Image: On Jan. 7, 1865, the Montana Post dedicated its entire front page to the bare-knuckle fight between Con Orem and Hugh O’Neil. (Public Domain)

On this day in history, January 2, 1865, in Virginia City, Montana, welterweight Con Orem and heavyweight Hugh O’Neil brawled for 185 rounds in a highly contested bare-knuckle boxing match. By far one of the most prolonged bouts ever to have taken place in boxing history, the fighters, with hometown hero and Ohio-born native Con Orem, the declared underdog from the onset, battled the taller and heavier O’Neil for $1000 in purse money.

Five days later, the Montana Post dedicated its entire front page to the great fight between Orem and O’Neil. The article was written by the Post’s editor, Thomas Dimsdale, who was friends with John Condle Orem, or, as he is generally termed, Con Orem, who was born in 1835 in Carroll County, Ohio, and was a blacksmith by trade. Dimsdale was effusive in his praise of Orem. He told the reader that Orem had spent much time in the Rocky Mountains, buffalo hunting and shooting game. As a result, he became quite proficient with a rifle and bowie knife and had many hand-to-hand encounters with “Old Bruin.”

 Having begun his fighting career in 1861, he had become a veteran of many fights, including a loss to pugilist Owen Geohegan, though Dimsdale felt that the result of the fight was more than crooked. Dimsdale relates, “After 19 rounds, in 23 minutes, the mob broke up the fight on the pretense of a foul, the referee, with a revolver looking into his ear, deciding against Orem.”

Dimsdale tells us far less about the challenger, an Irish miner named Hugh O’Neil. He says that O’Neil “more than once settled the pretensions of some tough customers in the outside world in a style which boded no good easy times for any future opponent.” It seems that Dimsdale liked rooting for the underdog. Hugh O’Neil had 53 pounds and 2 inches on Con Orem.

O’Neil, the Irishman, wore green shorts with the old Harp and stars with his name embroidered in full. Orem wore the stars and stripes with an eagle on his trunks and bore the motto “May the best man win.” Orem stood 5’6 ½” and weighed in at 137 lbs. O’Neil stood 5’9” and weighed 190 pounds.

“At 20 minutes to 2 o’clock, time was called, and quickly, each man toed the scratch and began.” The first round was short and lively. Both fighters took rights to the ribcages and struggled for a while, then both fell.

Under London Prize Fight Rules, the round ended when somebody was on the ground. And because no one seemed to mind if a fighter went down to rest, a round might end in seconds or go on indefinitely. The fight would end when one man – or both – could no longer continue.

Things started to get going in the third round. O’Neil knocked Orem down. Loud cheers from O’Neil’s friends and offers of three to one, in the hundreds against Orem. By the seventeenth round, both fighters were quite bloodied as they traded punches, gouges, and headbutts. O’Neil knocked Orem down a lot, but the latter always got up. Throughout the fight, Con would utilize going quite a bit to maintain his stamina and prolong the fight, much to O’Neil’s growing agitation.

By the 126^th round, O’Neill’s left eye was closing, “nothing but misses registered; Orem slipped down.” By the 137^th round, O’Neill was “failing.” By the 168^th, Orem was “getting faint.”But neither man would concede.

Finally, after O’Neil dominated the 180^th through the 185^th rounds but didn’t have enough left in the tank to put Orem down, the men attending to the fighters had enough. The referee ordered the backers of both fighters to sort things out. From all that, Dimsdale tells us, the fight had lasted for 185 minutes without ceasing.

Happily for all involved, it was decided to call the match a draw. All Bets were off, and wagers were returned. Purse money for the fighters was divided. The brass band hired to entertain the crowd struck up a lively tune. Everyone was happy except the two men who had endured 185 rounds without a winner.

Con Orem seems to have come out of the match ok. An ad in the following week’s Montana Post reminded residents of Virginia City that Orem, owner of the Champion Saloon, was offering “private lessons in boxing and sparring once a week.” Hugh O’Neil was not as fortunate. A notice in the same issue announced that his friends were planning a benefit in his honor. They were determined to make up for him a sum sufficient to leave him on the sunny side of “square” instead of in debt.

Montana Post editor Thomas Dimsdale took the time and effort to report on each round of the fight, but he should have reported on the one detail that matters most to history: the time the contest ended. Bare-knuckle fights were ranked not by the number of rounds but by duration. Dimsdale wrote that Con Orem withstood 185 rounds in 185 minutes. This is a stretch of the imagination on the editor’s part. In the decades after the match, the legend grew as these things are bound to do. Some observers stated that the fight never ended until after midnight. Some have observed that the best guess is that the fight did not last 3 hours and 5 minutes, but more likely, it lasted around 5 hours and 30 minutes. If this was the case, Hugh O’Neil and Con Orem set the American record for a fight duration – unless that record belongs to J. Fitzpatrick and James O’Neil, who fought for 4 hours and 20 minutes in Berwick, Maine, in 1860.

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