The Immortal Irishman

by Timothy Egan

  Meagher organized a militia and galloped off in a dust swirl to fight the tribes. But his heart wasn’t in it. He ventured east, into the nerve-racked Gallatin Valley, and found no hostiles. On a swing to the north and west, he was supposed to kill Indians of any tribe. The Jesuits urged him to show some mercy, to not fire a shot unless he was fired upon. Red Cloud was the Indian Meagher of the Sword, said one of the priests. He honored their request. A reporter noted that Meagher didn’t have to fight. “He will quiet the Indians by talking their heads off.” At summer’s dawn, the militia had disbanded without bloodshed.

  By the time he dismounted at the Sun River junction with the Missouri, in late June, Meagher had been on a horse, in one form of service to Montana or another, for almost two months. He could go no farther, he said. Whatever it was that ailed him—a serious intestinal disease, dysentery, typhus—he felt terrible. For six days he didn’t move, coiled in the predawn cold around the last embers of a fire, sweating through the blistering sun by day. He’d decided he was done with politics in the Rocky Mountains. The governor, Green Clay Smith, would be back any day. “On his arrival, I shall be free—and right glad,” Meagher wrote Barlow, “for I am downright sick of serving the government in a civil capacity.” The Democrats had urged him to run for territorial delegate to the U.S. Senate—his for the asking, given the majority political sentiment of Montana. He turned them down. “I’m not rich enough, yet, to support the grand responsibilities of that position,” he wrote his brother-in-law. Barlow was in on the joke. At this point, he knew that the great Irish general was a pauper.

  On July 1, Meagher roused himself for a final push to Fort Benton, at the bony footings of the mountains in the north. Several steamships were at anchor. The town was jumping with gamblers, prospectors, washed-up slaveholders, missionaries, Indian killers, liquor merchants, prostitutes, soldiers, mercenaries for various causes, Meagher haters and Meagher lovers. The general was instantly recognized as he hobbled down a boardwalk fronting the Missouri. Every other establishment was a saloon or an inducement to vice. A woman named Madame Mustache ran the Jungle, a place for a man to get a quick poke and a pop of corn whiskey, while Lily’s Squaw Dance, in a false-fronted shack next to the euphemistically named Board of Trade, catered to similar clientele. Men who recognized Meagher pointed at him, staring. They turned away, muttering what sounded to the governor like a threat—There he goes.

  Sweating and exhausted, Meagher went to the home of the merchant I. G. Baker, an adobe cabin that doubled as a store—two rooms under a sod roof. Bad news greeted him: his back pay, which was supposed to have been forwarded to Baker’s residence, had not arrived, nor had Sherman’s shipment of guns. The weapons were stuck downriver, another hundred miles or so. Meagher tried to hold down lunch with Baker inside the cooling refuge of his home, the finest in Fort Benton, with its whitewashed, three-foot-thick walls and timbered, rough-hewn beams overhead. The merchant offered Meagher blackberry wine as a palliative.

  At midday, a well-dressed man with a pointed beard poked his head in the door, acting on a rumor that had rumbled through the river port.

  “General Meagher?”

  It was Wilbur Sanders. The vigilante leader had just returned from his trip to the nation’s capital, having thrown out the work of the legislative session Meagher had labored so hard on. And here was the governor himself, still defiant, still conducting official business, not “dead beyond all hope of recognition,” but unbowed. Sanders was solicitous, seeking to join Meagher and Baker. Men of political disagreement could still share a meal, yes? Surely Meagher was ready to give up this New Ireland nonsense and the promotion of Catholic immigrants to the territory. And what was with his animus toward the Freemasons? Meagher had called them pimps and bigots in a speech; they were Know-Nothings in cowboy hats. See here: as the recently elevated grand master of the Masonic Temple in all of Montana, Sanders could assure his rival that the defenders of pureblood Americanism were only getting stronger on the frontier. Resistance was futile. The established order would prevail.

  Meagher had to be surprised to bump into the man he’d called “the most vicious of my enemies” in this upriver outpost. Pure coincidence? Perhaps. The governor waved off his rival, retreating to the back room of Baker’s house to read the paper, work on official business and answer some correspondence.

