The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  He was gazing at a picture of the son he had never seen, eleven years old—Thomas Bennett Meagher. The boy had his father’s good looks, and judging by the letter, some of his skill with words. Now Lyons drew close enough to tell that Meagher was not crying. “He was laughing at the pleasant and loving things the lad had written, and handed me the letter with a proud allusion to the manliness of its style,” he said.

  Meagher thrust the image of his son at his friend, an absentee father’s pride bursting. He wanted the boy to know something of the legacy of memory that he would inherit—it wasn’t all skeletons at the feast. The youngest Meagher would soon be burdened with a sizable number of centuries to keep alive in narrative form. Family stories. Tipperary struggles during the Penal Era. New life in Newfoundland, and a merchant renaissance along the River Suir. Defiance in one of England’s best schools, and finding a voice in the revolutionary salons of Dublin. The great horror of the Great Hunger. An uprising of poets that never had a chance. Bravery in a cell while waiting to be hanged. A stirring of the senses in Tasmania, the dead mother of this boy. And love a second time in New York, a woman who could still be mother to another Thomas Meagher. America’s promise, and America’s crime.

  The boy had surely read in the Irish press his father’s explanation of what the immigrant soldiers meant to every son and daughter of Erin. “Thank God!” Meagher wrote, in words reprinted across the tormented island, “that disgrace” of slavery is no more, “averted from our race by the splendid conflict of the thousands of Irish soldiers who have been the life, the heart, the soul of the Federal armies.”

  He expected to see young Thomas soon, to be a proper father yet, in this coming turn in a life he himself found so improbable as to not try to recount it in a single sitting with new friends. First he needed to make some money. The West was opening quickly; fortunes were being made overnight in the goldfields and towns sprouting from the sageland. It could be a last chance, or a first chance. “I leave this evening for the far west, for one of the richest of our new territories,” he wrote his son and his father on July 17, 1865. “I entertain the liveliest hopes that this enterprise will prove a profitable one to me, and that it will enable me to pay you a visit in France next summer.” Thomas and Libby would close out their New York life, their military life, their eastern life. The wilds of Montana Territory called. Meagher was forty-one years old when he lit out for the sunset side of the continent.

  20

  * * *

  New Ireland

  So, off to the new land, far from gaslit interiors and dinners at Delmonico’s, far from graveyard eulogies for young men, far from the familiar. Meagher went first to Minnesota, talking his way into a job with a professional emigrant, James L. Fisk, whose trade was guiding pilgrims from the flatland to the promised land. Meagher had heard Fisk speak in New York, where he sketched a picture of a big sky country so full of gold dust you had to shake it from your hair after lying on the ground. Afterward, with the war still on, with friends in the press now enemies, with the jabbing questions of the father-in-law, Peter the Great, about their future, he and Libby had taken the first steps toward a fresh chance in a faraway place. They would start from scratch, unknown, unfettered. Meagher would find a place to build a life. His wife would follow. The permanent home that had long eluded them would be theirs at last in the Rocky Mountains.

  Something much larger than any one couple was envisioned for the unturned ground that touched the clouds in the West. Eastern cities were not healthy places for the immigrant masses. The New York riots showed just how toxic the tenements had become. Meagher himself had urged the Irish to leave the thin-walled, smoke-filled, low-ceilinged hovels of urban America for the open-aired promise of the high country. But how? A transcontinental move was not cheap. Gold was a lure, of course—a lure and a gamble. All you needed was a pan, a pick, a strong back to sift yellowy flakes from the gravel of a streambed. So went the pitch. Big strikes in little gulches had drawn deserters from both armies to Montana—$50 million in gold in three years’ time!—and prompted thousands of men in California to leave for the snowbound north. The Homestead Act, which went into effect on the same day as the Emancipation Proclamation, was a greater attractor. You didn’t have to be a citizen, you could just intend to become one, to lay claim to 160 acres. Free land: the two most powerful words in the nineteenth-century American West. Single women, former slaves, immigrants—all qualified. Yet a poor family living in the filth of Five Points, a neighborhood still said to have the highest murder rate of any slum in the world, could find enough reasons to stay put. At least Tammany Hall could guarantee meal money for turning a shovel in the city. The Irish were not loners or mountain men, had little experience as ranchers, sodbusters or prospectors. They cherished community, clan gatherings, rituals attached to place. Montana Territory was the end of the earth—a big blank spot on a map.

