The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  “The wild birds, flashing and whirling over the waters, were my only companions,” he said of Lake Sorell. “But I peopled the lonely scene with friends who were far away, and made it teem with memories and visions of the land of my birth. That lake became the lake of Killarney. An island in the center of the lake was changed to Innisfallen, the ruined cloister of the monks . . . the round towers . . . the castles . . .” He asked his audience to transport themselves from snowbound Montana to the spring green of Ireland. “Every foreign Irishman goes home on St. Patrick’s Day . . . Why . . . every one of you are at home with me today. There’s not a one of you in Montana. There’s not one of you has seen the Rocky Mountains this morning. The Rocky Mountains are gone for the day, and won’t be back till midnight.” Laughter here, for reprieve from the siege of a six-month winter. But even if Ireland were not beautiful, even if it were a desert, it would be mustered forth to rouse the soul of those who believed in the cause of forgotten people. “We should love it, be jealous of it, be proud of it, and cling to it all the more devotedly on account of the deprivations with which it has been stricken.”

  From passing on his trick of a memory mate in bad times, to the high-passion zone of any Irish immigrant, Meagher moved, strolling across the small stage. He faced men with scarred hands and women who scrubbed plank floors in Virginia City, people who’d been derided as harps. “Give me the peasantry, the reviled, scorned, ignored peasantry of Ireland! Their wretched cabins have been the holy shrines in which the traditions and hopes of Ireland have been treasured and transmitted. Never, never let the Irish heart give up the hope of seeing, on Irish soil, the fatal destinies of centuries reversed, and a restored nation, wisely instructed and ennobled in the school of sorrow planted there.” The roar inside the theater lasted for several minutes, Meagher unable to continue. When he picked up again, he turned on those who thought that Irish and American could never be one and the same. He was talking to the Know-Nothings, to the vigilantes, to Peter Townsend.

  “There are some vicious bigots, men of small brains and smaller hearts, men of more gall than blood, who even here assert that love of Ireland, devotion to her cause, active sympathy with the protracted contest for her redemption, revoke an unequivocal allegiance to the United States.” The boos rang out—not here! He called for calm, the better for the crowd to hear his answer, the vow of the immigrant doubted, his citizenship sealed in blood. “Let the woods and swamps of the deadly Chickahominy, the slopes of Malvern Hill, the waters of Antietam, the defiant heights of Fredericksburg, the thickets of the Wilderness—a thousand fields now billowed with Irish graves, declare that love for Ireland blends in ecstasy with loyalty to America.”

  But such loyalty was not unquestioning. Yes, the United States was a wonderful country, a refuge for those who would have died of starvation at home. But there were too many in this new nation who were empty of love for something greater. “It is the soulless American who has no heart, who has no thought beyond putting a mighty dollar out at mighty interest, who has no zest for any other book than his soulless ledger.”

  When he uttered these words, Meagher himself was broke. He had turned down a salary from the territorial legislature, hoping that the federal government would eventually pay him what he was owed. But they hadn’t. Traveling to the West in search of a fortune, he found only new battles to fight, variants of his persistent lifelong struggle to grant dignity to those without it. No matter. In his mind, the bigots were doomed. The soulless rich more so. He closed on a hopeful note. Any other way would have been out of character. Ireland and the United States, “hand in hand, down the great road of time,” would always be on the side of “the freedomless, the beggared, and the crushed.”

  His ardor for the old country did not escape notice outside the drafty interiors of Virginia City. In Waterford, the press proclaimed Meagher the head of a large Irish nationalist movement in the American West. He was back! This time, as leader of the immigrant masses on the far frontier, poised to strike the Empire in its territory up north. “His plans are said to divide the Fenian Army into two immense bodies and with one to invade Canada.” But the English knew better: they had infiltrated the Fenian ranks in Dublin, suspending habeas corpus yet again, and did not find their old foe from Young Ireland to be among the leaders of the biggest threat to British rule since 1848. Still, the Crown had good reason to keep track of the fugitive Thomas Meagher.