  In a weakened hand, Meagher wrote Richard O’Gorman in New York. They’d been schoolboys together at Clongowes Wood, rebels during Young Ireland’s rise in the face of the Great Hunger and fellow Manhattan lawyers. Meagher sketched a plan to travel with Libby to Europe, do some speaking about his Civil War experiences and see if there was a back door into Ireland. He wanted to look into the eyes of the son he had never met. He could count on friends in high places: some of the leading figures from the 1848 uprising were now pillars of society, a few members of Parliament among them. Speranza was more influential than ever; her house in Dublin was one of the liveliest parlors in Europe. But Meagher was conflicted. He and Libby were mostly happy. Montana could still be home for his people. He was not done yet with the dream of New Ireland.

  The pilot of the G. A. Thompson, tied up on the riverfront outside Baker’s store, interrupted him. Johnny Doran was electrified at the chance to meet the Irish American patriot. Also, he had guided the stern-wheeler that brought Libby to Fort Benton a year earlier. Meagher was grateful to the riverman for bringing his wife safely back to him. And how was the missus? Very well, Meagher said. He was just dashing off a note to her now. The brutal two-week ride to Fort Benton was his last official mission; he’d be home with Lib soon, and free of public service. Doran invited Meagher to dine with him in the comfort of his riverboat and spend the night in a guest room. Meagher explained that he wasn’t well. Doran insisted. They had many things to talk about. For one, British authorities were supposedly on their way to Fort Benton, if not already there, to look into reports of another Fenian plot against the Empire. An Irish American cavalry soldier—said to be a Fenian—had killed a British army captain a few days earlier aboard one of the Missouri River steamboats. Shot in the head. The victim was a nobleman of some rank, and wealthy. For another, Doran had a decent library on his ship. With that, Meagher perked up. Fresh literature, as always, was a bigger draw than fresh food.

  In the evening, belted kingfishers swooped for trout over the wide, swift expanse of the Missouri, gliding just above the waterline. As the heat broke, the river fell under the shadow of high, beveled cliffs on one side. White-tailed deer foraged in the shallows, and pelicans scanned the surface for the dimples of rising fish. Tree limbs, broken-off logs and other bits of flotsam rushed by. Across the way and downstream, exposed tiers of the ages were burnished in the last sunlight on the high mesas. Over a light meal, Meagher and Johnny Doran talked of Ireland and the navigational tricks of the upper Missouri, of Gaelic poets and death on Marye’s Heights. As sick as Meagher was, he could still tell a story, still bring a stranger to tears of outrage or laughter, even an audience of one.

  But he was not himself. The charm was forced. He was preoccupied, sensing that mortal danger was at hand. Of all the ports in all the world, Meagher found himself in one at 2,700 feet above sea level, where the enemies of his life—the Crown, the dregs of the Confederacy, vigilantes—lurked nearby. Ah, but not just enemies. Friends as well. Irishmen. Fenians at the American fort, in uniform. Johnny Doran. After their dinner, they crossed the gangplank back to town for a leisurely stroll over cigars along Front Street. Again Meagher noticed the stares and murmurs of men who looked away when he tried to meet their gaze.

  “Johnny, they threaten my life in that town.”

  As the last light melted at dusk, the two men retreated back to the steamship. The pilot tried to reassure Meagher. He had a pair of pistols he could lend him for the night. And, even more comfort, a riveting book, as promised: The Collegians, a thriller set in rural Ireland, written by Gerald Griffin. The author had died young, but his novel enjoyed a lon
g life in all parts of the English-speaking world. Johnny Doran escorted Meagher to the stateroom, on the port side—open to the river on the upper deck. Meagher insisted that Doran stay with him for a time. But Doran had some business to attend to. He left him with the novel that took Meagher, in his last hour, back to his homeland.

  About 10 p.m., a crewman on the lower deck of the G. A. Thompson heard a cry and a splash. The night was windless with a strong moon; sound carried across the open surface of the river. He said he heard gasps, a gurgling sound—the desperate noise of struggle.

  “Man overboard!”

