Was Major John Thorn Croft Omaha’s most interesting man?

Bold. A veteran of the Mexican and Civil Wars.

Cultured. A leader of Omaha’s musical community.

Well-connected. A person intimately acquainted with three U.S. presidents. He knew Queen Victoria when the two were children.

The organist at Trinity Cathedral was the proprietor of a roadhouse, the first, and yes, notorious, on the wagon path to the Omaha Barracks (Fort Omaha).

Beat that, Dos Equis Most Interesting Man!

A lifetime already packed into his first 42 years, Croft came to Omaha in 1857.

He was born off the New England coast. His grandfather was Commodore John Thorn Croft, who was with Admiral Horatio Nelson in the battle of Trafalgar. An uncle captained a trans-Atlantic ship, and much of the major’s boyhood was spent at sea and in Great Britain.

King George IV once patted the boy on the head and asked him, “Little boy, what do people in America do in the evening? Young Croft piped up and told the king that, back home, there were just as many amusements as in England.

Croft attended McGill College in Montreal and studied music. He taught at the Boston Academy of Music under New England composer Lowell Mason for eight years in the 1840s. He was the first to sing the version of “Nearer My God, To Thee,” the purported swan song of the Titanic orchestra, to the commonly used tune written by Mason. He organized musical societies and his circle of friends included the “Swedish Nightingale,” Jennie Lind.

He met future President Franklin Pierce while teaching in Concord, New Hampshire. During the Mexican War, he and Fletcher Webster, son of statesman Daniel Webster, organized a cavalry regiment.

Croft’s route to the west went through Philadelphia and Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, where he operated music houses and became a close friend of future President James Buchanan; Chicago, where he and his new bride spent only a few months; and Rock Island, Illinois, where he opened a music house — and a saloon.

He drove across Iowa, family in tow, with 18 horses to reach Omaha. He platted a 122-lot subdivision near boom-and-bust Saratoga, an area now between 16th and 24th Streets along Ames Avenue. Seven houses went up. He was the first organist at Trinity Cathedral and was co-leader of the choir.

Then Croft had to start over. The land he bought had a defective title. He lost almost everything. He recovered, regaining his land, by selling livestock to the Mormons — he became friends with Brigham Young — who were in the second large migration west. At one time, there were 1,200 oxen, 480 horses, 200 mules and scores of wagons standing on his property.

“I bought that 100 acres three times before I finally owned it,” he said in 1906.

In the Civil War, Croft rose to the rank of major while with the Curtis Horse unit that became part of the Fifth Iowa cavalry. He met his third future President — Ulysses S. Grant — after reporting to him at Fort Henry. Croft was wounded near Clarksville, Tennessee, and came home on a furlough.

Freighting on the frontier was his next adventure. He worked for Western Telegraph. Then for Butterfield Freighting, he “cleaned up” all the freight — valued at $1.5 million — of several wagon trains that had been captured on Smoky Hill by members of the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Kiowa Tribes. He brought the goods to Denver and contracted to take them to Salt Lake City.

He sold the contents for $122,000. Claimed he never saw a cent.

“I had a wonderful faculty for making money,” he told the Omaha Daily Bee when he was 94, “but I also had a wonderful faculty for losing it.”

In 1868 and back in Omaha, he was in charge of the piano department at the Omaha Music Depot on Douglas Street. There on Tuesday nights, he was the music director for the new Omaha Choral Union.

Life changed for Croft when his wife, Eliza, died suddenly in 1871 in downtown while walking the block from the music store that he now owned to their home at 15th and Howard Streets. He was a widower with two daughters and a toddler son.

Croft left the music business and moved his children to his Saratoga farm, where he opened his roadhouse in 1874. The Omaha Bee called it a welcome development: “Last evening over 20 teams stopped there, while the occupants indulged in liquid refreshments or a fragrant smoke.”

Two weeks before Christmas 1874, the major and his oldest daughter’s suitor — 11 years her elder — took their feud to the streets of downtown. Despite the younger man throwing white pepper in his face, Croft chased him down and caned him until the cane broke.

A few years later, Croft needed to extract himself from performing a sham wedding ceremony at the roadhouse, now known as the Park House. The “groom” was from out of state, the intoxicated or drugged victim of a confidence man. The “bride” was a theater performer from Chicago who had been in town only a short time and was with a new friend who likely was a lady of the evening.

A hack driver took the man and two women from a downtown saloon to Croft’s place, where more bottles of wine were consumed before the sham ceremony. The next day, when police sorted out the matter, the major was charged with performing the marriage rite without due authority and released on $500 bail. The other three, under charges of grand larceny, spent the night in jail.

Croft claimed it had had been all a joke, that all the parties had given consent. He went to trial — newspapers did not record the outcome — but the others had their cases dismissed.

An accidental shooting, leaving a 16-year-old reputed prostitute from Valentine dead in January 1884, ended Croft’s days of managing the roadhouse — now being called the Club House. Or, as the Omaha Bee referred to it, a “notorious dive.”

Under new management, and a name change to Cottonwood Villa, the roadhouse stayed open until it was converted into a boarding house in 1890.

In his later years, Croft lived as a recluse, giving violin lessons in a bungalow at 1920 Ames. His daughters died in 1876 and 1895; his son was in Chicago as an officer with Woodmen of the World.

If the roadhouse blues had tarnished his good name, music restored it. He was regarded and revered as Omaha’s oldest living pioneer.

Death came to the major at 95 on April 10, 1910. Two years before, the Omaha Bee gave him a living epitaph:

“He possesses the qualities both of the lion and the lamb, the threshing machine and the watch. He has moved in the thick of raging battles; he has dealt with the lawless breed of man who rubbed the first roughness from the wild western plains; he has fought the Indians; he has hunted the fierce wild animals of the mountains.

“These activities show the qualities of the lion. But he has also devoted fourscore years to those gentle symphonies of the great life which is not seen, the life of music. He is a true Bohemian in his present style of living and has been so always.”