  While Meagher did his fighting with words, the Fenians took to battle. They struck Canada in the late spring of 1866, sending a thousand Irish Americans across the Niagara River at Buffalo into Ontario. The invading force—Civil War veterans, itinerant laborers, new immigrants—fought a company of the Queen’s Own Rifles and seized Fort Erie on June 1. The plan was to hit key locations in New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario and Manitoba at the same time, but the attack was poorly coordinated and executed. At Fort Erie, the Irish were led by John O’Neill, a former captain in the U.S. Cavalry. They were prepared to fight English troops for control of the Union Jack’s redoubt. Instead, they skirmished with a Canadian militia, 840 volunteers. By the third day, with their supply lines cut by an American naval ship, the Fenians retreated back across the river to the United States. They were promptly arrested, the invasion of Canada a bust.

  Libby arrived on June 5, 1866, after sixty-five days on a steamboat up the Missouri from St. Louis to Fort Benton, about 2,600 river miles. Husband and wife had been apart for nearly a year. He had lost some of the snap in his life, complaining of stomach ailments and trouble sleeping. The pain of a serious skin burn from a campfire was ever present. She had put on weight during the long weeks of sedentary travel, but her physical beauty, at the age of thirty-five, could still impress. “She is a fine looking woman . . . with the blackest eyes and queenliest presence and prettiest face I’ve seen in the mountains,” wrote the territory’s Episcopal bishop, Daniel Tuttle. The cleric was struck by her mind as well; the acting first lady of Montana was clever, smart, quick in conversation, he noted. Meagher was overjoyed to be back in the arms of “my dear Lib.” She had to love her pioneer husband after he escorted her to the governor’s residence: their new home was the leaky log cabin in a town that could collapse in a sneeze. Tiny, mouse-infested and primitive the shack may have been, but with two Meaghers now occupying the crude cabin, it became a parlor—the “gubernatorial mansion,” they dubbed it. A picture was commissioned of the executive residence, for laughs and posterity. They hosted poetry readings and nights of backgammon and claret, the educated talk moving outside on summer evenings when light glowed in the mountains till a few hours short of midnight. Also, to the alarm of the Masonic Temple, the Meaghers buttressed the Catholic community, lobbying the church to send a bishop to tend to the growing ranks of immigrant faithful.

  The Meaghers fought as well. Money was now a serious problem. Libby’s father had always provided a residence in New York for the couple, but little else. Another Townsend daughter, Alice, who had become wealthy by her marriage to Samuel Barlow, was part of one of the richest couples in the United States. Barlow kept a finger dipped in banks, railroads, war contracts and presidential politics. Meagher had nothing. His earnings were from speaking, and he had done precious little of that—for pay—since becoming a warrior and politician. Montana’s motto was bottom line, Oro y Plata. Meagher had neither gold nor silver. He still intended to invest in a mine, or some land, but he never found the time. Tangling with the vigilantes and trying to get the new territory on its feet had consumed him. What he wanted most, he said, was to be a man who brought honor to his people. The Irish Brigade, the soldiers sacrificed, his own near-death experiences facing Confederate musketry, should have been enough. But he still had to prove himself. “It is my ambition,” he wrote a friend, “to be the representative and champion of the Irish race in the wild great mountains.” New Ireland, though, was slow to fill.

  His enemy Sanders had been put in his place, or so it seemed: he was roundly defeated in an elec
tion that year for territorial delegate to Congress. The rebuff to Montana’s leading Republican was seen as an endorsement of Meagher by the voters. Unable to govern legitimately, the Vigilance Committee that Sanders had guided killed another round of men by secret edicts in mid-1866. Leander Johnson was hanged in Deer Lodge, accused of “a want of appreciation of the law,” no small irony. J. L. Goones was strung up in German Gulch. A man named Frenchy Couchet was hanged in Helena a few days after Libby’s arrival, with a note, “robber and perjurer,” pinned to his body.

  At the same time, Sanders also plotted to bring a new governor to Virginia City. Montana Republicans leaned on leaders of their party in Washington to appoint someone who fell in line with the Freemasons and other upstanding people in the territory. A proper replacement was promised by the fall.

