When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  At the beginning of 1871, powerful voices still backed a simple solution to the problem of the Fenians raiding the Canadian border: Get rid of the border. Nearly four years after the confederation of Canada, the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner continued to call for annexation as a way to solve the deadlock on the Alabama claims—the reparations the Union had demanded for damages incurred from Confederate warships built in English ports. “The greatest trouble, if not peril, being a constant source of anxiety and disturbance, is from Fenianism, which is excited by the British flag in Canada,” he wrote in January 1871. “Therefore, the withdrawal of the British flag cannot be abandoned as a condition or preliminary of such a settlement as is now proposed.”

  While Sumner sought to keep the Alabama claims open for as long as it took until Great Britain ceded Canada or granted its independence, Grant eventually sided with Secretary of State Hamilton Fish, who thought the idea unrealistic. Convinced by Fish of the importance of restoring peaceful relations with Great Britain, Grant called for the reopening of negotiations on the Alabama claims at the same time that Gladstone’s government also expressed its willingness to settle the diplomatic dispute.

  On February 27, 1871, a ten-man joint high commission that included the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, met for the first time inside a library at the U.S. State Department. Grant became a regular presence strolling through Lafayette Square and leaving a trail of cigar smoke in his wake as he visited Fish’s house to receive updates on the negotiations, although he bothered to meet with Macdonald only twice—once to say hello, once to say good-bye. While the Alabama claims were the overriding concern, the commissioners devoted two-thirds of their meetings to issues between Canada and the United States such as Atlantic fisheries, trade, and disputed boundaries.

  On May 8, in the city torched by the British nearly sixty years earlier, the members of the joint high commission scrawled their signatures on the Treaty of Washington. Among its forty-three articles, Great Britain declared remorse “for the escape, under whatever circumstance, of the Alabama and other vessels from British ports, for the depredations committed by those vessels.” The treaty renewed the reciprocity of fisheries as Canada deeply desired, and the two nations were permitted to ship fish and fish products to each other duty-free. The Canadians granted access to the St. Lawrence River in perpetuity and gained the right to travel freely on rivers flowing through Alaska.

  The United States and Great Britain agreed to submit outstanding questions to arbitration. The emperor William I of the newly united German Empire agreed to arbitrate the disputed boundary for the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest. The treaty called for a five-person tribunal—with one member each appointed by Grant, Queen Victoria, the emperor of Brazil, the king of Italy, and the president of the Swiss Confederation—to meet in Geneva and determine the specific damage amount due to the United States for the Alabama claims. (In September 1872, the tribunal ordered Great Britain to pay the United States compensation of $15.5 million.)

  To the fury of some Canadians, already outraged at the toleration of Fenian activities by the American government, the commissioners agreed to drop claims for damages from the Fenian raids. The Gladstone government, instead, assumed the burden of compensating Canadians for the attacks.

  The Fenians weren’t pleased with the treaty either. No longer would the U.S. government turn a blind eye to their Canadian forays, as leverage to get Great Britain to settle the Alabama claims. No longer was the Fenian Brotherhood a useful pawn on the diplomatic chessboard.

  Anglophobia provided the lifeblood of Fenianism. It was inbred in the Irish. But the Treaty of Washington reflected its waning in the United States. With the conditional pardon of the political prisoners from British custody and the passage of Gladstone’s reforms, the Fenian movement lost some of the grievances that fueled its militancy.

  For one militant Fenian, however, hatred of Great Britain could never be diluted. He would make one more last-gasp attempt to strike Canada.

  21

  The Invasion That Wasn’t

  EMBERS DANCED LIKE fireflies and ash fell like snow upon the Fenian wagon train as it rattled north through an American cauldron. An extreme drought in the summer of 1871 had turned the Great Plains into a tinderbox. A red sea of flames washed over the middle of the North American continent from Kansas to Manitoba. Tongues of fire six to twelve feet high fed on the prairie grass and devoured freshly reaped harvests of wheat, oats, and corn, torching months of toil in an instant. Ordinary fire blocks proved impotent. Blazes hurdled over roads and leaped over rivers. The fires were so ferocious that they appeared to ignite spontaneously.

