The next author whose life I plan to tackle is Katherine Mary O’Fallon. She was the real-life inspiration behind “Mrs. Mike”, a novel written by Benedict and Nancy Freedman, published in 1947.
I picked the book up at a library giveaway a few years ago and got interested in finding out O’Fallon’s real story: the book is described as a novel, but the Freedmans had stated that it was based on the real life of Katherine Mary Flannigan, whom they had met and interviewed in 1945.
The book is a romantic tale of a young Irish-American, Kathy, who travels to western Canada in 1907, meets and quickly marries the dashing Mountie, Sgt. Mike Flannigan, and moves with him to the remote northern Canadian communities, where they face both tragedy and triumph. The book was a massive best seller and the subject of a film adaptation in 1949, starring Evelyn Keyes and Dick Powell.
In particular, I wanted to know what happened to Kathy and Mike after the book ended. Quick internet searches showed that I was not the only one with the same desire, but it seemed that few people had got very far in uncovering their real life trail.
In 2007 Peggy Orenstein wrote a long article in O Magazine entitled “The Story of My Life” about the influence of the book on her life. In her piece, Orenstein reports meeting with the very elderly Freedmans and realizing that the book was a novel rather than a biography – as well as the consequences of that revelation. She decides not to research the true story further, but I have taken a different path.
The following is the fruit of searches on genealogical and local history websites/books, as well as newspaper, city and university archives. I wish to give particular credit to Adele Boucher, local historian from the Peace River region of Alberta, who was researching Katherine’s story at about the same time as I was. She made some key discoveries which she shared freely with me. I gratefully acknowledge her help in piecing together Katherine’s life.
As with the previous articles, I have linked to online evidence where this is easy, but since much of the research involves off-line sources (including trips to archives in Vancouver and Halifax!) this is not always possible. In addition, I sometimes link to Wikipedia or other sources to provide quick, basic information about places and people that may not be familiar to readers.
Initial clues – the unreliable obituaries
The first direct information I found about O’Fallon was her death in Calgary, Canada in 1954. In the days following, several newspaper articles were published which provided some apparent clues: that she was born in Boston, and had two sisters, Annie of Boston and Nellie of Florida and two brothers, John and Michael. According to the Calgary Herald obituary, after the death of Michael Flanagan (sic), she had married a John P. Knox and she had two stepsons – William Michael Knox, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia and Frank Knox of Toronto.
Also according to the obituary, she had written two books “Faith of Mrs. Kelleen” and “My Animals of the North”, and had died aged 54. The listing for her funeral gave her residence in Vancouver but stated that she had been visiting friends in Calgary and was living at 120 4th Street West at the time of her death.
As it turned out, the article (which was reprinted in various forms in other newspapers – including the New York Times) contained multiple errors, some major, others minor. I should have suspected inaccuracies as the author’s name was given as Catherine Mary Flanagan. One puzzling issue was that O’Fallon’s age was given as 54, meaning that she would have been born about 1900 – and indeed her gravestone in St. Mary’s Cemetery, Calgary, gives her birth date as 1899. Close readers of “Mrs. Mike” will know that the fictional Kathy was 16 in 1907 and so based on the book, the author should have been born about 1891. However, there are enough grains of truth in the obituary that made it possible to discover some facts about Katherine Mary’s life. Some of these will disappoint fans of the book, as key points of the “Mrs. Mike” book are fiction. On the other hand, Katherine’s real-life story – although very different from her fictional counterpart Kathy – show evidence of much the same spunk and resilience. For clarity, in what follows I will use these names consistently: Katherine for the real woman (although she was mainly known as Katie when younger and Kitty when older), and Kathy for character in the book.
Early Life
Figuring out the truth of Katherine’s early life was one of the more challenging parts of telling her story. Much of the difficulty comes from the fact that O’Fallon is a very common last name, and can be spelled in multiple ways. In addition, many family members were economical with the truth about their ages, complicating search for the family history. And then of course, there are conflicting reports where Katherine was born: the “Mrs. Mike” book stated she was born in Ireland, while the obituary said Boston.
In the end, after much searching and a tip from Adele Boucher, the release of Irish records online shows that Kate Fallon was born on 14 April 1887, the daughter of John Fallon, a farmer, and Margaret Cooley in Glantane, Ballinasloe, County Galway, Ireland. Ballinasloe is a small market town located 116 kilometres from Dublin, and was known for its ruined Tudor castle, annual cattle fair and the asylum on the outskirts of the town.