  Throughout the summer and into October of 1866, Meagher set out to introduce Libby to those “wild great mountains,” while also gathering material for an assignment from Harper’s Weekly. If he was afraid, he didn’t show it. He’d killed for the Union. He’d promised to kill for Ireland. He would kill to defend himself. “Every day intensifies my hatred of the Radicals,” he wrote Barlow. “Here in Montana, they have ever since my arrival, been violently endeavoring to do, on a smaller scale, what in the states they have virtually succeeded in doing—that is, disorganizing and paralyzing the government because they could not control it.”

  The Meaghers crossed over the Continental Divide, went west into the drainage of the Blackfoot River, to the Clark Fork—clear-running streams a few days removed from snowmelt, rushing to join the Columbia, which empties more water into the Pacific than any river in the Western Hemisphere. At sunset, occasional storms passed through; more often was a show of alpenglow along the ridges that lined up like sentinels. North from Hell Gate Village, renamed Missoula that year, the Meaghers traveled through the Flathead Valley, gazing on the big lake of the same name. He found Jesuits again, at the Mission of St. Ignatius, lonely black robes working in the shadow of the imposing wall of the Mission Range. Wandering among those peaks, Meagher named a waterfall for the love of his life.

  But the closing of the season of light, with snow flying again on the journey back to Virginia City and ice forming in the creekbeds, brought fresh intrigue, and no checks from the government. Now Meagher was desperate, more than $2,500 in debt. He turned to a friend, Cornelius O’Keeffe, for a loan of $1,000. What he had in collateral was his way with words. Meagher would file his Harper’s piece under O’Keeffe’s byline, a great ego boost for a man trying to make his name in the territory. Meagher didn’t want to grovel. “I want to return to Virginia City a proud and independent Irish gentleman—having no one insult or even give me the cold shoulder because I owe a miserable little bill of 50 or 100 dollars,” he wrote O’Keeffe. “I want my countrymen to place me up and beyond the sneers of these ‘blackguards’ who are ever ready to run down an Irishman.”

  Back in the capital, the town was abuzz over the arrival of a well-regarded gentleman: the new governor, Green Clay Smith. He was from Kentucky. A member of Congress. A Protestant—evangelical Christian. And a teetotaler who dreamed of a day when all of the United States would be dry. He was everything Meagher was not, and everything the right-thinking people of the territory could hope for. Around Governor Smith, Meagher was himself—chatty, solicitous, funny, dropping an allusion to Ovid here and a quote from Thomas Jefferson there. The new man was charmed. As it turned out, they had several things in common. Smith had been a general in the Union Army; like Meagher, he had led men to death against the slaveholding republic. They shared a love of certain authors, a habit of summoning a line of verse to good effect and a governing philosophy. Several times, they stayed up past 1 a.m. talking about history. In short order, the Irish Catholic tippler and the nondrinking evangelical were fast friends. “Green Clay Smith is in complete accord with me,” Meagher confided to Barlow. “He is a genial, bright-hearted, high-minded fellow.” But Smith had no sooner arrived than he decided to leave, just like the first governor. He promised to be back in half a year. Leave he did, barely three months after arriving, giving full power back to Meagher, who resumed his title of the Acting One.

  His enemies hit him twice, first with great force, and then less so. In early 1867, Wilbur Sanders traveled to Washington on a mission to cripple his Montana rival. The midterm elections of 1866 had given Republicans more power than they ever had in Congress. In the House, they held 174 of 224 seats. At the same time, they started impeachment proceedings against the unloved president, Democrat Andrew Johnson. Doors in the capital opened for Sanders. This Meagher fellow, the great Irish general, the Acting One, was a fraud, Sanders claimed—and had to be shut down. In response, Congress passed a sweeping measure: it nullified the legislative session of Montana. All laws and acts passed in the 1866 assembly were held to be null and void—“an extraordinary and unprecedented action,” as the western historian Gary Forney called it. Back in Montana, in case Meagher didn’t get the message about power in the territory, vigilantes issued another death warrant. They hanged a man—his last name, Rosenbaum, tagged to his body—for reasons unexplained. No arrest. No trial. No due process. No last words. In the fall, Rosenbaum had been whipped and told that he was banished from Montana. But he refused to move out of the territory, and paid for it with his life.

