When the Irish Invaded Canada

by Christopher Klein

  “The American troops are coming!”

  * * *

  O’Neill looked out to see the U.S. Army captain Loyd Wheaton, the commanding officer at Fort Pembina, riding a four-mule wagon. He was accompanied by a line of about thirty armed soldiers advancing on the “double quick” with an army ambulance. Apparently, the American prisoner who had been released did not seek help from Canadian authorities but instead ran three miles south to deliver his note to Wheaton inside the U.S. Army’s Fort Pembina.

  Wheaton had been stationed at the citadel, which had been completed the year before, to enforce the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie signed by the Dakota Territory’s white settlers and the Lakota. He never expected to be drawn into a confrontation on the prairie between Irish exiles and the British Empire. But when the loose lips of a Fenian sympathizer in Fort Garry revealed the entire plot to the U.S. consul James Wickes Taylor after one, two, three pours from a decanter of gin, Wheaton received orders to prepare the Twentieth Infantry to respond to a possible attack. Archibald also informed Taylor that the Manitoba and Canadian governments would not object if the United States sent troops across the boundary to suppress a Fenian attack.

  Although the invaders had a slight numerical advantage and a superior defensive position behind the trading post’s stockade, panic spread among O’Neill’s men at news of the arrival of American troops. Colonel Thomas Curley ordered the wagons laden with plunder to move immediately. But the Irishmen scattered in every direction—through the trading post gates and into the woods or the brush along the Red River. With his one arm, Watt failed to grab O’Donoghue before he fled on horseback. O’Neill scurried so abruptly that he left behind his trusty sword.

  Wheaton ordered his men to fire a volley over the heads of the Fenians, but when that failed to stop the escape, the thirty-three-year-old captain drew his pistol and galloped in pursuit of the raiders. The Fort Pembina commandant would not have to worry about return fire; even for the cause of Ireland, a former Union soldier like O’Neill would never sanction firing at another man in blue. “I had fought too long under the Stars and Stripes to want to fight United States troops, whether they had crossed the line legally or illegally,” he later recounted to the St. Paul Pioneer.

  The captain arrested O’Neill, Curley, Donnelly, and ten of the rank and file without resistance. Like children, the Fenians were made to unload their wagons before their punishment was inflicted. The federal troops seized seventy-seven breech-loading Springfield rifles, seventeen muzzle-loading rifle muskets, five carbines, eleven sabers, and twelve thousand ammunition cartridges.

  When O’Donoghue was in the clear, he traded in his horse for a canoe. He paddled five miles north on the Red River toward the Métis settlements, where he expected to be given safe haven. Instead, he found himself captured by two of Riel’s scouts, who tied him up with ropes and brought him back over the border to Wheaton that evening.

  The raid passed without any injuries or damage, and the Fenians were thwarted with nothing to show for their efforts, newspapers noted, outside “a hearty breakfast.” O’Neill was in a familiar place—American custody. He was loaded into an army ambulance for the ride back to Fort Pembina. It was the American government that had cut his supply lines after the Battle of Ridgeway. It was the same that dragged him off the battlefield at Eccles Hill. And once again, it was the United States, not Canada or Great Britain, that thwarted his plans.

  “I believe the action of Colonel Wheaton to be entirely unauthorized, in crossing into British territory and arresting anyone,” O’Neill later groused to the St. Paul Pioneer. He was wrong in more ways than he knew.

  * * *

  Surveyors in the nineteenth century knew it was far easier to draw a border on a map than to mark it on the ground. In the decades after Major Long surveyed the international boundary using the heavens as his guide, both the American and the British governments eventually concluded that his dividing line was actually south of the 49th parallel, although exactly where the formal divide actually lay was in dispute.

  In May 1870, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyors, under the direction of Captain D. P. Heap, resurveyed the border and concluded that Long’s frontier was 4,763 feet—nearly an entire mile—south of the 49th parallel. That meant that, according to Heap’s redrawn border, the Dominion Customs House and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post seized by O’Neill’s men were not a quarter mile north inside Canadian territory as they believed, but actually three-quarters of a mile south of the border, on American soil.

