All Standing

by Kathryn Miles

  The grocers, it seemed, didn’t actually have the capital to buy the steamers they had contracted from Munn, and for the first time in his career, he had borrowed heavily from the Bank of North America in order to front their construction. Now he was deeply in debt, his property heavily mortgaged. His uncle James, loyal to Munn until the last, bequeathed to the wright all his assets, dispersed upon James’s death that year. Still it wasn’t enough. Quebec was moving into the steam age with all the speed that technology could buy. It was about to leave behind its most successful shipwright.

  • • •

  That same steam couldn’t carry the Reillys away from Quebec fast enough. While some passengers from the Jeanie Johnston had opted to stay in Canada as Earl Grey and his cronies in Parliament had hoped, Daniel Reilly was committed to reaching Indiana. He and his family departed Quebec City on an emigrant train, bound for Buffalo and points west. Progress was halting at best. First, there was the long delay at the station, where crowds of Irish and German immigrants packed onto a single platform waiting to hear their names called. Then there was the rush to claim a seat—a wooden bench on which to lay a bag of straw—which dispersed some families throughout the train and left others at the station, wondering if they would ever make it to America. The Reillys were lucky: they all got on board. For days they crowded on a narrow wooden bench inside a third-class car, sandwiched between other new arrivals and their luggage. Many looked far worse for wear than the Reillys when they climbed aboard, but all would be both sooty and hungry by the time the train rolled into the Buffalo station.

  Each time the railway company needed to add another freight car, it would switch the immigrant cars to a side rail, where they sat for hours. Inside, the crowded passengers stood and stretched, hoping for relief from the wooden benches and Spartan conditions. A single bucket of water on the car’s disused stove was the only hydration available; slop buckets became privies. It was like a steerage Atlantic crossing all over again.

  There were differences, of course. One could at least lie down on the Jeanie Johnston. Not so on the emigrant railcar. Captain Attridge had made sure that rations were available to everyone every day while they were at sea; on the train, the family had to settle for the occasional visit from a vendor who climbed aboard to sell fruit, bread, and milk during a delay. On the rare occasion that the emigrant car was stalled in the vicinity of a station, those aboard could hope for a hot meal—assuming, of course, that they had enough cash. Here again the Reillys were lucky: they had enough money to eat and made it to New York and then Indiana in seven days without incident.1 Once there, they found a town struggling to embrace the new world of steam and the supposed boons it offered.

  25

  Liberty?

  THE TOWN OF LIBERTY was situated about halfway between Indianapolis and Cincinnati in a dense forest of walnut, hickory, and oak, the likes of which a person newly arrived from County Kerry had never seen before. Wolves still roamed the woods, and a terrifying disease called rabies preyed on dogs, raccoons, and even humans. Massive thunderstorms built in the afternoon far out on the horizon, bringing with them deeply fluctuating temperatures; the thermometer in Liberty was said to spend as many days at 100 as it did at minus 15, and regularly moved every degree between. Even more terrifying were the funnel clouds that dropped from those storms without warning, said to be strong enough to level an entire town.

  Still, Liberty had made a go of it, and by 1850 it was the thriving seat of Union County. People there wore the latest in American fashion: Panama hats for the men, bloomers for the women and girls. The town boasted its own drugstore, five dry goods shops, and twenty-one mechanics. There was a courthouse and jail, a county seminary, and a Methodist and a Christian church. The town didn’t have a place for Catholics to worship, but that wasn’t of much consequence for a family living in a railroad shanty far from the town’s center. Living in the country was certainly something with which Margaret Reilly had been familiar in Ireland; the farm she had shared with Daniel in Ballybeggan was far enough from Tralee that she rarely made the trek there with her husband. But that didn’t make her new situation feel any more familiar.

