The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

by Thomas Keneally

  O’Mahony welcomed him back to New York, but Mitchel was fed up with the Fenians. ‘I do not wish your branch of the organisation or that of Mr. Roberts, to use my name in any manner whatsoever.’ He began to argue, as he would never have done once, that the Fenian Brotherhood, given ‘the interium in interio they propose to create in the US,’ was inconsistent with the members’ duties as US citizens.

  He found that his three remaining children were flourishing. His daughter Minnie had married a former Confederate Colonel Page, and Isabelle married a Dr Sloane and converted, like her late sister Henrietta, to Catholicism. Mitchel and Jenny took a house in the Bronx, near Fordham University and Mitchel recommenced publication of the Irish Citizen. It would run only briefly, until July 1867, and was strongly Democratic, opposing in particular President Grant. But his Letters on Fenianism were so critical of the movement as to seriously injure circulation amongst the Irish. He had not lost the old gift to offend both sides of an argument.

  Fenianism was still alive in Montana. At the small army outpost on the Judith, where he had greeted Governor Meagher, Lieutenant Martin E. Hogan of the 13th US Infantry was a typical military Fenian. He ran a lively correspondence with the Fenian Centre for Montana, the Union war veteran Andrew O’Connell, who lived in Helena and Blackfoot City and was a close friend of the Meaghers. At the war’s commencement, Hogan had enlisted as an 18-year-old in a cavalry unit from Terre Haute, Indiana. Commissioned in the field for retrieving General Rosecrans’s flag at Carnifax Ferry in 1861, he was ultimately promoted to captain. Captured in 1864, he served eleven months in Andersonville prison, from which he escaped, to become ultimately a witness against the commandant, Henry Wirz, condemned to death for crimes against humanity.

  In a silken Montana night, by lamplight, with the pickets out to guard against the Blackfoot and the Sioux, Hogan wrote to Mr O’Connell about Irish matters, a meeting with James Stephens at the Metropolitan Hotel in New York. ‘He spoke very hopefully and with unmistakable confidence of the future of Ireland.’ Hogan looked forward to Fenians being permitted an unimpeded invasion of Canada. ‘I shall make it my business to be somewhere in that vicinity with a squadron of Irish Cavalry. This is an inclination of a lot of Irishmen in the army.’

  But the hope of leading Fenian cavalry into Canada was thwarted by the follies of 1866. Here was a soldier heavily involved in the Union’s affairs, maintaining a parallel existence as a committed Fenian. Nor did he see Fenianism as detracting from his duty to the United States. One reinforced the other. ‘I’ve often told brother officers that when that event took place, I would bid the mess goodbye. They laugh and don’t believe me.’ But, ‘America has been kind to me. As proof of the impartial kindness, she has in a few short years placed me, a Stranger on her Shores, while yet a boy, in a position that, if duty called me to England, England’s Queen would receive me as her equal or not at all.’ Irish affairs would in the end fail to give him the pretext to leave his post, and in 1873, he was still creeping up the seniority pole towards his captaincy in Fort Randall, Dakota Territory.

  In Washington in the summer of 1866, a new governor was in fact appointed to replace Edgerton. He was Green Clay Smith, a well-connected Kentuckian in his early thirties. He had fought as a Union officer in the Civil War but was not an automatic member of the old Montana clique. Of course, appointment was easy, but reaching Montana was tough. So Meagher would be Montana Territory’s chief executive until Green Clay Smith, which would not be until early October 1866. Having then met and liked Meagher, within a few weeks he applied for a five months’ leave to visit Washington on business. At that stage Meagher himself—who had served in the territory a year—had decided to resign his military secretaryship. He might have wanted to meet with his father and son in France, as he had mentioned in a letter to Waterford the previous summer. He seemed also to have commercial schemes, and to be planning to stand for Congress in the elections of 1868. But Clay Smith urged Meagher to stay on, and sent a telegraph to the President asking him not to accept Meagher’s resignation. Meagher approved of Green Clay Smith, described him as ‘a genial, light-hearted, high-minded young fellow,’ and so agreed.

  Early in the New Year of 1867, Smith departed for the East on a steamer from Fort Benton, and once more Meagher was what even he had now begun to call himself, ‘the Acting One.’