  But what if a swath of that big blank spot was set aside as a lasting home for the exiles of Erin? A refuge, a colony, or something in between, still under the American flag but free of English Protestant domination? The Mormons had their Zion at the Great Salt Lake, a theocracy with its own militia and a radical sexual philosophy that allowed old men to marry teenage girls by the dozen. Free blacks were establishing towns on the Kansas frontier, and beyond. Free-love advocates were drawing up communes for islands in Puget Sound. The social frontier followed the geographic frontier. From Dublin, the American consul, William West, floated an idea in the final months of the Civil War. The plan put Meagher at the center, though he’d yet to be informed.

  “It has long since occurred to me, that in complement for his valuable services, and those of the Irish soldiers generally, it would be fitting acknowledgment on the part of our Government, to select some desirable portion of our territories and call it New Ireland, of which no doubt General Meagher would in due time be elected Governor,” the consul wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward.

  New Ireland? Why not? There was a New England. A New Jersey. A New York. A New South Wales in Australia. A Newfoundland in a long-known land. Certainly, there were Little Irelands in the cramped underbellies of nearly every American city of standing. But no place where the Irish diaspora, now footloose after the war, could plant its stories and religion, where people could become something more than laborers, servants or embittered ex-soldiers scarred by Confederate grapeshot. Seward never acted on the suggestion. And there’s no evidence Meagher was told of the grand design for the wayward son of Waterford—the part that had long been prophesied for him. But he was thinking along the very same lines. He was also hoping to stake his claim to some of that gold in the Montana dust, or get a piece of raw ground that could be turned for city-building and a quick profit—the two routes to overnight wealth in the West.

  While in Minnesota, Meagher got word that his status as a western-bound traveler had been greatly elevated. By telegram, he was informed that President Andrew Johnson, the Democrat named to Lincoln’s national unity ticket in 1864, had appointed Meagher the Secretary of Montana—the second-highest office in the territory. As one of the primary architects assigned to organize the foundations of government and civilization in a rawboned land, Meagher would be fortune-seeking as well as nation-building. He had asked for such a thing while the war was still on. He’d sent a note to a high-ranking friend at the White House—“Let me have Idaho.” That was the original name of a territory stretching from the Dakotas in the east to Washington in the west, from the Canadian border in the north to most of present-day Wyoming.

  Meagher didn’t get Idaho. But he got the new Montana Territory, barely a year old, 143,776 square miles. At the time, there were more people living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan than the entire non-Indian population of Montana, about 15,000. And nearly all those had arrived in the past four years. Meagher’s imagination churned. He sensed a second Great Migration, time for the Irish to move again, en masse. Just as they’d taken one big heave-ho across the
Atlantic, they could take another leap over the ocean of prairie grass to Montana. He’d been thinking about this for months, but in his diminished state, he kept these musings to himself. Now, with a small measure of his confidence restored, he shared some expansive thoughts. “An Irish laborer, with his wife and children hived into a badly plastered den in the back part of a tenement house in New York . . . is very little better off than he was at home,” he wrote a friend. Meagher pictured that Irish laborer with some dignity, “with his own hearthstone under his unshackled foot.” In Minnesota, speaking to the Immigration Society, he expanded on this notion. As he’d summoned his countrymen to war against the slaveholding South, he urged them to pick up and build something from nothing in the West.

  But getting from Manhattan to Montana Territory was much harder than crossing the Atlantic in a coffin ship—much costlier too. A family looking to claim a quarter square mile of land could follow a straight line west, more than 2,200 miles. Of course, nobody traveled in a straight line. You floated down a river, or steam-paddled up one. You hugged a valley floor by rail, stage or wagon, rode on the back of a horse until a trail lost its way in summer snow, and then cautiously stepped down a corkscrew of rocky turns overlooking straight drops to sure death. In the high desert you picked up a stage again, or a fresh horse, now nearly 3,000 miles into it, and all the while wondered what you were thinking.