  Instead of a stone cottage with a thatched roof, Margaret now occupied a grimy two-story house made of plywood. The house had been built by the railroad for its employees, and neither group expected people like the Reillys to occupy it for long. Trains needed to move across states and nations; so too did their tracks and those who laid them. This kind of thinking was foreign to a young woman born and raised in one small corner of Ireland. But then again, just about everything in Liberty seemed unfamiliar, including the men also occupying her new home.

  Margaret and Daniel weren’t the only people from Tralee to make their way to Liberty that year, but they were two of the more financially stable—enough so, at least, that Daniel was given a lease on their flimsy house. As was the custom in places like Liberty, he had opened the tiny space to other new arrivals in need of room and board. In the spring of 1850, eight men between the ages of twenty-five and forty were living under their roof, and the Reilly family now included John, Nicholas and Robert’s new baby brother. In all, thirteen people crowded into the wooden house. Margaret’s busy daily routine seemed focused almost entirely on feeding everyone. A dry goods store catering to railway workers provided the staples: flour, sugar, salt, molasses, eggs, beef, pork, mackerel, tea, coffee, and whiskey, all sold in huge portions, as was the soap and starch she used to fight the unending grime accumulated by nine laborers. It was a far cry from the empty shops she had left behind in rural Kerry. So too was the imposing forest she now called home.

  For Daniel’s part, he didn’t so much see the trees as he did the cornfields that surrounded them. This was fertile country, and farmers did well on their land, most even raising their own livestock as well as row after row of grain, all surrounded by more squash and pole beans than he had ever seen. During harvest time, he could see the teams of wagons working their way through the fields, pulling in bushel after bushel of corn. It was clean, honest work, and a far cry from the life of a railroad worker.

  • • •

  When passengers traveled on the railroad, Henry David Thoreau would write fifteen years later in Walden, they did so on the backs of Irish immigrants. Railway mania was well under way in Indiana, and over a dozen lines transected the state, all part of the growing network of midwestern rails replacing water as America’s preferred venue for transportation. Over the next two years, workers like Daniel Reilly would be responsible for laying nearly 150 miles of track in Indiana alone, enough to double the state’s lines.

  Eastern Indiana is mostly level, but the elevation from one end of the track to the other still dropped three hundred feet, requiring grading and excavation—backbreaking work in a geography defined by limestone and shale. Those not leveling the earth itself were clearing it of boulders and virgin growth or digging ditches alongside the tracks. The men did their work with picks and shovels, grubbing their way across the landscape from dawn until dusk six days a week. Daniel and the other men in the house would leave before sunrise, walking the ever longer path to their worksite and the twelve hours of toil that awaited them there. This was not work for the faint of heart; injuries and death—from explosions and falls, from cave-ins and runaway trains—were common. So too was illness; in fact just west of Liberty in Funk’s Grove, Illinois, more than fifty Irish railway workers would soon succumb to cholera, and were then buried in a mass grave.

  Then there was the violence Irish workers brought upon themselves as long-held national feuds found new roots in the United States. Riots were epic battles sometimes nearly nine hundred men strong, and they included enough arms to make even a military battalion wary of interfering. On the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, one particularly severe skirmish left fifty-six men dead and required intervention from both the local militia and the army before it was quelled—the first time federal troops were required to settle a labor dispute in Ame
rica.

  Daniel didn’t want this kind of life any more than he wanted the violence and suffering back in Ireland. He was just a shy farmer, late to marry and more comfortable in his fields than anywhere else. Railroad work was exhausting, dangerous, and foul. The men toiled until they could no longer think straight, then drank themselves to sleep—or into a brawl—every night. They had little individuality working the line and even less respect from their supervisors. Farming, by comparison, was work that Daniel knew and loved. More than anything, he wanted a farm where he could raise his family.