  The first days of autumn brought little relief to a land so parched that even the soil burned. Driven east by scalding winds, the wildfires roared across the prairie like a buffalo stampede.* The inferno bestowed a perpetual twilight upon the middle of America. Great billowing smoke clouds dimmed the sun during the day, while an otherworldly orange glow floating above the horizon brightened the night.

  The black soot of the charred prairie begrimed the faces and darkened the clothing of John O’Neill and a force of twenty-seven Fenians in the last days of September as they tracked the meandering path of the Red River dividing Minnesota from the Dakota Territory as it flowed north.

  In spite of his previous pledges to the White House and his fellow Fenians that he would forever resist such temptations, O’Neill had been seduced yet again by a plan to attack Canada. The chance to cleanse himself of the shame of Eccles Hill and redeem his family name was irresistible. Hugh O’Neill might never have kicked the British out of Ireland as he’d hoped, but at least he had never suffered the shame of having been arrested on the battlefield by a local marshal.

  As he looked out the window of his stagecoach, O’Neill saw the glimmer of the encircling blazes. The fires illuminated the way forward to Canada. Sometimes, though, those inextinguishable flames burned with such ferocity that the acrid smoke prevented the Fenian general from seeing what lay ahead.

  * * *

  This time, the plan to invade Canada wasn’t O’Neill’s but that of another son of Ireland—William Bernard O’Donoghue. When the Fenian general first met O’Donoghue several months earlier, he had seen in the twenty-eight-year-old something he liked—himself. The pair of Great Hunger refugees both favored action over oratory and harbored a smoldering hatred of the British, one that raged behind seemingly placid facades.

  Born in Ireland’s County Sligo, O’Donoghue had already learned to despise the British by the time his family fled to New York City around 1848. Two decades later, the devout Irishman joined the western missions of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada’s Red River Colony, which lay north of Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. O’Donoghue taught mathematics at the College of St.-Boniface and studied for the priesthood, until he found a higher calling in taking up arms against the Crown.

  O’Donoghue joined the Red River Rebellion launched in 1869 by the colony’s dominant ethnic group, the Métis, who drew their lineage from two centuries of intermarriage between French fur traders and Native American women. Fearing the loss of their rights as an ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority, the predominantly French-speaking Catholics launched an uprising to protest the transfer of their land from the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada and the appointment of an English-speaking governor. Led by Louis Riel, the descendant of an immigrant to Canada from Limerick in the early eighteenth century, they seized Fort Garry, present-day Winnipeg, and formed their own provisional government with O’Donoghue serving as treasurer. The Canadian government put down the rebellion in August 1870 and carved the confederation’s fifth province, Manitoba, out of the Red River Colony, but harsh feelings endured.

  Forced into exile in the United States, O’Donoghue wasn’t willing to cede the fight. Rebuffed by President Ulysses S. Grant in a White House visit, the Irishman lobbied t
he Fenian Brotherhood to come to the aid of the Métis. He argued that because of their collective grievances at the hands of the British Empire there was a natural alliance between the Métis and the Irish. O’Donoghue also assured councilors that they would be supported and welcomed as liberators by the Métis, who accounted for approximately 9,800 of Manitoba’s 11,960 residents, although he had received no such pledge from Riel.

  The Canadian government issued service medals such as this one emblazoned with the image of Queen Victoria to Fenian raid veterans.

  With no stomach for another venture into Canada, particularly because there was still hope of uniting Irish American nationalists in the wake of the arrival of the Cuba Five, the Fenian council told O’Donoghue they would give him no aid except for their prayers. O’Neill, however, was so driven by redemption and vengeance toward the British Empire that he resigned from the Fenian Brotherhood in order to participate in the raid. In a concession to their former president, the Fenian council agreed to his request to not oppose or condemn the attack so long as he didn’t try to enlist any members of the brotherhood into his scheme. That would be the limit of their support.

