Redemption Falls

by Joseph O'Connor

  ––Who is there? she called out without warning.

  Did not move. They exchanged some words. She produced and shot a pistol.

  ––Who is there? I know you are there. Stand up or you are dead.

  One of the idiots went away and came back with three storm-lanterns. Features very monstrous in its glow. Gave a light to the girl, who raised it on a pole. Eardrums by now drumming hard. I saw John Cole McLaurenson come from the cave. Positive identification. No question whatever. He was bearing a sawn-down which he loaded.

  ––Counting me to ten. Get to eleven, you’re a deadman.

  Rope was produced by one of the imbeciles. The girl slung it over a bough. She started to count. Very clear, cold voice. Accent of Brooklyn. Unholstered my pistol.

  McL heard my Bobby. He ran toward him firing.

  The girl and the idiots followed.

  All the while, the boy was lying very ill on the ground. I could hear his frightened tears.

  CHAPTER 71

  TO BAIT A HOOK YOU NEED A WORM, TO LURE A MAN, A PROMISE

  Message delivered late at night to the Governor’s house – scribbled on a shred of the reward notice

  Eight minutes past Midnight –Christmas Eve

  General O’Keeffe, sir,

  I call’d to your house this instant, but you were not at home, and the servant did not know your whereabouts. I thought it improper to ask for Mrs O’Keeffe, who had retired – but perhaps, given the circumstances, I should have press’d the matter. If I have not heard from you in a couple of hours, I shall take a liberty & return – We must confer before dawn at the latest.

  Forgive – sir – my unruly hand – I have ridden six days & nights from the north with only the briefest respite. I should see you most urgently on a subject of profoundest importance.

  Am at the Widow’s Hotel – Send a man the very moment you receive this – and I will come to you immediately – Or come here yourselfno matter the hour – Insist with the widow, sir, that I be awaken’d the instant you arrive. She will attempt to protect me but for God’s sake brook no opposition.

  Your marshals & militia need to be muster’d without the least delay & every last man you trust in this Territory. I believe, firmly, that we have not a single minute to squander.

  Thankful, sir, to have an opportunity to prove myself

  Your friend –

  A. W., Capt.

  PART IX

  THE FINISHING

  …It being almost midnight, and dispatches yet to be written, he excused himself and retired to confer with his Captains. As he took his leave courteously, I put to him a parting query, emboldened, no doubt, by the lateness of the hour. He pondered a while, as though my question had surprised him, and his thinking eventuated in the following response: ‘My ambition?’ he said, ‘is to know a contented family life. To be a kindly father and husband; to deserve the blessings I have been given. I was at one time a revolutionist. I am now a soldier for the constitutional. But I would be, as soon as possible, a quiet and private citizen.’ He added, after a moment of further contemplation: ‘And for my people to be free. To know they are as good as any other. I cannot see my brother live and die a slave. If I do, I will have wasted everything.’

  From ‘A Sketch of the Handsome Irish General on the Eve of Battle’.

  New York Times, August29 th,1862 .

  CHAPTER 72

  AN EXTRACT FROM ‘CONCLUSIONS of the COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION into CERTAIN EVENTS, WHICH OCCURRED LAST YEAR at FORT STORNAWAY, THE MOUNTAIN TERRITORY, & at sundry other PLACES’

  Two hours before dawn on Wednesday, December 26th, 1866, a posse set out from Redemption Falls, the Mountain Territory, for Fort Stornaway on the Missouri River (47°49’10” N; 110°40’11” W). The collaborators stole in silence, their lanterns unlit, the hooves of their mounts muffled with wraps of wet sacking, down the passageway behind the quietest of their settlement’s four streets, and westward, through the quarter-light, to the County’s remotest outskirt. There a trio of associates, who had been waiting in a certain house, slipped out and added their number to the assembly. The hour was now approximately a half-after-five. The order was confirmed: ride north.