  Elizabeth Meagher had arrived in Montana, and for the Meaghers the summer of 1866 was a blessed and hopeful season. From the executive offices in Virginia City Meagher was able to write to Samuel M. Barlow about ‘a truly delightful excursion of fully three months through the Western portion of our territory’ from which ‘Lib and I returned last week.’ It was a country of bracing air, august mountains, wonderful camp-sites by huge lakes. But it was true that his political enemies, the Radical Republicans as he called them, diminished the peerless territory Libby and he rode through. ‘Every day intensifies my hatred of the Radicals—I see them here face to face, in such colours as I fail to perceive them in the greater crowds of the Eastern cities. So fiercely do I detest them, I am often on the brink of wishing that the South had won the day in the field.’ But he was delighted to recount the result of the latest legislature election: ‘thirty … staunch Union Democrats to three emasculated disunion Radicals.’

  Like other friends, and indeed enemies, Barlow surmised Meagher had his eye on the Senate. Meagher’s answer could be considered coy. ‘I’d infinitely prefer, any day,’ he told a number of correspondents including Barlow, ‘to have a splendid yacht, a box at the opera, and a four-in-hand, than have a seat for six years in the Senate.’ Perhaps he thought he might, through Montana’s mineral wealth and numerous Democrats, achieve both. But not yet. When, in early July 1866, the territorial Democrat convention urged him to accept the nomination to Congress, he had ‘obstinately’ declined, ‘Not being rich enough as yet to support the grand responsibilities of position.’

  The work of the ‘Radicals’ of the territory had been to send to Washington a lobby group, of which Wilbur F. Sanders was a member, and over the coming winter to persuade Congress to nullify the laws of Meagher’s two 1866 legislatures; in March 1867, on motions of Congressman Ashley of Ohio and Senator Ben Wade, a congressional Act to this effect would be vengefully passed. A commentator in Montana wrote: ‘Certain Republican office holders smilingly marched up to the crib and drew their back pay under the law they had thus revivified.’

  Republicans and the Blackfoot both remained the Acting One’s grief. From the eastern side of the Rockies, Meagher received in the summer of 1866 many representations about unregulated bands of young Blackfoot who had left the reservations and attacked travellers and remotely placed settlers. He began asking General Sherman, commanding the Department of the Missouri, for a larger garrison. He had, he said, just ridden up to Fort Benton, and the country along the way between Virginia City in the south of Montana territory and Fort Benton in the central north had plenty of forage to support cavalry. Now he wanted Sherman to send at least 850 men, and to make Montana a separate military district. Sherman answered from St Louis: ‘Were I to grant one/tenth part of the calls on me from Montana to Texas, I would have to call for 100,000 men, whereas I doubt if I should expect to have 10,000 men in all. You ask for a Regiment of Cavalry. I have only the 2nd for Montana, Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico.’

  Meagher’s quarrel was not with the Blackfoot elders and chiefs, who had already made their accommodation with the government for good and ill. In the spring of 1866, Meagher had officiated in Fort Benton at the concluding phases of an uneasy and long-disputed treaty between the Federal government and a number of the elders of that series of tribes and clans generally named the Blackfoot, but including Bloods and Piegans. The Post recorded that ‘the Red delegates’ seated themselves before the blanket-covered seats which had been laid before them, and faced Gade Upson, the Indian Agent, General Meagher in his role as Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and US Judge Lyman Munson as
legal counsel to the government. The Blackfoot elders had been persuaded by the offer of annual payments, by pressure of settlers and fear of horse soldiers, to cede a massive area of lands northwards and eastwards of Virginia City and Helena, including all land along the Teton River near Fort Benton, along the Marias, and along the Missouri River as far as the Milk River. That is, they consented to limit themselves to the area now identified as the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in eastern Montana. In the spirit of the day, the Montana Democrat declared: ‘So we concluded a treaty in the highest degree advantageous to the whites: which gave over to us all that vast extent of country (embracing between two and three hundred thousand square miles) in which is situated our largest towns—Helena, Virginia City, Bannack.’

