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

by Thomas Keneally

  Eva, living in a rough wooden house in a sub-tropic torpor of dazzling light and fierce summers, was dislocated from the source of her verse. She gave birth to two babies, a boy and a girl, in 1862 and 1864 respectively, and lost both of them in the first year of life. The infant death-rate was high in Queensland, with its hastily erected, ill-drained, sweltering towns. Perhaps Kevin’s later reputation as a public health champion derived from the grief of these losses. In 1865, with his medical renown enhanced, the O’Dohertys moved to Brisbane. Kevin had civic tendencies, and in a town of 13,000, many of whom lived in what the Brisbane Courier described as ‘paltry humpies’ with fly-blown sanitary arrangements, he was soon elected a visiting surgeon by the subscribers of the Brisbane hospital, at a time when the premises were a former convict hospital. But almost at once plans for a new hospital were announced, as if to break the link with the penal origins of the Moreton Bay region with which Dr O’Doherty was not totally unacquainted. Perhaps old ticket-of-leave men recognised the good doctor in the street as the former segregated State prisoner of their ship, the Elphinstone.

  His rooms were in Edwards Street, Brisbane, and on the basis of consultations there and at the nearby Brisbane hospital, O’Doherty was esteemed by the mid-1860s as one of Brisbane’s two leading surgeons. He was considered such a good after-dinner speaker that despite his rebel youth he was elected surgeon to the Brisbane Volunteer Rifle Corps, and had no problem doing what Eva avoided: drinking the Loyal Toast. Like D’Arcy McGee in Canada, living under happier institutions than those of Ireland, he did not intend to violate the civic pieties. He donned morning dress and top hat each year to attend levees in honour of the queen’s birthday given by a succession of governors. Eva expended energy on running efficient stalls at fund-raising fêtes for hospitals and schools. But she was a stall-holder with a difference—she was au fait with Irish and Fenian politics, since she received occasional briefings by mail from John Martin. She liked the women of Queensland but felt a certain nullity and fear in them. They were distanced from what they considered the sources of culture and unsure of their place on the map.

  In 1867, the Irish community urged O’Doherty to stand for election for the Queensland Legislative Assembly as a candidate for North Brisbane. Some feared, however, that in the legislature he would be merely a voice for his friend Bishop Quinn. In one of his four campaign speeches, he said:

  A generation ago when I was a young man with hot blood in me, I was mistaken enough as some supposed, to risk my life and lose my liberty in an attempt to secure civil and religious liberty for my native country … I had seen the effect of civil and religious liberty in Australia, and I determined to come out and settle amongst you. It is not likely that I came out with the desire to impose fetters, the existence of which compelled me to leave my own country.

  On election day, Saint Kevin was called out of town on a medical visit, and while returning asked a passer-by how the voting had gone. The man announced, in Ulster brogue, ‘Bad enough, that bloody papist O’Doherty got in.’ As a representative in the Queensland Parliament, O’Doherty took an anti-pastoralist line—unlock the land and bring in the immigrants! Having diagnosed wives who had unknowingly contracted syphilis from their husbands, he proposed compulsory medical examination of prostitutes. He was launched too on what would become a long campaign for the reform of the archaic and abusive Woogaroo asylum, in which the expatriate Irish were notably represented, exiles from softer air and more ambiguous suns.

  The O’Dohertys, especially Saint Kevin, appeared to be tranquil souls. The former felon had found a political system which he believed had room for him, and noble-hearted Eva, with no outlet for her voice, supported him in his doctoring and his political career. She had time to write only intermittently to her confidant Martin, but received from him reliable news of old friends. Pat Smyth, for example, was living in Normandy with his Tasmanian wife and children—letters of his had been found amongst the materials seized at the raid on the Irish People in 1865, and, though not active in the movement, he feared arrest. ‘A queer, solitary, suspicious, nervous grey-headed man, he is become. Such are the results of our unhappy Irish politics.’ Martin’s picture of the new Ireland must indeed have reconciled Eva somewhat to Queensland. ‘God help the poor Fenians,’ he said, ‘who are now breaking stones in the jails of England or pining in the jails of Ireland.’