  Black hoods were worn by some, bandanna-masks by others. Others, again, had obscured their features with dirt. Most were bearing carbines, rifle-muskets or revolvers; behind them, hauled on a gun-carriage, was a 12-pounder field howitzer, and, mounted on a trail-wagon, an empty cage. A miner on the road, returning from the sickbed of his brother, happened upon the queer company and took them for vigilantes. He was advised to walk on and banish the encounter from memory if he wished to live long enough to see the sunrise.

  Presently they came to the ridge near Brogan’s Prospect. There they took an old mule-trail that winds northward for twelve and a half miles, through overgrown terrain, along a precipitous undercliff, to a long derelict burial ground of the Pend d’Oreilles Indians, making campfire adjacently around half-after-ten. The horses were watered. A plan was argued out. The howitzer was test-fired. Around noon, they rode on.

  The mission was anticipated to require seven days and nights. At its head rode former General James Con O’Keeffe, Territorial Secretary and Acting Governor, who had commanded the ‘Irish Brigade’ of the Army of the Potomac, and later served briefly, we might add controversially, at a desk in the headquarters of the Eastern Tennessee Command. The Mountain Territory extends to a dauntingly vast area, much of it unmapped, most of it inhospitable, but the Governor, no stranger to reckless judgment, refused wiser counsel and pressed his scheme.

  Certain parties came and went in the course of those days; but the core of the posse was as follows: Acting Governor O’Keeffe; nine men of his purpose; a tracker by the name of Eye-John Thorn Berry; the Governor’s wife; a federal cartographer; and a maidservant, one Elizabeth (freed Negro). It is deplorable that the participation of women in such an operation was ever countenanced, over precarious country, in a treacherous midwinter. The solitary mitigation is a meager one indeed: that the circumstances and objective of the mission being unique, Mrs Lucia O’Keeffe had been adamant that her duty was to accompany her husband to its end. Loyalty is a commendable, a wifely quality. It is second, however, to obedience.

  Information had been garnered by Acting Governor O’Keeffe that an infamous brotherhood of outlaws captained by one Cole John McLaurenson – styled ‘Irish Johnny Thunders’, a Confederate renegade – was hiding in a cave system accessible by abandoned mineshafts lying northwestward of the town of Fort Stornaway. (Map coordinates: 30/ix/f). The gang’s crimes in the Territory had been numerous and brutal, the most monstrous being the murder, on the 27th day of August, 1866, of the entire crew and command of the Federal steamshipWilliam H. Harrison , when that vessel was wrecked with callousness and cowardice and pirated of four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gold and uncut sapphires.

  But the truer instigation of the Governor’s mission was his own: that a friendless orphan, one Jeremiah Mooney, in whose improvement a benevolent interest had been taken by Governor and Mrs O’Keeffe, was abducted near Edwardstown in late November, 1866, reportedly by the gang’s principal, McLaurenson. The child had been widely reported dead but the Acting Governor held to hopes that in actuality he was alive. The intent of this expedition was to liberate the boy Mooney, to fetch his captors to justice, or to kill them. It is the conviction of this Commission, having weighed the available testimony, that the latter was the option favored strongly by the Acting Governor. This was, in all but name, a mission of execution, and was understood so to be by at least several of its participants, who regarded themselves as a fellowship above the reach of that law which some of them were employed to defend. That men who had sworn an oath to the United States Constitution suffered themselves to be members of ‘O’Keeffe’s Apostles’ – that they addressed their leader by the title of ‘General’ – conducted themselves, in fact, as a quasimilitary body – these are grave matters indeed. There is but one l
egal army in this Republic; its Commander-in-Chief is the President.

  The mission was insufficiently informed and was to prove ill fated. The catastrophic consequences are known and need not be repeated here. It must only be noted that Acting Governor O’Keeffe, some creditable service in the War against the rebellion notwithstanding, acted in a manner that warrants, and here receives, the severest possible rebuke of this Tribunal. Furthermore [the remainder of this paragraph has been heavily scored out, and the subsequent nine pages are missing from the file. The document resumes as follows:].

  …to anyone who wanted to know of it. The personal reputation of Mrs O’Keeffe *** ******** ******* ** *********** ** ********. We are satisfied, entirely, that this allegation is unfounded and deplore that it sullied these proceedings.

