Origins in Oneida County
Bartholomew Quinn was born on July 21, 1876, at Kirkland Iron Works in the town of Kirkland, Oneida County, New York — an industrial hamlet built around the iron-forging trade that had drawn working families to the Oriskany Creek valley since before the Civil War. He was the son of Thomas Foran Quinn (born c. 1845, died 1919, Clinton, Oneida County) and Alice Houston Quinn (born August 19, 1853, died 1933). His father’s roots were Irish, his mother’s family established in the same corner of central New York where the Imhoff and allied families had put down roots a generation earlier.
He was twenty-three years old when the United States called for volunteers to extend American authority across the Pacific, and he answered.
Enlistment and Deployment
On August 3, 1899, Bartholomew Quinn enlisted in the 26th Regiment, United States Volunteers — one of several regiments raised in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War specifically for service in the newly acquired Philippine Islands. The regiment trained at Plattsburg, New York, then paraded through Boston, Massachusetts before embarkation. The men were initially issued pith helmets, which proved so impractical they were quickly replaced by campaign hats. Their standard arm was the Krag-Jørgensen repeating rifle, nearly five feet long and the best infantry weapon the Army had seen to that point. Each company fielded roughly 106 men.
The regiment sailed from San Francisco aboard a transport believed to be the U.S. Grant, under the command of Lt. Colonel Edwin M. Walker, whose wife was the only woman aboard. Twenty-eight days later, they arrived at Manila Bay. What awaited them was not the tidy aftermath of a war already won.
The Philippine Campaign
The Philippine-American War — officially termed the “Philippine Pacification Campaign” by the War Department — was a grinding guerrilla conflict fought in jungle, river bottom, and rice paddy against Filipino insurgent forces who knew the terrain and were fighting for their independence. Bart was assigned to Company C, operating in Iloilo Province on the island of Panay, and he kept a meticulous diary from October 30, 1899 through July 1900. That document, preserved in this family archive as QUIB1876_19000101_DOC_JRN_01, is among the few surviving enlisted-man’s accounts of the campaign in this theater.
His first entry, dated October 30, 1899, is characteristically understated: “Vaccinated. Very sore arm.”
Within two weeks, he was in combat.
Under Fire: November 1899
On November 10, 1899, Company C marched to San Isidore, where an engagement with Filipino insurgents left Corporal Corbett wounded and three Filipino fighters killed, five more wounded. The 18th Infantry took part alongside them. Bart passed through the town of Mandoray and noted, almost as an aside, that he had been acting corporal in the battalion drills.
The most significant early action came on November 21, 1899 — the Battle of Jaro. Company C was roused at 1:30 in the morning, forded a river in darkness, circled to the enemy’s rear, and attacked. The fighting lasted two hours in brutal heat on waterlogged ground. The Americans captured prisoners, supplies, and four smoothbore guns. One prisoner stabbed a corporal and was shot on the spot. All buildings in the vicinity were burned. The 6th Artillery, meeting some 800 retreating insurgents, inflicted heavy casualties. Gunboats shelled the enemy entrenchments from the river. That same afternoon, Bart went out again with 24 others to scout, finding many dead and recovering a Mauser rifle, bayonet, bolo knife, and two boxes of cartridges. He watched columns of prisoners — men, women, and children — being marched through town.
Four days later, on November 25, the company undertook a forced march of more than twenty miles, setting out at 2:00 in the morning. When they reached Filipino fortifications at an uncrossable river, they turned back. Along the roadside lay eight dead Filipino men — arms bound, hands and feet severed, throats cut. “The stench was terrible,” Bart recorded. The mules gave out before they reached home, and soldiers were put in their harnesses to haul the wagons. He reached quarters near midnight, describing himself as “most dead.”
Life in Garrison
Between engagements, the diary is an irreplaceable portrait of American soldier life in the occupied Philippines. Bart attended Catholic mass in churches he found magnificent — and noted bitterly that Tennessee troops had already looted the finest of them. He watched local funerals conducted to the music of brass bands. He attended a cockfight and found it entertaining. He complained about the food, the mosquitoes (“as big as birds”), the punishing heat, and the tuba — a potent fermented palm wine that seemed constantly to be incapacitating his fellow soldiers, including old Gillick, who raised enough hell on the substance to earn an $15.60 fine and eight days of hard labor.
His closest friend in the ranks was Joe Oldridge, a soldier from Massachusetts. When Oldridge was sent to the hospital at Iloilo in early December, Bart wrote simply: “Very lonesome without him as he is a fine fellow.” They maintained a correspondence for years after the war.
Christmas Day 1899 fell somewhere between absurd and poignant. Breakfast was sowbelly, hardtack, tomato sauce, potatoes, and coffee with milk. The weather was as hot as July in New York. Bart called it a swell dinner.
The letters that meant most to him were the ones from home. When he returned from a brutal ten-day mountain expedition in early January 1900, ragged and all but barefoot, and found mail waiting, he wrote: “Never had anything do me as much good as them — letters from home — Father, Mother & Sister.”
Thomas and Alice Quinn, still living in Oneida County, had a son overseas and did not always know whether he was alive.
Lost in the Mountains
The New Year’s expedition stands as the diary’s most vivid sustained passage. On January 1, 1900, Company C set out into the mountains to hunt the Ladrones — brigand-insurgent forces operating in the highlands. Bart described it as the hardest thing he had ever done. The men marched all day and camped at night, cooking sowbelly and boiling coffee, climbing steep ridges under a merciless sun. After ten days, his shoes had completely disintegrated. They located the Ladrones’ headquarters and had a skirmish, killing one officer and two men.