  The Liberty newspaper was filled with ads for fertile farmland in nearby Michigan. Just a few decades earlier, Michigan had been the site of border wars between Britain and America. It had become a state in 1835, and since then officials there were eager to see it settled. Brochures for upland immigrants abounded, most promising the kind of pastoral life Daniel had once known in Ireland. The family had been in Indiana for just a year, but that was enough for Daniel to know it wasn’t the place for them. And so, with a little American money in his pocket, he again packed their belongings, this time for what he hoped would, at last, be their promised land.

  FERGUS FALLS, MINNESOTA

  AUGUST 26, 1885

  The air was crisp and cool that night, unseasonably so, even for the northern prairie. Men were glad to wear their jackets; women donned their autumn dresses. The temperate air was a welcome relief for Jim O’Brien’s tenants, who, like the schoolchildren before them, had come to rue the extremes of an old and poorly insulated schoolhouse.

  Nicholas Reilly was now the father of five, and his youngest, Eugene, was barely a month old. Above the Reillys lived the Finklesons and their four children. Two couples, the Champlins and Coopers, rounded out the tenantry. From their apartments, they could hear Rat Matthews working his racehorses in the morning and the clamor of John Whitaker’s and Jim O’Brien’s saloons at night.

  Whenever Finkle Finkleson asked about O’Brien’s Saloon, Nicholas quickly changed the subject. How could he explain to his new Norwegian friend that he may very well be renting his apartment from a criminal? For all he knew, Nicholas himself was on the wrong side of the law. For weeks now, official-looking men had been coming around and asking a lot of questions about Jim’s extracurricular business pursuits. They seemed particularly interested in the stack of bonds in his massive safe. New taxes on whiskey were making it increasingly difficult for distillers to front their batches without auctioning off futures in the form of bonds. These bonds—at least the legitimate ones—had the same currency as a bank’s savings bonds, but keeping track of them was a nightmare. Forged receipts were everywhere, despite a massive national sting a decade previously that sent 176 distillers throughout the Midwest to court, and many to prison. Nicholas had begun to wonder if a similar fate might befall his brother-in-law, who was clearly feeling the pinch of scrutiny. Not to mention the pain of debt, which was making Jim more erratic than ever. Harriet was uncharacteristically absent these days, and Nicholas couldn’t help but worry about her. When Jim left to buy what he insisted was the finest racehorse to ever run in Minnesota, Nicholas was relieved. If nothing else, the horse would distract everyone from the rising tension.

  Jim did everything with great fanfare, and the arrival of his new racehorse that evening was no exception. All of the schoolhouse tenants turned out to watch as the trailer arrived at Rat Matthews’s and a gorgeous chestnut stallion emerged. Clearly elated, Jim played the part of ringmaster as the horse was led around for all to admire. The children cheered, and even Nicholas had to admit the horse was worth the attention.

  It was well after dark when everyone returned to their apartments for the night. As they did, no one noticed the lights in the armory or the distinct smell of cigar smoke pouring out of one of the guards’ weekly meetings. Nor did they notice that one of the cigars had been left to smolder—probably accidentally dropped or set down by a guard and then forgotten. Certainly John Whitaker, who was too busy preparing for last call at his tavern, didn’t have the time to notice.

  Several hours later, nearly everyone in town was fast asleep—including the two underemployed police officers responsible for patrolling the town’s streets. Years of law-abiding behavior on the part of a hardworking citizenry had taught the officers that there was little reason to leave the quiet comfort of their office at that time of night.

  But Whitaker’s young servant girl was suddenly awake, though she didn’t know why until she went to the window and saw the blaze: all of the armory was engulfed in flame and threatening to collapse at any second. She rushed to wake her employer. Without bothering to don his trousers, Whitaker ran from the saloon to the police station, where he roused the sleeping officers. Another neighbor raced to O’Brien’s tenement building to wake the Reillys. While Cecilia gathered the children, Nicholas ran upstairs to wake the Finklesons. By then the fire was lapping at the tenement house itself. Finkle grabbed an armful of clothing and bedding, then pitched it out the bedroom window. Eliza managed to save only a beaver hat and the family Bible. Their younger son, Johnny, jumped out the second-floor window after discovering that the main stairway to their apartment was cut off by smoke and flame. The rest of the family just made it out by using a secondary staircase that led into the rooms occupied by the Reillys.