  Many questions linger unmet at the conclusion of our deliberations. The Commissioners have noted the vague recollection of certain witnesses, the dubiety of the evidence offered even by some under oath. For a lawman to depose with less than complete forthrightness brings dishonor on the badge he wears. Our investigations have been further impeded by the refusal of certain parties to testify, the absconding of one witness (reportedly into Canada), and the failure of Acting Governor O’Keeffe, in breach of the law, ‘to make and keep and maintain for the people a recordin writing of his works’. It is difficult to avoid the deduction that particular persons, of whom a great deal better might have been expected, have attempted to dam, or at least to divert, the flow of revelatory truth. These charges we place sternly before the magistracy of private conscience, since we have not the legal authority of dismissal.

  The facts uncontested, inasmuch as we have been capable of ascertaining them, are above set out in brief. Four conclusions, merely, shall be placed on the record:

  I)Acting Governor O’Keeffe’s mission was NOT authorized by the United States Government.

  II)The United States Government denies EMPHATICALLY that it had hand, act, or part in the events at Fort Stornaway.

  III)The coming into the Territory of one John Fintan Duggan had little, if anything, to do with these events. This Duggan, nevertheless, is to depart the Territory immediately, his holdings to be confiscated (without compensation of any kind) and appended to the Koötenais reservations.

  IV)The proceedings of this Commission, and all papers which it considered, and all evidence gathered by dint of its powers, are to remain CLASSIFIED and UNPUBLISHED for a period of no less than seventy years.

  The names of these Commissioners are never to be revealed; and the matter, now deemed concluded, is never to be revisited.

  Signed: **** ***** (Brig. Gen., Presiding);

  ***** **** **** (Maj. Gen.)

  and ***** ********* (Major)

  Given this day, XII January, 1868,

  At the city of Washington,

  The District of Columbia,

  The United States of America.

  CHAPTER 73

  THE LAST RIDE OF THE APOSTLES

  FIRST DAY OF SEVEN

  Wednesday, December 26th

  Her husband stumbles out of the coppice with a Colt repeater in his hand, having convinced himself, wrongly, that he heard a rattlesnake in the bracken. His face is leathery. He looks traumatized and tired. The vein in his forehead is rope-like.

  The Indian tracker is angry with the Irishmen, one of whom is translating his signs. He is a mute, the Indian, or so he claims, though Lucia is not certain this is the truth. It is a desecration to discharge a weapon in this locale, he insists. The burial ground remains holy even though it has not been used in twenty years; to disrespect it is to spit in the faces of the dead. The Irishmen pretend to listen even as they are priming the fuses. He warns them they will be sorry, will bring down a curse. They laugh; push him away. They say his smell is the curse.

  They do not understand that cannon, she knows. Her husband is trying to explain its workings, but she is not sure he understands it either. He cannot leave anything mechanical unexplained. It has always been one of his shortcomings. The squabble grows louder. Some of them are shouting in Gaelic. Elizabeth looks up at them from the river.

  He saw them used often during the War, he insists, for breaking up bunkers, for digging out diehards. When they get to Fort Stornaway this machine will prove its worth. There is a rat at Fort Stornaway will need digging out.

  Creed, the former rebel, looks hard at her husband. He does not like the equation of ‘diehard’ with ‘rat’. She can see that her husband regrets his choice of words. Creed lets it pass. Stands away.

  The explosion rocks the ground. The whiz of the mortar. It sails into the forest, over the crests of the sequoias, and a wrenching splintering bursts from the woods as it lands in some place unseen. Birds soar out of the burning pine-tops. Some beast utters a shriek of abjection.

  ‘Guess she’s workin,’ Hannigan says, slapping the barrel of the cannon as a farmer the haunches of a milkcow.

  Hannigan is the one who most enjoys machinery. Face blackened with smoke and cinders. They say he murdered rebel prisoners: she can imagine this happening. They say he has a wife someplace. She feels pity for his wife. The thought of him naked is terrifying. Only a few hours since they rode out of Redemption and already she is feeble with the cold. It blasts you in this Territory, needles a way into your pores. It is like a torturer finding out the secrets of your body. The thought that this stupidity will last seven days – incomprehensible now. How did she agree to it?