On the first Sunday of 1900, a detail of ten men — Bart among them — was sent up a mountainside while the main body moved on without waiting. The detail got lost. They made a native show them the way, stumbled into the town of Benti after dark, five hours behind the column, and Bart slept on a convent floor. “So much for Army life,” he concluded.
There are no further diary entries between January 21 and May 23, 1900 — a gap of four months. A note added by a family member to the diary manuscript explains the silence: Bart suffered a severe sunstroke while carrying a message before breakfast one morning. He passed out after delivering it. He almost certainly spent much of those missing months recovering.
Balotac Nueva: The Second Year
When the diary resumes in late May 1900, Bart was stationed at Balotac Nueva, operating in a more senior capacity. He took charge of work details, clashed with subordinates, and in one memorable entry threatened to punch Private Rhodes over a building assignment. Rhodes, he noted with satisfaction, “shuts up.”
The summer of 1900 brought renewed intense combat. On June 2, insurgents launched a carefully planned night attack on the barracks at Balotac Nueva — firing from two directions after setting a house alight to silhouette the defenders. The barracks was riddled with bullets. Three men were wounded, including Private Peter Dutiara, who was struck mortally. Bart and Private C. Maher were on patrol when the attack began. They dropped behind a wall and returned fire. The company’s doctor, badly rattled, shot the hat off Bart’s head in the confusion. “He was so excited he could not handle a gun,” Bart wrote.
On June 5, a native boy arrived with word that nine Americans were surrounded by more than 300 insurgents and had a critically ill man among them. A relief detail was dispatched at a run. The detail found the men holding on, but they had abandoned everything except the sick soldier, refusing to leave him. The man — Private Ivan Mills of Buffalo, New York — was carried in alive. He died four minutes after reaching the post. “We buried Mills at sunset.”
On June 18, forty-eight men including Bart left for Domangas under Captain Barker. They were fired on from trenches. The engagement lasted four and a half hours. One man, Tom Lee of Buffalo, New York, was killed, shot through the heart.
On June 21, 1900, Bartholomew Quinn was appointed Corporal, receiving his warrant the following morning.
The Final Entries
The diary’s last entry is dated July 14, 1900: a routine guard assignment, every available man sent toward Domangas. Then, simply: “No further entries.”
His discharge record shows continued service through December 1900. Actions listed include engagements at Pototan on December 12 and 16 and a final recorded action in Iloilo Province on December 22, 1900. His full service record from the discharge document lists:
- Nov. 10, 1899 — Engagement, San Isidore, Panay, P.I.
- Nov. 18, 1899 — Reconnaissance beyond Jaro
- Nov. 21, 1899 — Engagement, Balantang
- Nov. 25, 1899 — Reconnaissance, Zanaga
- Jan. 1, 1900 — Reconnaissance, Single
- June 3, 1900 — Attack on Barracks, Balotac Nueva
- June 18, 1900 — Skirmish, Domangas
- June 24, 1900 — Skirmish, Sahao
- July 1, 1900 — Expedition, Bolilao
- Dec. 12 & 16, 1900 — Attack on Pototan
- Dec. 22, 1900 — All in Iloilo Province, Panay, P.I.
The Voyage Home and the Report of His Death
In 1901, Corporal Quinn sailed home aboard the French transport Garronne, routed from Manila through Yokohama, Japan. The Garronne had previously seen Gold Rush service in the Yukon. Somewhere in the Pacific, it developed engine trouble and fell thirty days overdue. Back in San Francisco, the San Francisco Call ran a story — accompanied by an illustration of a sinking ship — reporting that the Garronne had gone down at sea. There was, as a family note dryly observes, no wireless and probably no cable in 1901. When Quinn and his shipmates finally arrived in San Francisco, they learned they had been reported dead.
He had survived the Philippine Pacification Campaign.
Home to Oneida County
Two years after coming home, on July 22, 1903, Bartholomew Quinn married Mary L. Rauscher (born 1882) at St. Agnes Church in Vernon Center, New York. She was twenty-one; he was twenty-six, a veteran of two years of guerrilla warfare on the other side of the world. Mary would live until 1952.
Bart Quinn lived out the rest of his long life in the region where he was born. He died on March 3, 1956, in his seventy-ninth year — more than half a century removed from the Philippine campaign and the mountains he had climbed in disintegrating shoes on the first day of the twentieth century.
In the Family Archive
The diary of Corporal Bartholomew Quinn — 27 handwritten pages, spanning October 1899 through July 1900 — is preserved in this family archive as document QUIB1876_19000101_DOC_JRN_01. His comrades named throughout its pages — Oldridge, Rhodes, Gillick, Maher, Birney, Mills, Lee — were real men who stood post, forded rivers, and buried their dead together in the Philippine heat.
Bartholomew Quinn is recorded in the imhoff.us genealogical database under Person ID I00673, Family F00257. Additional records and genealogical documentation are maintained in the TNG database.
Sources: Diary of Corporal Bartholomew Quinn, Philippine Pacification Campaign (QUIB1876_19000101_DOC_JRN_01); biographical and service notes appended to diary manuscript; discharge record, 26th Regiment U.S. Volunteers; imhoff.us TNG genealogical database (Person ID I00673; Father: Thomas Foran Quinn, I[TNG ID]; Mother: Alice Houston, I[TNG ID]).