  Going it alone, O’Neill traveled across the Midwest, recalling his past glories in a lecture titled “Ireland, Past, Present, and Future” and secretly trying to raise men, money, and munitions. It was an unlikely scene: By night, O’Neill assured audiences that he had sworn off any interest in Canada. By day, he recruited former Fenian comrades to join his latest venture.

  Most of his overtures, though, were met with rejections, except for the one toward General John J. Donnelly, his chief of staff, who had been among the wounded at Eccles Hill. Having managed to recruit an army of barely more than two dozen men, the persistent O’Neill traveled west to take Canada once again.

  * * *

  As O’Neill’s posse traveled through the incinerated grasslands of the Dakota Territory, the Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken trailed just behind them on the road north to Fort Garry to begin his new assignment. When rumors of a Fenian raid reached Manitoba in late August, a panicked lieutenant governor, Adams G. Archibald, beseeched the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, to send help. In need of a trusted set of eyes to keep watch over the internal and external threats in Manitoba, Macdonald appointed McMicken agent of dominion lands for Manitoba and dispatched him to Fort Garry.

  Passing through Chicago, McMicken had met with Colonel Henri Le Caron, who informed him that an attack was imminent. After the disasters at the Battles of Eccles Hill and Trout River and O’Neill’s imprisonment, Le Caron had concluded that the Fenian threat to Canada had finally dissolved. “I had no thought of its ever reviving again,” he recalled. The spy thus put his career in espionage to rest, returning to his medical studies before opening up a practice in Wilmington, Illinois, where he lived with his wife and three children.

  That life took a turn when he was handed a telegram written by O’Neill, summoning him to a meeting in Chicago on June 15. More than a year had passed since their last encounter, when Le Caron watched with a wry smile as O’Neill was arrested behind Alvah Richard’s farm and forcibly removed from the battlefield. The secret agent, his confidence undiminished, assumed the former Fenian general had come to pay him back the hundreds of dollars he had borrowed. He was surprised, then, when O’Neill produced letters from O’Donoghue detailing the Red River plot.

  O’Neill told his confidant that he needed the weapons from the Fenians’ cache that had remained hidden after the prior year’s raids. Only Le Caron knew their location. Would he help O’Neill recover the four hundred surplus Springfield rifles and ammunition? Le Caron obliged. He accompanied O’Neill to a hidden repository in Port Huron, Michigan, containing the rifles that had been contracted by the Fenians the year previous.

  In the Fenians’ wake, along the Red River, McMicken collected scraps of information about their plan, like bread crumbs left behind on the trail. He transmitted them in coded messages back to Prime Minister Macdonald in Ottawa. From an Irish stagecoach driver who groused that the Fenians had made a “damned mistake” not waiting until November, when the frozen rivers would have impeded the arrival of Canadian reinforcements, McMicken learned that the raiders’ plan was to meet in Pembina, a village just south of the Canadian border in the Dakota Territory, and start the march for Fort Garry on the morning of October 5.

  * * *

  Like giant wooden guideposts, a string of newly planted telegraph poles that awaited the draping of wires shepherded the Irishmen into Pembina, the only permanent white settlement in the Dakota Territory north of the 45th parallel. After passing ramshackle cabins cobbled together by impoverished squatters, the expedition arrived in the town huddled on the west bank of the Red River two miles south of Canada. With a population of only 250 residents, Pembina was still the most populous town in the Dakota Territory. Twice every year, the Métis gathered in the border town for their traditional buffalo hunts. Now O’Donoghue used the village as the rendezvous point for an army stalking a more elusive prey.

  As the days until the raid dwindled, the Fenians continued their recruitment efforts among the discontented Métis who had fled to Pembina after the Red River Rebellion. When O’Donoghue finally reached out to the Métis leaders in Manitoba, two nights before the attack, however, they made it clear to their former treasurer that they had no interest in his scheme.