  All four tenants and their families had made it safely to the street by the time the fire brigades arrived to find the biggest fire in the history of Fergus Falls awaiting them. Soon there were enough firefighters to staff twelve brigades. Their exuberance in addressing the problem caused nothing short of chaos, as warring chiefs fought over how best to contain the blaze and where to direct the stream of water from their trucks.

  The town’s shopkeepers, alerted to the blaze, ran to their stores and began piling their goods in the street in an effort to save inventory from the blaze. The fire meanwhile kept right on burning, collapsing the roof of the armory in a cloud of embers and debris and consuming Jim O’Brien’s tenement building, before moving on to Rat Matthews’s training stable and the rest of Jim’s outbuildings. But before it did, someone—perhaps Jim himself—had the foresight to open the stall containing his new thoroughbred. The frightened horse bolted from the stable and wasn’t seen again until the next day, when someone on the outskirts of town managed to subdue the animal long enough to get a halter around his neck.

  By morning the neighborhood was in ruins. Jim O’Brien, already strapped with debt, lost $4,200 worth of property (more than $80,000 today), only half of which was insured. The Reillys, along with the other tenants, lost everything they had, save for the bedding and beaver hat salvaged by Eliza Finkleson. It was a great blow. Over a century later, Cecilia’s granddaughter would recall the way she spoke about the fire—the fact that it destroyed all her wedding gifts, which she said were “the nicest things she ever owned.”1 The Finklesons, along with the Champlins and Coopers, would settle into a new home just a few blocks away; the Reillys decided they had had enough of life in Jim’s frontier town.

  But first they had to settle up with the insurance adjuster. They were visited the next day by A. W. Perry, special agent of the St. Paul Fire & Marine Insurance Company, who arrived prepared to settle the loss incurred at the tenement. Upon arriving, however, the adjuster discovered that Jim O’Brien was nowhere to be found; he had taken the new horse, rechristened “Fireball,” to race in nearby Stillwater, where he hoped to recoup some of his loss. Without him there to answer questions and sign the paperwork, no one would receive a dime.

  While Jim bet his future on Fireball, the town of Fergus Falls opted for a more salubrious approach, dedicating itself to bolstering its fire ordinances and disaster protocols in an effort to prevent such a disaster from occurring again. As far as they were concerned, the fire would forever be known as the greatest tragedy to occur in Fergus Falls.

  They were wrong.

  26

  The Rising Tide

  1852

  BY ALL ACC
OUNTS, the Great Exhibition of 1851 had been a huge success. For five months people from around the world poured into London’s Crystal Palace, an enormous exposition center. Made almost entirely of glass, the nineteen-acre building was a daring testament to architecture, complete with grand halls, ceilings towering over a hundred feet high, and a domed roof. It was, many said, a tribute to man’s triumph over nature.

  So too was much of the Great Exhibition itself, which was in large part funded by Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. Considered by many to be the first real World’s Fair, the exhibition billed itself as the “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” but in truth it was Britain that took center stage. In the main hall, visitors were treated to massive installations celebrating colonial products, including sugar from the Caribbean and timber from Canada. Cotton gins spun cloth and telegraph demonstrations offered visitors their first opportunity to transmit messages across the globe.

  It was, Victoria hoped, a clear sign that the modern technological era had finally arrived, supplanting the upheaval and turmoil of the previous decades of inefficiencies. So successful was the exhibition in highlighting Britain’s superiority in these realms, that she was now planning a smaller triumph in Cork: Ireland’s Industrial Exhibition, the first to be held on the beleaguered island and one intended not only to demonstrate Ireland’s phoenix-like rise from the famine but also its full embrace of the Industrial Revolution.