  A few days after the treaty with the Blackfoot, a large party of young tribesmen stole horses from a rancher and killed a herder. A war party of Bloods killed two white men on the Musselshell River and rode unabashedly into Fort Benton with horses, saddles and arms. Two white prospectors setting out from Fort Benton were killed by a Blackfoot party in the Bears Paw Mountains 50 miles downriver from Benton. On top of that, four men who left the mouth of the Judith River to come to Fort Benton vanished utterly. At a newly opened Fenian Library in Deerlodge County near Helena in late 1866, Meagher made a speech that eloquently showed how Irish Americans saw no parallel between Irish dispossession and the crisis for the tribes. ‘The rascalities in crimes, robberies and murders, with which the liberality of the United States was repaid, might well be cited with condemnation of the costly and wasteful policy with which it was believed in Washington the Indians could be tamed and subsidised.’

  In the winter of 1866–7 Virginia City hunched down in its high canyon amidst rumours that in the spring Red Cloud intended to lead some 4,000 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapahoe into the Gallatin Valley to the east of the capital and clear the white settlers away. These bands were themselves refugees from the encroachment of the railroad further south, but they caused considerable fear throughout the territory. Meagher would later be accused of orchestrating this fear, but it could be argued that the locals did not need orchestration. John Bozeman, for example, a resident of the Gallatin Valley, wrote to Meagher asking for protection. Meagher telegraphed General Grant that immediate action was necessary. ‘We earnestly entreat permission from the War Department to raise a force of 1,000.’ Grant, in the process of dealing with Fenian border activity, noted on the back of Meagher’s telegram, ‘The citizens of Montana ought to have some organization to defend themselves … and if the services rendered by them warrant it, they should afterward look to Congress for compensation.’

  When news came from the Gallatin Valley late in the winter that John Bozeman had been killed by a party of Blackfoot Indians, the Helena Herald’s headlines shouted: ‘THE PANIC AMONG THE GALLATIN SETTLERS! … THEIR APPEAL TO GOVERNOR MEAGHER AND THE PEOPLE OF THE TERRITORY!’ The sense of desperation felt by the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Blackfoot and the Crow at the shrinkage of their traditional ground and their food resources has been well documented. Meagher was facing a land war, although he did not interpret it in those terms. And on 8 February 1867 the distracting news came to him from eastern Montana that three officers and ninety men, part of the garrison of Fort Phil Kearny in the Dakota Territory, had been surrounded by a party of 2,000 Sioux and Cheyenne Indians and slaughtered. Green Clay Smith himself telegraphed Sherman asking him for a battery of mountain howitzers, a request which Sherman dismissed. Clay Smith urged Meagher to preserve his present friendly relations with the Crow Indians in the Big Horn area, near present-day Billings, who could serve as a buffer between the Sioux and the settlers near Virginia City.

  Immediately after the military massacre, Meagher called for 600 volunteers for three months’ service in the Gallatin Valley and on the Yellowstone River, in the south central area of Montana. So urgent did the need seem to the whites of the territory, panicked or otherwise, that one of Meagher’s virulent enemies, Henry Blake of the Montana Post, volunteered to lead the new military force. The volunteer force mustered in Helena and Virginia City. Like the Fenian army, it possessed plenty of officers, but also a rank and file, and for now it was kept together, billeted and fed at territory expense.

  Sherman wrote to Secretary of War Stanton: ‘Meagher, in Montana, is a stampeder.’ He was supported in this view by the new Indian Agent in Montana, Chapman: ‘Acting-Governor Meagher’s Indian War in Montana is the biggest humbug of the age, got up to advance his political interest, and to enable a lot of businessmen who surround and hang on to him to make a big raid on the United States treasury.’ But Meagher’s friends in business did not see a grand and instant bonanza in an Indian War. Any bills would be paid late by a distant Congress and pared down by Congressional vote. And having singularly denounced Meagher, General Sherman said that the other governors of the western territories were not much better. Governor Alexander C. Hunt of Colorado had also informed Sherman and the Secretary of War that his state was about to be overrun. But Sherman told Secretary of War Stanton that he had spoken to Governor Green Clay Smith on his way back east through St Louis. ‘He understands with me that the grant to them of 2,500 muskets, dispatched by one of the first boats up the Missouri, was all the people asked to enable them to defend themselves.’ That musket shipment would in fact serve as a tragic catalyst.