  Johnny Doran knew immediately that it was Meagher, the only occupant of the guest stateroom. He considered jumping in, and then not, “for it would be almost certain death.” He ordered lights cast on the river, threw out boards attached to ropes. Doran ran to the shore and raced downstream, calling out. The final sounds he heard were “two agonizing cries from the man, the first one very short, the last prolonged.” The pilot waded hip-deep into the river, holding the ship’s paddlewheel as a tether. Small boats were launched. But they found not a trace of Thomas Meagher.

  It fell to Wilbur Sanders to announce the death and shape the story that would be told for generations to come. Poor fellow, our acting governor, had gone to an early grave. Meagher was the most brilliant conversationalist he’d ever met, said Sanders. And the sudden death of one so full of life. Such a pity. A suicide, he implied. Sanders said he had shared warm words with the Irishman that day, an afternoon “delightfully spent.” At night, as Sanders told the story, he saw the governor again, on Front Street, and this time “it was apparent he was deranged . . . loudly demanding a revolver to defend himself.” Why, he could not imagine. The vigilante leader, the man Meagher most despised in Montana, escorted his enemy to his stateroom and all but tucked him in. So he said. But Johnny Doran, who actually did put Meagher to bed, said nothing of that sort happened. It was just Doran and Meagher. This would not come out until later. Sanders then went back to town, in his telling, and about thirty minutes later heard the shocking news that the governor had drowned. During that same half hour, Sanders or a hired killer could have crept into Meagher’s room. It was not heavily guarded. Sanders claimed that a witness told him Meagher had jumped into the water in his nightclothes. Jumped. On his own. San-ders sent these details out with the evening post, leaving at 11 p.m. for Helena.

  They searched into the morning. Searched all day and the following one, up and down the banks of the Missouri, dragging the river. Governor Smith, now back in the territory, immediately authorized a $1,000 reward for the recovery of the body. He praised the general as a gentleman and a friend, recalling their late-night talks. In Virginia City and Helena, people crowded into assembly halls to mourn the best-known Irish American in the country. Nobody believed the Sanders version of the disappearance. Suicide? Though he quarreled with the high clergy, Meagher was a Catholic by culture and faith. He would never kill himself. Nor did they believe that he’d tripped over a coil of rope on deck, as others said, falling to his death. Even if he did fall, Meagher was a strong swimmer. All his life he’d been around water. He grew up on the River Suir, went to his first Jesuit school along the Liffey, endured his banishment on the shores of Lake Sorell, escaped from the penal colony in the treacherous swells of Bass Strait, led soldiers through the rain-swollen hold of the Chickahominy. In Tasmania, he had offered to swim to his rescue boat, had his pirate friends not offered to take him. No, the Missouri currents, strong though they were, could not alone take Meagher to his grave. Even when sick, he was robust, with an oaken barrel of an upper body, a stubborn bastard.

  More likely he was assassinated, these friends of Meagher believed. Citizens of Helena packed into the same theater where, a few months earlier, Meagher had given a stirring lecture on the Irish Brigade. They put together a fund to find the killer; it grew to ten times what the governor was offering. They passed a resolution, reprinted in papers throughout the nation: “That in his death, our country has lost a true patriot, a friend of universal liberty, a sympathizer with the oppressed of all nations, a foe to tyranny . . .”

  The governor ordered thirty days of official mourning. Now Meagher’s enemies were among the most effusive in praise. No more talk of a drunk, whoremonger or tyrant. “There was nothing in his faults to extinguish the fire of great virtues,” wrote one Republican leader who had battled Meagher in the territory. The Irishman was “a ripe scholar,” said the Montana Post, which had slandered him at every turn, “courteous, amiable and hospitable.”

  Throughout the East—in Meagher clubs, Meagher bands and Meagher militia units, in New York and Boston and Philadelphia, wherever lived the men who’d been soldiers in the Irish Brigade—there was disbelief. What they knew of the Waterford rebel, some of it legend, much of it factual, was that he had lapped the globe on a wave of immortality. The ancient gods of his homeland always had his back. The man was never quiet, never still, never slow, never far from history’s front edge. The idea of his death, now, at age forty-three, by an “accident” that was no match for the life lived—this was preposterous. The Irish American, a hagiographer at first, then an opponent, and now again on Meagher’s side, published a commemorative poem among its many tributes:

  And is the patriot, Meagher, dead?