  Meagher went down the Mississippi to St. Louis—the Father of Waters, all of it, under one flag again. From there, he chugged up the Missouri, to Atchison, Kansas, named for the flame-throwing slave enthusiast. By stagecoach, he traveled over the grasslands to Denver, arriving in the mile-high boomtown in late August of 1865. His movements were heralded, via telegraph and horse travel, in the first newspaper to pop up in the year-old territory, the Montana Post. “This illustrious Irishman,” the paper’s editor informed his readers in September, would be bringing to the wide-open country a “persuasive elegance that held spellbound both Celt and Saxon.” But the concept of New Ireland could not expect a hearing in the pages of the Post. The editor, Thomas J. Dimsdale, was an Englishman. Oxford-educated, short, sickly and humorless, with a waxed mustache and badger-like tight-set eyes, Dimsdale was also a strong supporter of a secret society that ran Montana Territory without formal recognition or adherence to the Constitution. He praised the general for doing much to improve the reputation of his dreadful people. “He has made the name of an Irishman respected wherever the story of the deeds of the heroic Irish Brigade is told.” With the pandering out of the way, Dimsdale put the incoming secretary on notice, three weeks before his arrival. He expressed hope that Meagher, though a revolutionary at home against the Crown, was now a good Irishman: someone who might “rein in the hearts” of bad Irishmen.

  The English editor had reason to fear the Celtic tide in the West. Members of the Fenian Brotherhood, their military skills hardened in the war, were making plans to invade Canada. They intended to seize a few forts and hold them as leverage to get concessions from Britain. Canada would be the hostage; a free Ireland was the ransom. The plan was crazy, preposterous and ill formed—yet somewhat plausible. Canada was lightly guarded. The British Empire’s forces were elsewhere, trying to hold down natives in India, in Burma and Canton, in Africa and the Middle East, ensuring the stamp of Her Majesty on a quarter of the earth’s land, from the Falkland Islands off the Patagonian coast to the Malayan states in the South China Sea. After the Civil War, the Fenians were flush with fresh members—Irishmen from all ranks. They were unafraid of England; indeed, primed for a fight with the Empire. The plan to invade the north was not a well-kept secret. It was publicized in the papers, aired out in meetings, heralded in a popular song:

  We are the Fenian Brotherhood, skilled in the arts of war,

  And we’re going to fight for Ireland, the land we adore.

  Many battles we have won, along with the boys in blue,

  And we’ll go and capture Canada, for we’ve nothing else to do.

  Meagher had joined the Brotherhood a year earlier. He’d taken the oath—to “labor with earnest zeal for the liberation of Ireland from the yoke of England.” And he’d recruited untold numbers of Irishmen to fight for the Union with an endgame of freeing the country of their birth. But he was also a representative of the U.S. government. If it wasn’t technically treasonous to advocate war against British territory on the American border, it was certainly less than diplomatic. In public, Meagher underplayed his Fenian sympathies.

  From Denver, he crossed the Front and the Wasatch Ranges of the Rocky Mountains, descending into the valley of the Great Salt Lake. Irish miners in the Mormon stronghold greeted General Meagher as a Hibernian hero, there to release them from the theocratic hold of Brigham Young. His business was in another territory, north over the Bitterroots. By coach on the overland express, Meagher set out for the last 475 miles of his journey, crossing the Snake River, up over the Continental Divide at Monida Pass, and down, through mountains upon mountains, to icy waters that drained to the Pacific. All told, he had passed through the homelands of the Omaha and the Pawnee, the Sioux and the Arapaho, the Ute and the Shoshone, the Cheyenne and the Crow, the Nez Perce and the Blackfeet. They had stitched their languages, their customs, their rituals, their religions, their livelihoods to the big blank spot on the map. But Meagher knew little of the natives, save for what he heard around the campfires of panicky pilgrims.