  While the U.S. State Department was willing to honor the long-established dividing line for commercial purposes, pending an official joint boundary survey, that wasn’t the case for military jurisdiction. Although Wheaton had been granted permission by both the Canadian and the Manitoba governments to cross the border with the Twentieth Infantry, the U.S. Army captain believed it irrelevant when it came to the Dominion Customs House and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post outside Pembina, because they sat on what he considered American land, south of Heap’s border.

  O’Neill was unaware of Heap’s survey. That meant that not only had he failed to invade Canada, he had failed to enter Canada—at least in the eyes of the U.S. government. What that also meant, however, was that O’Neill and his fellow raiders could not be prosecuted for violating the Neutrality Act. Technically speaking, they had never in fact attacked Canada.

  Citing a lack of evidence and “want of jurisdiction,” the U.S. commissioner George I. Foster of the Dakota Territory dismissed the case against O’Neill and his fellow marauders on October 9 after two full days of proceedings. O’Neill was a free man. But in a sense, this was a fate worse than conviction. It was the ultimate humiliation for the hero of Ridgeway. Not only couldn’t he capture Canada, but he couldn’t find it.

  * * *

  In the days following the attempted invasion of Canada, newspapers ridiculed “the Fenian fiasco,” calling it “another reckless and ridiculous Fenian raid.” O’Neill’s former friends and followers were hardly kinder in their assessments. “This time the attempt was even more farcical than his performance of St. Albans,” groused The Irish-American, which made it clear that “O’Neill’s folly” was his and his alone. “The application of the term ‘Fenians’ in the narrative is a misnomer, as O’Neill has been repudiated by all sections of that organization, and his movement was in no sense a Fenian affair.”

  The “Garibaldi of the Green Isle” no longer inspired respect; now only laughter and pity. After the Red River disaster, Ridgeway—and not Eccles Hill—appeared to be the fluke in the general’s record. O’Neill blamed the expedition’s failure on “a mere accident” of geography. But his ignorance of the resurveyed boundary was more gross negligence than mishap.

  In addition, just as he had done with the French Canadians in Quebec in previous raids, O’Neill had again miscalculated the extent to which the enemy of his enemy would be his friend. O’Donoghue’s sales job had convinced O’Neill that they could count on support from the Métis. The Irishman’s stature among Riel and the Red River Colony was much weaker than he advertised. Not only did Riel refuse to aid O’Donoghue’s venture, but he pledged the allegiance of the Métis to the Manitoba government, providing scouts to guard the frontier from further raids from the United States.

  While the press depicted the Red River raid as a comic opera, it also revealed a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. O’Neill’s hasty insistence, his default to action, obliterated his ability to see any distinction between courage and recklessness. O’Neill had become so consumed by the sense of his own abilities and his hatred of the British that it blinded him to reality—that Le Caron was a spy, that O’Donoghue lacked the support of the Métis, that the borderline was off, that he and O’Donoghue were by then a pair of quixotic romantics tilting at windmills. The Fenian fire that burned so hot inside O’Neill’s zealous heart no longer lit the way. It clouded
his vision.

  * A week after John O’Neill’s journey to the Dakota Territory, fires sparked by the drought and high winds in the Midwest would incinerate Chicago and on the same night cause the deadliest forest fire in American history that killed as many as twenty-five hundred people near Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

  22

  The Next Best Thing

  AFTER DISCUSSING THE disastrous Red River raid with Fenians in Chicago, Henri Le Caron was certain John O’Neill would never threaten Canada again. “All denounce O’Neill in strong terms,” he reported to Gilbert McMicken. “He is a dead duck for ever.” By now, though, the British spy should have known better. Given his family pedigree, O’Neill could no sooner abandon the fight against the British than he could renounce his name. And anyone with Celtic blood coursing through his veins, as Le Caron claimed, would have known that seven centuries of defiance made the Irish a tenacious—others might say stubborn—people.