  In June 1867, Meagher, expecting the muskets Sherman had promised, undertook a journey from the gubernatorial seat in Virginia City to Fort Benton, 200 or so miles in hot weather. He had half a dozen of his officers for escort. The arrival of arms, this first token of federal favour, would have, he knew, a large impact upon future militia recruiting.

  Mrs Meagher accompanied her husband as far as Helena and kissed him farewell. For Meagher himself, the leg from Helena to Benton was the least appealing of his excursions. The refreshing splendour of the mountain country slowly vanished behind the riders, and the way ahead lay across a bare, rolling, high plain, monotonous, hot and featuring, by courtesy of the spring rains and the wallowing of buffalo, sumps of black mud sometimes miles across. Fort Benton figured in the governor’s and in America’s plans; it was as far as steamers from St Louis could beat their way upstream on the Missouri. And from Benton, the Mullen Trail ran west to Idaho, Washington and Oregon. On the south bank of its deep green river, and set amongst cottonwoods beneath brilliant red bluffs, Benton featured at the western end of the town a substantial log fort and then, strung out along the bank, the traders, taverns and victuallers of the new West.

  Meagher’s party had had to make a series of long detours to circumvent mud holes and buffalo wallows, and he was ill as much from bad water as plenteous whiskey by the time he came over the last rise, saw Fort Benton, and rode down into it on 1 July, the last day of his life. Witnesses say that as he travelled up the main street, Meagher heard a man cry emphatically, ‘There he goes!’ He interpreted it as a death threat. Some attributed his reaction to tiredness, or perhaps to alcoholic delusion. If delirium tremens could be proved to posterity, then his death could be more credibly depicted as the culminating tipsy accident of his career.

  Visiting the three steamers in the river, the general was disappointed to find that none of them had brought the rifles. So he went by invitation into I. G. Baker’s one-storey storehouse and residence to rest. Baker would do so well trading with travellers to the West and buying skins from trappers that his little split-log store would generate a large corporation and a St Louis bank. He later told a journalist: ‘General Meagher stopped a couple of days in Sun River on his way to Benton, and I believe he got on a bender there, but I met him at the wharf when he arrived in Fort Benton and took him to my house. I am prepared to swear that he was stone sober.’ He kindly gave Meagher some blackberry wine to ease his stomach and bowels, and after a time, the governor got up and rode along the riverbank west to visit the fort. He came back more distressed still. Although apparently Meagher did not say as much, Baker surmised that his guest had received further concrete notification of his death.

  There is overall to Meagher’s last day, as related by those who had reasons for enmity towards him, an expectation that in accepting their version of what befell him, we should not only discount what Baker and others tell us but also ignore all we already know about his character; in particular his characteristic boldness. The governor was a man until that day patently not easy to scare, a man who had stood fast both in government and in some of the most ferocious battles of the Civil War. Was all his concern that long June day credibly to be written off to paranoia, gastritis and alcoholism? Was it not halfway credible that at the fort the Vigilantes, having already threatened Meagher’s life once, had renewed their threat?

  G. A. Thompson, one of three steamers along the bank, had taken more than three months to get up the Missouri from St Louis to Benton, and had had to unload twice during the trip to clear sandbars. Johnny Doran, Irish master of this vessel, went ashore looking
for the governor and found him reading a newspaper in the back of Baker’s store. The Irish-born Doran was ecstatic to meet Meagher of the Sword in this remote port. Decades later, on 8 June 1913, his account of Meagher’s last afternoon would appear in the New York Sun. According to the aged Doran, the depressed state of Thomas Francis Meagher’s health was due not to any binge in Sun River but to a 6-day dysentery attack. Similarly, Meagher was disappointed that the arms had not arrived. He intended to press on to Camp Cook on the Judith in hope of finding them stored there. ‘He also spoke in the most tender and affectionate terms of his wife, residing at Helena, saying that in their mountain home they were as happy as two thrushes in a bush.’ Seeing that Meagher was genuinely concerned for his safety, Doran invited him to use one of the staterooms on the Thompson, and so get a good night’s rest. Doran’s steamer was moored between two others, the Guidon and Amelia Poe.

