Article taken from The Columbus Dispatch, October 2, 1895
How a Faithful Wife Rightfully Stood Out Against Her Neighbors
Special to the Dispatch, Portsmouth, O., Oct. 2
Robert McAuley, one of the Argonauts of 1849, was buried today at Wakefield. He was one of a party who went to California in the days of the gold excitement.
All others perished in the trip across the plains, and McAuley was for six years supposed to have shared their fate, as nothing was heard from him when a stranger appeared at Wakefield and announced himself as being the long lost McAuley.
His hair had changed color, but he explained it as having been caused by fever. The only disagreeable feature about an otherwise pleasant homecoming was the fact that all of the village, his wife, his brother were alone in refusing to recognize him.
The wife persistently refused to receive him and he finally drifted to Cincinnati, where he died the following year. Two years after his death, Robert McAuley No. 2 appeared and furnished absolute and indisputable proofs of his identity as the real posessor of the name, to the gratification of his faithful wife, and the corresponding confusion of her neighbors, who had been unanimous in condeming her for her obstinacy in refusing to accept the first man, the impostor, as her returned husband.
The first man was a gold miner named Hall, who had been intimate with McAuley in the gold field. Long talks in the solitude of camp had posed him upon various details, to which he added a general knowledge of Wakefield, as he had lived but 20 miles east of the village in Jackson county. He did not disclose his identity, but died claiming to be McAuley.
McAuley settled down on his farm after his return, and was 74 years old at his death.