  O’Neill still believed it was his calling to be at the head of an Irish army, but the time had come to change tactics. While O’Neill bided his time until the day he would liberate Ireland, he decided instead to emancipate the Irish from America’s noisy factories, filthy mines, and wretched tenements and deliver them to the fresh air and virgin prairie of the Great Plains.

  Fenian leaders had long talked about the idea of establishing their own colonies in North America. O’Neill was determined to turn that talk into action. “Absolute possession of the soil is the only true independence for a laboring man,” wrote O’Neill, who believed the underlying cause for the Great Hunger was that absentee British landlords—not the Irish—owned the land.

  A quarter century earlier, the Irish had migrated west to flee starvation. Now O’Neill thought they should follow the sun once again to escape poverty. While some claimed that Irish immigrants needed to break out of their insular enclaves and integrate themselves into American culture, O’Neill took the opposite tack. He wanted to remove his fellow Irish Catholics altogether.

  * * *

  The American West offered the Irish the prospect of cheap land. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, both native-born Americans and immigrants who applied for citizenship could take ownership of up to 160 acres of public land for an $18 filing fee as long as they lived on the parcel for five years, farmed it, and built a dwelling. Civil War veterans and other soldiers received added incentives. Irish American newspapers frequently printed advertisements such as one from the Union Pacific Railroad that promised “Cheap Farms! Free Homes!” in the “Garden of the West.”

  As early as December 1870, The New York Times reported that O’Neill had embarked on a lecture tour to promote a scheme “for providing homes for his countrymen in the West.” At the time, his enterprise had been little more than a cover for his recruitment of men for the Red River raid. After the failed attack, O’Neill pursued it in earnest. He spent parts of 1872 and 1873 scouting locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri before deciding upon a plot of land in the Elkhorn valley of northern Nebraska as a suitable place for planting his Irish colony. The general signed an agreement with the land agents Patrick Fahy and S. M. Boyd to colonize a settlement with twenty-five families in return for $600 and seventy lots.

  Throughout the winter of 1873 and 1874, O’Neill toured traditional Irish strongholds—from the mill cities of New England to the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After regaling audiences with tales from his three raids on Canada, he delivered a sales pitch for his new business venture: “Why are you content to work on the public projects and at coal mining when you might in a few years own farms of your own and become wealthy and influential people?”

  With the panic of 1873 triggering a severe economic downturn, O’Neill’s promise of a fresh start was especially appealing to those who were out of work. Using the same powers of persuasion that led hundreds of Irishmen to attack Canada, O’Neill persuaded an initial colony of thirteen men, two women, and five children to transplant themselves to Nebraska by giving them what he always gave his fellow Irishmen—hope for better lives.

  * * *

  Adrift on an ocean of tall prairie grass bending in the wind, O’Neill made the second exodus of his life in the spring of 1874. The general who had fled the Great Hunger had high hopes for his new venture. “We could build up a young Ireland on the virgin prairies of Nebraska and there rear a monument more lasting than granite or marble to the Irish race in America,” he wrote to Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha.

  As the sun reached its zenith on May 12, 1874, the settlers finally arrived at their new home, originally called Holt City but quickly changed by Colonel James H. Noteware, immigration agent for the state of Nebraska, to O’Neill, in honor of the colony’s leader (to say nothing of his distinguished forebears).

  The Irish had always lived off the land, but not land like that they found in Nebraska. The flat, desolate prairie and barren sand hills sported few trees to offer shade from the blazing sun, let alone timber for building and burning. The colonists who had lived shoulder to shoulder in the tenements of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and St. Louis now found deer, antelope, coyotes, and wolves to be their only neighbors.

  Shelter was the first order of business for the colonists. With the nearest timber six miles away, O’Neill and his followers built a sod house thirty-six feet long and eighteen feet wide to house the entire colony. The settlers jokingly dubbed their rude, crowded quarters the “Grand Central Hotel.”