  Doran and Meagher strolled through the town that afternoon—Meagher feeling safe in the open, amongst witnesses. ‘Thus, in walking and talking, we spent the afternoon and, toward evening, wended our way to the boat to take tea.’ The two of them sat on chairs by the guard rails of the boat, lit their cigars and commenced reading. Doran had loaned the general a book, The Collegians by Gerald Griffin, a great favourite amongst Irish Americans. ‘He seemed to peruse it with great attention for half an hour, when suddenly, closing it, he turned to me, and said very excitedly, “Johnny, they threatened my life in that town!” ’ It was then he asked Doran for a revolver. The sun went down and after a light supper, Doran showed Meagher to a stateroom, reassured him that the door could be opened only from the inside, and left him a revolver. Doran intended to return later in the night to occupy the lower berth.

  ‘Now the lock on the door leading into the cabin was very defective,’ said Doran, ‘but I did not mind it much, as I intended to return without delay. I had been on the lower deck but a short time when I heard a splash in the dark waters below.’ Doran said he heard two groans, the first very short, ‘the last prolonged and of a most heart-rending description.’ He and the sentry rushed to the paddle-wheel and lowered themselves hip-deep into the water, looking in darkness for the man overboard while others threw out ropes and boards. Nothing was found. ‘The river below is dotted with innumerable small islands of different and various areas, the activity of hostile Indians preventing us from exploring the ones furthest down; and no doubt the body of the gallant but unfortunate General was washed ashore on one of them.’

  I. G. Baker recounted, ‘About nine o’clock the dock watchman came into my room, where I was sitting by the window and said he’d just seen a man fall off the boat, and disappear under the keel of another boat. He seemed to be vomiting and lost his balance, the watchman said.’

  The drunken accident version would become the standard version in Montana, though many disbelieved it. If Meagher was as terrified as reported, would he have got up, opened his own stateroom door, and wandered to the stern? So far was Meagher from being either sick or drunk, he was clearheaded enough to write to friends before retiring. Richard O’Gorman, New York lawyer, would receive a letter addressed to him from the cabin that evening in Meagher’s decisive, spiky hand. Certainly, a bout of sickness could have driven him out, but it would have needed to be very desperate and very sudden.

  Meagher’s army friend William Lyons, now a New York journalist, mentioned, accurately or not, that the guard rails in front of Meagher’s door had been accidentally broken. Lyons wrote: ‘there was a coil of rope on the verge of the deck, over which he stumbled, throwing him off balance, and while grasping vainly for the guard—which was not there—he fell into the dark, rushing river.’ But Lyons was writing at second hand, in New York. No one in Benton, neither Baker nor Dolan, mentioned the missing guard rails. Distance from the site muted the suspicion of Meagher’s friends, and no one in New York seemed to voice the same suspicions as a modern commentator on Meagher, Chris Stephens, that the death was the work of ‘the twelve organisers of the Vigilantes, eleven of whom were freemasons who had dealings as well with British Pinkerton men.’ This scenario, especially the Pinkerton men, is impossible to prove. But the credibility of Vigilante involvement remains. Other historians and a number of Montana newspapers have raised over the last 130 years or more the possibility that Meagher, summoned to Washington in disgrace, committed suicide. ‘All lies,’ says I. G. Baker. ‘He was not bound for Washington, but for the mouth of the Judith … He was not in low spirits.’

  A grieving Libby rode up over the harsh, dusty, boggy plain to visit the site. It seemed that she accepted her husband’s death as an awful accident. She arranged extensive patrols of the Missouri downriver, but when the fall came without her husband’s body being found, she returned to New York. There she lived a widow for the next forty years.

  Meagher’s death, accidental or planned, brought no immediate success to the Republican cause. Wilbur Fiske Sanders stood again for Congress but was defeated by James N. Cavanaugh, Democrat. And only one Republican was elected to the next territorial legislature. These routs were seen as endorsements by the people of Montana of Meagher’s policies. And though Sanders would claim in the Helena Herald and elsewhere to have been the best of friends and neighbours to Meagher, Meagher had early told Secretary of State Seward that Sanders was the ‘most vicious of my enemies, an unrelenting and unscrupulous extremist.’