  As Meagher had been hoping, authority did come through to Virginia City from Sherman acknowledging that Washington would permit a battalion of 800 men for two months’ campaigning to be funded by the United States. Meagher issued vouchers to various Montana suppliers, who bumped up prices to cover the uncertainty about whether the vouchers would ever be honoured.

  Soon the Acting One had his militia in place at Camp Elizabeth Meagher, near one of the principal passes leading over the Madison Range into the Gallatin. A rumour reached Washington that Meagher had sent his volunteers out saying that they could keep Indian property they captured—robes, decorative and ritual items, horses, rifles. The east was watching, sometimes in judgment, sometimes in whimsy. The New York Herald of 31 May 1867 wrote almost benevolently, ‘If anyone can carry it to a successful issue, he is as good at a palaver as at a fight, and his eloquence is just of the character to suit the Indians. He will quiet them by talking their heads off—a much less costly and more humane process than that of exterminating them.’

  The spring threat of 1867 would not develop. Between April and June 1867, the volunteers did not come in contact with any Indians but were occupied principally in patrol duty. Not that all of them were available for such work at once. Meagher’s complaint about his militia—‘I am Commander-in-Chief, not of an invincible, but of an invisible militia’—was uttered in a number of letters, and remained for a time the Acting One’s favourite joke. The militia numbered at any time no more than 200 men, with the task of keeping open lines of communication from Fort Benton to Helena and Virginia City. As well they had the east-west task of keeping the road open between Butte and Bozeman.

  It was already early summer 1867 when Meagher wrote to Sam Barlow saying that he had been away ‘posting our volunteers 200 miles from here, against the Indians. Governor Smith has not yet relieved me … On his arrival I shall be free—and right glad it will make me to be so for I am downright sick of serving the Gvt in a civil capacity.’ He had already asked for Barlow’s help concerning a Major Vielé, who wished to acquire mining crushers, for work on various promising quartz leads around Helena. ‘I am perfectly satisfied that any interest you might purchase in it would prove splendidly productive—I am, myself, largely interested in it and have no doubt that my share will be a little fortune in itself.’ He sent his affection to Barlow’s two children, whom in earlier letters he had called ‘the Mysteries’ but whom now he dubbed the ‘Birds of Paradise.’

  The militia, of similar mind to their leader, began to fade away in late spring 1867, in part because in their patrols they had come across likely gold-panning sites they wanted
to test out during the summer.

  Meagher was aware that his old friend from VDL, the physician Kevin Izod O’Doherty, with whom he had satirically dined halfway across the stone bridge at the penal settlement of Tunbridge, was back in Australia. The O’Dohertys had moved with their children to the new northern Australian state of Queensland at the beginning of 1862, at the same time as the Irish Brigade was manoeuvring towards its first bloody Virginian confrontations. Perhaps Saint Kevin and Eva would not have gone north to the raw colony of Queensland but for their Dublin friend Bishop Quinn, first bishop of the region, but when they did, they settled not in the capital, Brisbane, but rather in what some would call a backwater, the inland town and former convict outstation named Ipswich, with a population of 3,500. O’Doherty was only the fourteenth physician to be officially registered as a medical practitioner in Queensland. Since he was well enough qualified to open a surgery anywhere, one modern writer suggests that his purpose in going to Ipswich may have been to keep an eye on an enemy of Bishop Quinn’s, Father McGinty, the parish priest, a turbulent priest used to operating until now far beyond the reach of fussy bishops.

  Saint Kevin became honorary surgeon at the Ipswich hospital, where a number of his procedures were praised in print in the North Australian. One of these was a breast cancer operation, in which the woman’s breast was removed but the cancer apparently cured. A second was an operation on the septicaemic ankle of an 8-year-old girl named Anne Kelly, which saved her from an amputation. In another case, the treatment of diamond snake bite, the bitten man was struck across the back with a whip to stop his sliding into coma! These were the bush applications O’Doherty pursued in the days when Fenianism was a-forming and the Confederacy and the Union were locked in bloody attrition.