  Downslope from the divide, still more than 6,000 feet above sea level, Meagher entered a world unlike anything he’d seen on any of the three continents he’d lived. No place in Ireland held summits of snow in late summer. No creature in Tasmania was the size of a grizzly, Ursus arctos horribilis, 700 pounds of beady-eyed bear. No mountain in the East was as high as the no-name peaks bracketing the territory, a horizon of jack-o’-lantern–smile granite and slate, a vertical world larger than many European countries. But where were the valleys and sun-kissed lakes, the places to grow potatoes and apples and wheat, to raise pigs and cattle, to build cities? Meagher was not alone in his disorientation upon entering Montana Territory. Wondrous, yes—in the late light of summer, a painting worthy of Albert Bierstadt’s brush. But did snow really fall every month of the year?

  “Rained, snowed and hailed all day,” wrote one new arrival, James P. Miller, in his diary on June 16, 1865, a few days before the calendar proclaimed summer. “Horrible weather and very cold.” And then in the first week of September, just days before Meagher’s arrival, Miller told of trying to get to the town, Virginia City, that had just been designated the new territorial capital. “Up half past six. Snow three feet deep and still snowing.” And still summer.

  Well, what fell from the sky never bothered an Irishman. What mattered was underground, or barely beneath the surface. Surely it would not take much to get rich in this place. “I’m resolved not to turn my back on the Rocky Mountains until I have the means to whip my carriage and four through the New York Central Park and sail my own yacht, with the Green Flag at the Mitzen-peak, within three miles of the Irish coast,” he wrote a friend. Three miles of the Irish coast. As a wanted man, he could get no closer. And in the meantime, you lived well off the fat of the new land, yes?

  “Dear Parents: Nothing is sure here but what one has in his hands.” So began a letter home from Cornelius Hedges to his family in the Midwest. “I have seen about enough of the mountains as I desire without I get some good pay for it. It is a hard life at best, full of self-denial & hardship. Living is very high, without any luxuries. We hardly ever see any fruit—vegetables are scarce . . . Everyone expects to make a fortune any minute. Life is full of danger here. We have lots of men who are ready to murder for a few dollars. Only yesterday a man was shot not half a mile from town in open daylight and robbed of all his money . . . I wish I could have some apples and cider once in a while. I dreamed the other night of eating apples.”

  He wrote these words from Virginia City, ten days before Meagher’s arrival.

 
The end of the coach line was Bannack, a mining camp that already had the shamed appearance of a played-out burg, barely two years after it sprang to life in southwestern Montana. Government, such as it was, was moving to Virginia City. The buildings in Bannack were shingled shacks with unpainted fronts, the main street a dust-choked byway smelling of horseshit. Not a tree in sight. What pines that once stood had been burned for fuel or spliced into framing timber. Across a brackish little waterway, Grasshopper Creek, slouched a huddle of tents and leaky sheds, home to Confederate deserters. Meagher was met by the governor, Sidney Edgerton. He was dressed for travel and packed to go, with his family. A radical Republican, with a long face whiskered to an arrowhead below his chin, Edgerton looked like a Gothic preacher with a toothache. He’d been governor for a little more than a year, and before that, the territorial judge. When Meagher asked a few perfunctory questions, he discovered that this “richest territory” had its own way of dispatching people on the wrong side of right-thinking citizens.

  The sheriff, for example. What of him? That would be the late sheriff, a Mr. Henry Plummer. Late? Considerably so. He’d been hanged. Oh. Was there a trial? No. A specific charge? Not really. But as one of the early leaders of these upstanding gentlemen had written in his diary, Edgerton could “recognize a bad man when he saw one.” Wait—they’d killed the lawfully appointed sheriff without a trial or due process? He had it coming. How so? Plummer was handsome, well spoken, with a cloudy past. He’d killed a few men in California, and here in Bannack City he dispatched a prospector who lusted for his young bride—killed him in self-defense, in a saloon, in front of dozens of witnesses. After the victim fell, with a gunshot in the gut, he blurted out, “You won’t shoot me when I’m down.” Plummer replied, “No. Get up.” Then he shot him in the chest and head. For this, he was applauded and, months later, elevated to sheriff of Bannack City by a grateful citizenry. But in the year since that shooting, the right-thinking townsfolk had soured on Plummer. They decided to take the law into their own hands. First they strung up two people in Alder Gulch, where Virginia City was forming around a cleft in Montana’s bristled hide. And then, in January of 1864, they went after Sheriff Plummer.