 14 May 1854 in Surrey. In 1872, at the age of 17, he arrived in the USA, seemingly on his own. What was he doing there?

I had no real leads until I identified him as the ‘young Ommanney’ (no first name given) who features in the journal published by Allayne Beaumont Legard under the name Colorado (1872).  You can find a copy online at https://archive.org/details/colorado00lega

 Legard was an Englishman who was serving in the army in Canada when he decided to embark on a three-month trip to Colorado. He arrived in New York in March 1872 intending to meet a friend, only referred to as ‘HPB’ in the journal but actualy Harry (later Sir Harry) Paul Burrard. On arrival, though, he found not Burrard but a stack of letters from him. Legard tracked Burrard down to St John, New Brunswick, where Burrard was supposedly looking after the 17-year old Arthur Ommanney (‘I all by myself, HPB positively declining coming even as far as New York, and saying that he had sent young  Ommanney, who had been entrusted to his care, on to Denver by himself… There is a beautiful mammoth hotel at St. John now, which is most reasonable in its charges. I, however, left it, and took up my quarters at a boarding house with young Ommanney, who had been entrusted by his confiding parents to the care of H.P.B. Had many and long talks with H.P.B. but failed to impress upon him that his conduct was in any way strange or different from what it should have been…’)

HPB (who was in St John to get married) somehow palmed Arthur off onto Legard permanently, and the pair then travelled on to Colorado.

The question is how Arthur had come to find himself alone in the US at that age. So far as we know, his parents were living in peaceful retirement in Putney.

They had an eventful trip to Colorado:

Left Denver at 7am on horseback…When we got in every atom of skin was blisterd off our faces, and Ommanney was nearly snow blind…

Ommanney went bull whacking to get a sack of flour, and encountered a ditch and a surly Yank. The former he had some difficulty in getting over. The latter utterly floored him, for seeing that he was new at work, with Yankee generosity stubbornly ignored the idea of helping him. He pointed out the bag of flour, and then collected his family to witness his (Ommanney’s) frantic struggles to get it to the waggon, while he indulged in sneering and vulgar remarks upon once having been an English gentleman himself, and the necessity of being able to work hard in this country. Ommanney, however, got the flour on the waggon and safe home…

Once in Colorado, Legard bought a 320-acre property in the Wet Moutain valley in Custer County, near Rosita. This he left in Ommanney’s hands when he returned to New York and embarked for Southampton in June 1872. (‘Got power of attorney correctly fixed up for Ommanney to act for me, and deposited it at the bank… Sorry to leave Ommanney to such a lonely occupation, but I think he really likes it. He is a good lad…’)

We do not know what happened to Arthur directly after that, but around 1880 he married Maria Wright. They had six children, the first born in Colorado in 1880. In 1890 there is a record of the family arriving back in the US after a transatlantic voyage from Glasgow. They were divorced in 1900 at Denver.

On 14 May 1907 married a Norwegian, Bertha Aandahl, and they had children.

By 1910 he was a chicken farmer at San Bernardino, California. In 1920 he was a miner living at Seattle. Arthur died on 1 March 1925 at Seattle.