In Memoriam

Floyd A. O’Neil, 1927–2018

The Utah and western history communities lost one of their most influential, generous, and colorful figures when Dr. Floyd A. O’Neil passed away at his Salt Lake City home on April 18, 2018. In his nearly ninety-one years of life, and in a career that spanned over half a century at the University of Utah’s American West Center, Floyd taught Utah and Native American history, mentored generations of graduate students, and helped shape the practice of public history in the West. At the time of his death, he was director emeritus of the American West Center, professor emeritus of history at the University of Utah, and a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society. His many honors included the Award of Merit and an Honorary Lifetime Membership in the Western History Association. In 2001, the Native Scholars group of that same organization honored him with a lifetime achievement award for his mentorship. Even more important to Floyd were the numerous awards and recognitions he received from Native peoples, including the Ute Indian Tribe, the Pueblo of Zuni, and the Intertribal Council of Nevada.

Born in the Uinta Basin on July 14, 1927, Floyd spent his childhood on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation. His earliest playmates and oldest friends were his Ute schoolmates. He sustained many of those friendships through the course of his life, and his early experiences engendered a deep interest in the history of Native peoples and of the Utes in particular. In Floyd’s early teens, the O’Neil family moved to Carbon County where his father and brothers worked in the coal mines. Serious health issues kept Floyd from following them into the mines and instead he turned to a life in education. After taking a degree (he always insisted that degrees were earned or “taken,” not granted or received!) at the University of Utah in 1957, he taught high school for a time before returning to the university for graduate studies in the mid-1960s. It was there that he found his life’s work. In 1967, due to his lifelong association with the Ute people and his knowledge of Native history, Floyd was recruited to work at the American West Center on the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project. He would remain central to the life of the center, building and sustaining it for the next fifty-one years. He completed his PhD in 1973 and went on to serve as the center’s director from 1986 until his nominal “retirement” in 1996. In truth, Floyd could never retire. As director emeritus he remained vital to the center and to the university’s relationship with Utah’s Native peoples.

Floyd devoted his career to putting history to work for the benefit of the West’s diverse communities. The Duke Oral History Project led to work with dozens of tribal nations across the American West. Floyd oversaw the collection of thousands of oral histories, coordinated the creation of tribal archives, facilitated the preparation of major land claims cases, and co-authored or directed the writing of twenty-six tribal histories. In these projects Floyd pioneered an innovative approach. Working directly with tribal members as authors, he essentially mobilized the resources of a research university to help Native peoples tell their own histories. He also ensured that tribes would hold the copyright to their published histories. Patricia Albers, the noted anthropologist who succeeded Floyd as the center’s director, recalls his “unswerving dedication to Native American history and the importance of doing it through oral history.” She also remembers him as “one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing in my lifetime.” Native history was just one part of Floyd’s work. Under his care and attention, the American West Center led the way in documenting and interpreting the histories of Utah’s ethnic and minority communities, including its Japanese American and Latinx communities. Indeed, in the words of Will Bagley, “Floyd was the most public of public historians.” Along the way he also published influential articles and co-edited important collections of essays, including 1985’s Churchmen and the Western Indians. His final publication, co-authored with his wife Shauna, “The Park City to Fort Thornburgh Road,” appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly.

In addition to scholarship, Floyd was a beloved and respected teacher. Although he never held a regular appointment in the university’s history department, his Utah and American Indian history courses were consistently among the department’s most heavily subscribed and highly rated courses. His enthusiasm, humor, and often blunt-spoken ways resonated with students. That talent in the classroom was apparent even is his early days teaching high school in Price and Salt Lake City. Floyd’s passion for history and generous nature stuck with his students, so much so that in the summer of 2017 “Mr. O’Neil” was the guest of honor at a reunion of the Carbon High School Class of 1962.

I was one of many whose lives were shaped by Floyd’s friendship and mentorship. In 1987, I came to the University of Utah to study under the tutelage of Richard White. At one of our first meetings Richard told me to go up to the American West Center and introduce myself to Floyd. It was a life-changing event. For the next thirty-one years Floyd was a constant in my life. He hired me to work at the center, first during summers and then year-round, and he offered advice and countless lunches, unwavering friendship and support during hard times, and endless “encouragement” (“dissertate damn you!” or “get your damned union card!”) while I struggled to write my dissertation. But I was not alone. Floyd impacted the lives of so many who went on to interpret Utah and the West’s history, including Richard White, Patty Limerick, Greg Thompson, Pat Albers, Kathryn MacKay, David Rich Lewis, Laura Bayer, Will Bagley, and Phil Notarianni, to name but a few.

Put simply, those who met Floyd could never forget him. He was a unique combination of homespun aphorisms and sophisticated interests. He regularly reminded graduate students with grand, amorphous theories that they should never try to “stretch a rat’s ass over a rain barrel,” and he devoted his life to studying the history of his home state and region. Yet he was equally well read in world history and literature. He cherished trips to Europe with Shauna and the French cuisine he first enjoyed in his mother’s kitchen. Once as a young man he rode the train and hitchhiked from Price to Salt Lake City to see the 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet starring Lawrence Olivier. Richard White, one of the most honored and respected historians of his generation, sums up Floyd best: “There are only two people I have met in my life whom I could not describe by comparing them to someone else. One was Floyd. He was sui generis. He came from a West that is nearly gone now, but he was never a relict. He was as shrewd an observer and as incisive and hilarious a recorder of the world around him as anyone I knew. He taught me much of what I know about the West. I will miss him until the day I die, but I also cannot think of him without smiling.”

—Gregory E. Smoak American West Center University of Utah