William Owen “Bucky” O'Neill was an Arizona lawyer, miner, cowboy, gambler, court reporter , editor of the Prescott Journal Miner, then founded, edited, and published Hoof and Horn, a paper for the live stock industry. He was elected Yavapai County Probate Judge and School Superintendent, tax assessor-collector, Yavapai County Sheriff, and finally, Mayor of Prescott. He was also one of the most important members of Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, having recruited many of the volunteers and supervised their training while in San Antonio waiting to be deployed. Just prior to the famous charge up Kettle (not San Juan) hill he was killed by a Spanish sniper. Theodore Roosevelt, "The Rough Riders"
"The most serious loss that I and the regiment could have suffered befell just before we charged.

He had graduated from the National Law School in Washington, DC and came to Arizona Territory in 1879, and arrived in Prescott in the spring of 1882 after stopovers in Tombstone (he worked on the Tombstone Epitaph) and Phoenix.
He gained his nickname in Prescott by his love of the card game faro which was sometimes called, "buck the tiger."
Bucky grew prosperous from developing onyx mines near Mayer, Arizona, and promoted copper mining in the Grand Canyon ( O’Neill Butte in the Grand Canyon is named after Bucky) as well as a railroad to its South Rim. In 1894, he led a Smithsonian expedition to explore the prehistoric Sinaguan ruin called "Montezuma's Castle" on Beaver Creek in the Verde Valley. He was Captain of the "Prescott's Grays" militia, and a volunteer fireman on the "Toughs" hose cart team. As Adjutant General of Arizona Territory, he helped to organize its National Guard.
Perhaps Bucky`s least known talent was fiction, which he is said to have written at night, as his wife Pauline played the piano. Apparently all of his stories (about ten are known) followed dark themes set in Arizona Territory, and appeared in the San Francisco Examiner or Argonaut magazine between 1891 and 1910.
In the Turner Network television miniseries on the Rough Riders, O'Neill was played by Sam Elliott.
Many historians feel if O’Neill had survived the war and returned to Arizona he would probably have become Arizona’s first governor when Arizona achieved statehood. On his tomb in Section 1 of Arlington National Cemetery are the words that he had once written:
"Who would not die for a new star on the flag."