  It was a hard existence, but nothing ever came easy to the Irish. Unlike their ancestors in Ireland, many of the settlers who followed O’Neill were city dwellers with no farming experience. Already off to a late start in Nebraska’s short growing season, the settlers attempted to tear into the tough, knotted prairie sod and plant potatoes, corn, and other crops in the black, sandy loam. The blazing summer sun, however, brought drought and heat so suffocating that one pioneer reported that as he peered into the mirages shimmering on the horizon, he could see towns one hundred miles away “so plainly mirrored on the nearby prairie that one could see between the buildings.”

  The pioneers had expected a land of milk and honey, only to discover that their Irish Moses had led them into the desert—devoid of trees, water, and comfort. And that was even before the arrival of a plague straight out of the Old Testament.

  On a mid-July day, the skies above the Irish prairie colony blackened as a dark cloud dimmed the sun and emptied its contents. The storm that swept in from the northwest didn’t deluge the settlers with badly needed raindrops, however, but a shower of grasshoppers. The pioneers found themselves ankle-deep in “Rocky Mountain locusts” that crunched like snow underfoot.

  While the wheat, rye, and barley crops were too ripe for the grasshoppers’ palates, they swarmed every stalk of corn, devouring them down to their cobs, and then ate those, too. The swarm stayed in O’Neill for a day, no more than two, before flying east to continue its destruction, leaving behind only the stubble of cornstalks.

  The great “grasshopper raid” devastated the newly planted crops that the nascent colony relied upon for subsistence. The harvest of 1874 did not come close to approaching the 250 to 300 bushels per acre that O’Neill had promised.

  Although newcomers had trickled in throughout the summer, by October 1, 1874, all but five of the original colonists had abandoned the settlement. As the first settlement prepared for the onset of winter, O’Neill returned to the East to begin recruiting his next colony.

  Encouraged by a report from the land agent Fahy promising a large hotel and several businesses in a “thickly settled” colony, a second group of pioneers ventured to Nebraska in the spring of 1875, eager to settle in what they heard was a bustling hamlet.

  The colonists arrived in a colony with no stores, no buildings. The town was just a motley collection of sod houses and dugouts. The settlers had visions of lazy afternoons rocking in chairs on the veranda of the Gran
d Central Hotel. They discovered it was a sarcastic moniker for the most rudimentary of shelters. They didn’t appreciate the humor.

  Believing they had been swindled to come to a godforsaken land, many of the new arrivals blamed O’Neill. After all, his name was on the place. They thought the general who had led the Irish into a folly in Canada had now done the same in the American heartland.

  Desperate to salvage his reputation from another tarnishing, O’Neill denounced Fahy in The Irish World and gave every man who purchased lots in O’Neill an equal number in a new eighty-acre addition to the town. The offer renewed public confidence in his embryonic Irish American colony.

  The arrival of O’Neill’s wife, children, and two oldest nephews also buoyed his spirits. A pregnant Mary Ann had traveled west with the original colony the prior year but remained with the children in Omaha, 180 miles away, to give birth. Once O’Neill’s white clapboard residence was completed in 1875, baby Katherine, six-year-old Mary Ella, and eight-year-old John made their new house a home.

  That was quickly followed by the construction of the town’s first general store, church, and school. After the discovery of gold in the nearby Black Hills, the merchants of O’Neill made the real fortune by selling supplies to the prospectors. Although the colonists continued to duel with the dreaded grasshoppers, relations with the native Pawnees remained friendly.

  In the spring of 1876, O’Neill led a third colony of 102 men, women, and children to Nebraska and followed that the next year with a migration of 71 men. With plans to plant as many as one hundred settlements on the prairie, he established a Philadelphia headquarters for “O’Neill’s Irish American Colonies” and hired an experienced Fenian recruiter, Colonel William MacWilliams, to assist him.