Democratic Sentinel, Volume 2, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 May 1878 — Obituary of a Bonanza King. [ARTICLE]

Obituary of a Bonanza King.

By the death of William Shoney O’Brien, California is minus one rich man, and that is all. The riches are still here, and so the rich man will not be regretted by the community at large. On the contrary, it is possible that some of the wealth that he had accumulated may be distributed, and then his death will be a souroe of good. It is sad that a man with such opportunities as Mr. O’Brien shsuld have died and left behind him no record; that his memory should depend for perpetuity simply upon the amount of money he was able to grasp between his two hands. The height of his ambition was simply to be rich; the most refined of his enjoyments was a game of seven-up in the back room of a saloon. He might have been a philanthropist; he was only a sensualist. He might have left a name that would have been remembered with honor and gratitude for ages, whereas his only epitaph can be, “He was very rich.” But if he did very little good to other people with his money, he took very little enjoyment out of it himself, and California may be thankful that fortune placed wealth in the hands of a man who was not capable of using it for worse purposes than the gratification of mere sensual desires. We may congratulate ourselves that O’Brien, if he did little good, was debarred by nature from doing much harm with his gold. —San Francisco Daily News.