  Meagher had been given a similar message. Riding from Virginia City to Helena, he was stopped by a posse of vigilantes. Did he not understand the note attached to the dangling corpse of James Daniels? Leave Montana, they told the Irishman—leave. Afterward, a crude drawing was dropped off at the governor’s cabin. It pictured a body hanging from a tree, and a noose around a name: “General Meagher.”

  22

  * * *

  River Without End

  Summer 1867. The Missouri held fresh snowmelt still; it was fat and full of swagger. Riding all day with a small party traveling north to Fort Benton, Meagher was sick, unable to keep his food down, his stomach convulsive. The clop of horses raised swarms of grasshoppers and drew biting flies and blood-sucking mosquitoes. Days were cloudless, hot and slow, the sky white with heat in the afternoon torpor. He’d left his wife in Helena, promising to return in about two weeks. When they were together, his pain passed, and they could laugh and make love and pretend that life in New Ireland was working. He missed old Ireland. He wanted to see what his son was like. He’d written to his father a week ago, inquiring about young Thomas and Waterford. Yes, he could summon the land of his birth and people it, using his great mental trick. But he missed the touch. He wanted to dip his toe in the Suir, to sit with Duffy and Speranza, to sing a rebel song in Kilkenny, to climb Misery Mountain and look down on the home of three living generations of Meaghers. He’d been away almost twenty years, had lived nearly half his life as an exile. In late afternoon, his ass chapped from the saddle, his back sore, his face sunburned, his stomach snarling, he looked around at the flat-topped mesas, treeless and brown, gazed up at that infinity of sky, and wondered how he got there, so far from home.

  And what would his father think of him now? Judged by accumulated wealth, not much. In a note to the territorial auditor, Meagher begged for the pay denied him over nearly two years as governor. “I am utterly—utterly—out of funds.” It was humiliating to admit, even harder to commit to paper. He could not ask his father for help; he was well past that. The elder Meagher never understood his rebel son, acting on principle instead of just pretending to act, as most people did. Young Meagher believed in luck and lost causes. The old man followed the rules, even if the rules kept Ireland in bondage: member of Parliament, mayor of his hometown, living well in a family manor stuffed with inherited riches from the merchant life. The rules rewarded him, to a point. If he could see the creaky assemblage of logs in Virginia City that the onetime Prince of Waterford called home, he would be appalled.

  Meagher’s mission this last week of June was joyless: go to Fort Benton to pick up a cache of ar
ms for use against the native inhabitants. After much resistance, General Sherman had agreed to send weapons for defense of the territory. This, after Red Cloud’s warriors had whipped the army in December of 1866. They had lured Captain William Fetterman out of his post at Fort Phil Kearny, in northern Wyoming, and directly into an ambush. Eighty men were killed, their eyes gouged, heads scalped, bodies mutilated for good effect—one of the few times an Indian army had annihilated the Americans. Fetterman had served under Sherman in Georgia. The general swore revenge. “We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination—men, women and children,” he wrote.

  With Red Cloud’s victory, the rest of the Bozeman Trail was closed to all travel, choking the route of pioneers who insisted on going to Montana the short way. The forts along the trail would soon be abandoned. For one final time, the bison grounds belonged to the Sioux, the last big swath of Indian country completely in the hands of native people. But John Bozeman—an ambitious hulk of a frontiersman, founder of the town and the shortcut named for him—would have none of it. In April, Bozeman and several white men ventured out along the off-limits trail, astride the Yellowstone River. There, he was killed by Indians, or so it was reported—a sensational murder that put the territory on edge. Somehow, Bozeman’s business rival who was with him at the time, Thomas Cover, escaped. And it was he who blamed the killing on the Blackfeet, though he may have had a hand in the death himself. A call for war against the natives—Blackfeet, Sioux, Arapaho, Northern Cheyenne—went up in Virginia City. “It is high time that the sickly sentimentalism about humane treatment and conciliatory measures should be consigned to novel writers,” wrote the Montana Post. “If the Indians continue their barbarities, wipe them out.”