  The Helena battalion of Governor Meagher’s little militia was engaged in a brief summer campaign against the Indians, while far away at St Francis Xavier’s Church on 16th Street New York on Wednesday 14 July, a Solemn Requiem Mass was celebrated, organised by the officers of the brigade. Cherubini’s Requiem was performed, and survivors of the Irish Brigade, though not in uniform, each wore a sprig of box tree, their badge since that brutal day at Fredericksburg. The officers of the Irish Brigade were still not sure about Meagher’s rank. One of them wrote to the War Department about it, but there is no reply on record.

  To the other potential causes of Meagher’s death—Vigilantes, accident-cum-delirium tremens, suicide—must be added the remote possibility of an unauthorised Fenian assassination. Meagher’s very abstention from the Canada campaign, his embracing of Montana, may have appeared to a fanatic as treachery. The idea that Fenians at any official level resented Meagher runs counter to his friendship with Andrew O’Connell, Head Centre of Montana. Meagher shared business interests with O’Connell, and had written to him earlier in the year about a patent for some processing, drilling, or crushing machine: ‘Walch’s patent, I should say, is safe—hurrah! … The fewer people knowing anything about this now, the better.’ For the nearly four decades of Elizabeth Meagher’s widowhood O’Connell would be her Montana friend and supporter, supervising the financial interests—shares in mineral leases—which the Meaghers had acquired during their brief, intense history in Montana. In 1902 Elizabeth Meagher had left New York and come to reside in a cottage in Rye, New York, which ‘I’ve bought and named after the old house of the O’Meaghers in Tipperary. I came to end my days here, but the city of NY is taxing my small income so heavily that I do not know if I can stand it.’ She asked O’Connell, still her helper, if he could sell for her a one-third share of a Helena gold-mine.

  As Libby aged, it became fashionable amongst some to look upon the Acting One and Montana as temperamentally ill-matched, as the writer Joaquin Miller argued. ‘The impetuous Meagher, true to his race and record, set Montana on fire in less time than it takes to write his strange life and long deeds of endeavor and achievements.’ He had ‘no comprehension at all of the Montanese.’ If so, it is hard to understand why his equestrian statue stands so dominantly today before the front door of the Montana legislature. Perhaps it was only an influential minority of Montanese that he did not comprehend. For in the last two years of Libby’s life, she was consoled, though too aged to attend, by the gala on 4 July 1905, when what seemed a majority of the state turned out in front of the Montana State House in Helena under
a bright sky to see the Stars and Stripes removed from Meagher’s huge statue. So her husband had won the battle of symbolism.

  But the mystery of his death also made it inevitable that she had to bear sensational press reports, and even a travelling freak show that purported to display his remains. Photographs of a Petrified Man appeared in New York papers in 1899: the remains of an ossified man had been found below Fort Benton by a farmer and hauled by wagon to Yellowstone, where the curiosity was sold for $2,500 to a Mr Arthur Miles who then exhibited it at fairs, claiming it to be the body of General Meagher, petrified through freakish physical causes but retaining in the middle of the forehead a bullet hole. For the better part of twenty years the exhibit would be shown at fairs in the United States and, as an ultimate irony, was shipped to Australia, a supposed second transportation, and made the rounds of agricultural shows in New South Wales.

  In heavily Irish Butte, Montana, the proposition that he was killed by Vigilantes is still widely accepted. In June 1913, some years after Libby’s own death, a pioneer named Pat Millar, alias Frank Diamond, on the verge of expiring in Kalispell, Montana, confessed to having murdered Meagher on behalf of the Vigilantes for a pay-out of $8,000. Recovering, Diamond recanted the story. Immediately one Dave Mack, in Montana since 1865, said that Pat Millar’s statement was true—he had heard Millar and others tell the story many times. Meagher had been taken from the boat at Fort Benton by a party of ten Vigilantes, executed and secretly buried. ‘Meagher had ample warning,’ Mack related. ‘When Daniels was hanged there was sent the Governor a piece of the rope, about six inches long, by the Pony Express accompanied by this message: “It don’t take a bigger rope to hang the Governor of Montana than it does to hang a horse thief or a murderer.” ’

  Leaders of society vouched for David Mack’s reliability. The son of Wilbur Fiske Sanders rushed into print to claim wrongly that the depredations of the Vigilantes had ceased years before Meagher’s death. Meagher was a significant ghost in Montana, and remains so to this day.