  The refusal dealt a terrible blow to O’Donoghue’s plans. His army of three dozen men, mostly Fenians, was absurdly small for a force intending to take over a vast province. Still, he knew that the charge of a light brigade such as theirs might work. After all, the provincial militia wasn’t much bigger. Archibald had a garrison of only eighty men to defend Fort Garry and much of Manitoba, and the makeshift force called out by the lieutenant governor still hadn’t left Fort Garry. They remained a two-day march from the border. And O’Donoghue held out hope that once he crossed the border, Riel would change his mind and mobilize the Métis to join the rebellion.

  In Washington, D.C., Secretary of War William W. Belknap told Secretary of State Hamilton Fish that he entertained “little apprehension of any organized invasion of Manitoba from the territory of the United States.” O’Neill and O’Donoghue were about to prove him wrong.

  * * *

  O’Neill, O’Donoghue, and their men slunk out of Pembina on the morning of October 5 while the village slumbered. By dawn’s early light, three dozen men had gathered their rifles and set off for Canada. Around 7:30 a.m., the raiders marched across the international boundary that had been surveyed by the U.S. Army major Stephen Long in 1823, five years after a treaty between the United States and Great Britain established the 49th parallel as the international boundary.

  Unlike at Eccles Hill sixteen months earlier, there were no Canadian forces waiting to ambush O’Neill and his men once they set foot on foreign soil. The men carried Fenian guns, but O’Neill maintained his pledge to disassociate the attack from the brotherhood. No green flag led the charge into Canada; none of the soldiers wore green uniforms or brass IRA buttons. As the force approached its first target, the Dominion Customs House, the men hid in a ravine until receiving the all-clear signal from Louison “Oiseau” Letendre, one of the Métis from Pembina who had joined the mostly Irish ranks.

  Stirred from his sleep by a report of an armed force approaching, the assistant customhouse officer A. B. Douglass might have thought he was still dreaming when he looked out of his window. On constant guard against Native American raids, Douglass instead saw the Irish O’Neill carrying his sword at his side, leading a Lilliputian force armed with breech-loading Springfield rifles, bayonets, and sidearms. O’Donoghue trotted alongside on horseback. Lest their intention be in doubt, rolling behind them were three carts full of arms and ammunition, as well as an empty double wagon waiting to haul the supplies they planned to seize from a nearby Hudson’s Bay Company trading post.


  After awakening George W. Webster, a courier en route to St. Paul with a dispatch from Archibald, Douglass sprinted from the customhouse to warn the Hudson’s Bay Company post. However, O’Donoghue tracked him down on horseback and pointed a revolver at his head, and the Canadian official thought better of his plan.

  The raiders advanced to the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post—a complex that included a store, a warehouse, and several outbuildings hidden behind a rough-hewn log stockade eight to ten feet high, with bastions at all four corners. They burst through the gates so quickly that William H. Watt, the one-armed trading post manager from the Orkney Islands, couldn’t lock the doors in time. O’Neill’s men faced no resistance either from the other occupants of the post—Watt’s clerk and an older married couple.

  For their first order of business, the invaders took breakfast. Then, rifling through the post’s provisions, the Fenians plundered food and supplies, which they loaded onto their wagon and a boat they planned to launch down the Red River to Fort Garry, seventy-five miles away.

  As the morning sun brightened, the marauders captured unsuspecting passersby on the road to Pembina. By 9:00 a.m., at least twenty were roaming inside the trading post’s stockade. One Métis prisoner from the American side of the border pleaded with his captors for his release by virtue of his citizenship. The raiders agreed to liberate the American. Unbeknownst to them, he carried a secret plea for help penned by the Canadian occupants of the customhouse, Douglass and Webster.

  While O’Neill held a war council with his fellow ringleaders around noontime, a breathless Fenian sentinel burst in with the startling news.