As in the book, the real Katherine (commonly known as Katie at this time) had two older sisters – Mary Ellen (Nellie) (b. 1881) and Anna Frances (Annie) (b. 1883). She also had an older brother John (b. 1885) and a younger sister Margaret (b. 1888). A sixth child, Michael, was born in August 1892, two months after the death of their father, John, from pneumonia. This must have been a desperate time: a fatherless family with six children under twelve. Mrs. Fallon could read but not write. Eleven-year-old Mary Ellen had only just started going to school and signed the registration of her father’s death with an X.
Over the next few years, the family seems to have been divided. The 1901 census shows Mrs. Fallon, Annie (18) , Katherine (14) and Michael (11) living on Tea Lane in Ballinasloe. Mrs. Fallon and the two older children were working as servants, while Michael was at school. Mary Ellen, Margaret and John do not appear. “Mrs. Mike” mentions a storyteller great-grand-uncle Denny Lannon, and uncles John and Martin Kennedy, all of whom appear to be fiction.
It seems likely that the family moved in small groups to the US, although it has not yet been possible to find exactly when and how. There is some evidence that Mary Ellen went first and was followed by other members of the family. In April 1902 Annie and Katherine travelled together on the SS. Ivernia from Queenstown to Boston to join their mother in Providence, Rhode Island. The sisters had $1.25 between them.
The first clear documentation of the family living in the US comes in 1905 when according to a street directory, they were living at 9 Scotia Street in Boston. The family moved around quite a bit: in 1908 they were living at 288 K Street, then 9 Farragut Court in 1909. A clearer snapshot comes at the end of April 1910, when the census takers visited. As in the book, Mrs. Fallon was the proprietor of a boarding house and had 4 boarders. Living with her were 23-year-old Annie, 19-year-old Margaret and 17-year-old Michael. None of the children were recorded as working or at school. The census taker did not note Mrs. Fallon’s first name either, presumably because she was very ill; only a couple of weeks later, she died of “general debility” related to cancer of the leg, aged 43.
Marriage
On the census, Mrs. Fallon was stated to be the mother of six living children: Annie, Margaret and Michael were at the boarding house, but where were the other three? Presumably one was 25-year-old John, about whom little is known. The second was Mary Ellen: in about 1905, she had, as in the “Mrs. Mike” book, moved to Rhode Island, where she had started a family. The third missing child, Katherine, had also left the coop.
Aged about 16 Katherine had met, not the handsome RCMP officer Mike Flannigan, but James Rupert Best (1859-1918), a Nova Scotian widower about thirty years her senior. Rupert, as he was commonly known, worked as a carpenter around Boston Common, but returned regularly to Prospect in King’s County, Nova Scotia, where he had a farm. In November 1897 he had married fellow Nova Scotian, Marie Blanche (Mamie) Kinsman in Boston, and a couple of years later their son, George Kinsman Best, was born. Based on various travel documents, the family continued to travel back and forth between Boston and Nova Scotia. On May 25, 1906, 35-year-old Mamie died of consumption and she was buried two days later in Waterville, Nova Scotia.
The courtship between Rupert and Katherine must have been quick. Presumably the intensity of Mike and Kathy’s romance is inspired by her memory of that time, though the setting was Boston rather than the wilds of Alberta. I haven’t been able to find a marriage certificate, and given that Katherine was Catholic and Rupert was Methodist, the pairing was likely unpopular with their families and their churches. In about November 1907, Katherine, Rupert and George moved to Nova Scotia and in May 1908, Katherine gave birth to a daughter, Mary Thelma. Lovers of “Mrs Mike” will know that Kathy and Mike’s first child was called Mary Aroon.
Rupert continued his work as farmer in Prospect but seems to have still been a restless man. The family, including Rupert’s 10-year-old son George, moved first to Winnipeg, and then to near Sprague, Manitoba, close to the Minnesota border. On 13 September 1909, a son, Ralph, was born – the same name as Mike and Kathy’s son in the book. That month, Rupert applied for a land grant. Life must have been very harsh: the land needed to be cleared, a house built, and money earned, no easy task with young children to care for. The family of 5 appears in the 1911 census. One wonders what the census taker saw when he visited their home.
Katherine’s experiences at this time no doubt influenced the stories about the hardships of frontier life that she later told the Freedmans and which are included in the book.
But Rupert Best was no Mike Flannigan. According to Albertan local historian Adele Boucher in a 2014 Irish Daily Mail article, life was so hard and Best so domineering that Katherine left him to travel more than 150 kilometres to Winnipeg, where, ill herself, she placed her two children into care at the Grey Nun’s convent, a Catholic orphanage.
Like Kathy and Mike’s fictional children, the real Mary and Ralph died in an epidemic, Ralph on January 19 1912, and his sister Mary on Valentine’s Day of the same year. They are buried in unmarked graves in Brookside Cemetery, Winnipeg.
The next part of this series can be found here.
authorsreallives 
Fascinating! Thank you.
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Thanks very much
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