  Who in his youthful glory, rose,

  A champion of his race, and led

  His country ’gainst her foes . . .

  His childhood friend Richard O’Gorman, recipient of what may have been Meagher’s last letter, was aghast at the loss. At the Cooper Union in New York, where Abraham Lincoln had given the speech that made him a national figure, where Red Cloud would make a plea for independence of the Sioux Nation, a huge crowd converged on a hot night in August to remember Meagher’s life. Earlier that day, a Requiem Mass was held at St. Francis Xavier Church. Veterans of the Irish Brigade lined either side of a portrait of their leader, each man wearing a sprig of green boxwood in his lapel.

  “He is gone,” O’Gorman said in his eulogy. “The pitiless Missouri, hurrying fast to sea, has enwrapped him in a watery shroud and dug him a lonely grave beneath its turgid waters.” The hall was bedecked with flags of the brigade, the United States and the tricolor that Meagher had designed for the country of his birth. O’Gorman told the story of an outsized life, the basic profile familiar to most, the details not. A boy of wealth and standing had risked it all for Ireland. The famine made him a revolutionary. The voice made him famous—“a trumpet blast to rouse the whole island.” In the docket at Clonmel came a speech that would long outlive him: “I know this crime entails the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains this crime, and justifies it.” Then, shackled and forced off to the end of the world, the loneliness, the escape, finding his way in New York. Always, Meagher was propelled by a desire to put a dent in history.

  “His was a mind that needed the inspiration of great purpose,” said O’Gorman. “To see the great game of life played by other hands, and to stand by inactive, and only watch . . . was to die a living death.” That great purpose came with the Civil War. The mortal conflict against the slaveholders was not his fight, nor that of the Irish. But he made it his, and theirs. In doing so, they became Americans.

  “Aye! Be proud of the Irish Brigade! Be proud of him who led it . . . Three thousand men were in the Brigade when it went to war; five hundred were all that left it.” And was the general not flawed in ways large and small? Without doubt. “His faults lie gently upon him. For he had faults, as all of us have.” O’Gorman closed with a final aspiration for his mate through nearly four decades.

  “Would that his grave were on some Irish hillside, with the green turf above him.”

  The widow Elizabeth Meagher left the territory in late summer, never sure what had happened to her husband, never to leave letters or diaries behind for glimpses into her heart. His death ended a life adventure for her. She was the only person who could keep up with him. She had rescu
ed him in his lowest moments, had said yes to the uncertain destiny he was always following, had curbed his excesses when he was full of self-pity or vanity. They never had a child together. But she adopted Ireland’s struggle, now orphaned in this raw and violent place. Libby departed by steamboat from Fort Benton, down the river that would become his grave. His body was never found.

  Wilbur Sanders could be reasonably sure that, in a few months, Meagher would be forgotten, and, in a few years, he might be a footnote, his words never to inhabit the beautiful high territory that had been his last home. As Sanders would have it, the story of the end of Thomas Francis Meagher, the story that took hold, was tragic and fitting and uncomplicated. But that story has not stood up in the nearly century and a half that has passed since his death.

  23

  * * *

  Inquest for Ireland

  On the Fourth of July, 1905, one of the largest crowds in Montana assembled in front of the capitol in Helena to unveil a statue. A procession, led by a band, marched from Last Chance Gulch to the government grounds, where it was greeted by women in white dresses and bonnets, men in crisp suits and hundreds of miners who had contributed their earnings for this memorial. The idea had the backing of Marcus Daly, the copper magnate from Butte and then the most powerful Irish American capitalist in the United States. When deep veins of the metal used in wiring in every town were found just below the surface near the Continental Divide, Butte was transformed into an industrial hive, known as “the richest hill on earth.” Daly recruited Irish immigrants to his mines and paid them well. They came in droves, the sons and daughters of people who had survived the Great Hunger. It was a hard town, hazardous and dirty, winter-cold for half a year. But the Irish flourished there, establishing literary societies and patriotic clubs, opera houses and theaters, schools and churches, raising large families in two-story houses. In the Rocky Mountains, their stories found a home. At one point, more Gaelic was spoken in Daly’s mines than anywhere on this side of the Atlantic. New Ireland, when it finally came to the American West, was Butte, Montana.