  Winterton sits on a rock near the streamlet. He appears to be sketching the Indian.

  EXHIBIT21A: ANONYMOUS LETTER TO JOHN FINTAN DUGGAN WRITTEN BY IRISH CONFEDERATE SYMPATHIZERS IN THE TERRITORY INTERCEPTED & COPIED BY THE FEDERAL AUTHORITIES

  Prisoner 435v

  Richmond Prison,

  Virginia.

  May VII, 1866

  Honored Lieutenant, Sir:

  We are a committee of private citizens of the Mountain Territory, sons of Old Ireland all. Providence has favored our endeavors since we came into this country, thus we dare, who deeply admire your patriotism, to frame this impertinent interruption.

  You cannot know our delight to have learned that your release impends, for which to God we offer thanks, and to you, sincerest congratulation. Our joy for you and Mrs Duggan has been tempered, nonetheless, by a matter that has troubled our consciences.

  Dear Friend – if we may presume to address you thus: we hope that a desire to assist does not prevail over tact, the courtesy due to any so far above us as you stand; but we have read that you experience a certain difficulty at present, an impediment that has been known by many great men, and by lesser such as ourselves, in former times, when family and love of country were the only wealth we knew. Treasure it was, in those leaner days, to have the example of John Duggan to shine before our children. We wish, if you will permit us – we dare to ask that you do – to assist a staunch friend of Ireland.

  Some of us own a plot of land in a north-western Territory, which we wish you would accept as your own. Furthermore, the deed is already completed; you will find it in this packet, and shall see, when you study it, that title rests entirely with you and your heirs; the conveyance merely awaits your signature before an attorney. The property was purchased, we vouchsafe, with honest money, some years ago when land in the Territory was inexpensively had. The plain truth is that one of us had hoped to mine the plot for silver, but it proved entirely worthless for that purpose.

  No mortgage or lien outstands on the property. It comprises a couple of acres, with outbuildings and a log-house, which latter, though in poor repair, could be built up again. It might do very neatly, but, even if it proved wanting, you would have sufficient of land on which to build a better; and of assisting hands a plenitude. It is not, Respected Sir, anything approaching what you deserve; but you would be among friends who love you.

  A tributary of the Missouri waters the acreage. There is adequate fishing and hunting, so that a man and his wife may eat. Lest it be thought
that the burdens of farming might be too much to take up, at these, with profound respectfulness, the years of most maturity, we should say that the hiring of a boy or two would lighten the load, with perhaps an overseer to boss them. We have among our settlers many Irish of every county, often knowledgeable on culturing and animal husbandry. We are adequately stocked with Negroes, most are biddable and clean, for the disruptive meet rapid correction. We have Swedes, Danes, and Germans, and the men make good hands. Our Norwaymen, also, are large-framed and strong and will work an honest day for a dollar and a grubstake. We might add, for it will concern a man of your piety, that Christians of the white race predominate here. Indeed, some of us have determined to have us a little south in the north-west, with her courtesies, traditions, and time-proven ways.

  Your vista would be a wild one of mountain and lake, agreeable to any Hibernian who ever reminisces of his motherland. Our savages are quelled; submission has been schooled into them. Our country is large. Here a man has room to go about. He may choose his own society and live by his own lights. Down-easting Yankee doctrines on the intermingling of the races, fashionable among the guilt-ridden hypocrites of New England, are regarded out here as dangerous sheckoonery. There is never any need, for the man of the West, to meet one he wishes to avoid.

  Honored Sir, lest there be any question of disinclination to accept a charitable hand, which reluctance we know would be the prime impulse of any manly Irish heart, permit us to state, on our solemn honor as your countrymen, that no condition appends to our proposition. Nor even do we wish to be identified to you at the present, for we feel certain, forgive our discourtesy, which is not intended, that you would attempt, out of pride, to reverse or cancel our deed, whereas we, stubborn men, have determined to press it. We shall welcome you delightedly when you are come to be our neighbor. Our wives shall greet Mrs Duggan, in excellence their model, as a respected, a beloved sister.