The Immortal Irishman

  While Meagher was in the saddle, the vigilantes issued a new round of death sentences, as if no governing authority existed. They would occasionally refer to “the Acting One”—and laugh. It didn’t matter what his title was; they had no use for him. The decision to kill a citizen was made in secret; the execution was not. The vigilantes asphyxiated their victims in the light of day, and left them hanging well past the point of rigor mortis. On October 3, Con Kirby was strung up in Helena, from the branch of a big pine called the Hanging Tree, at the corner of what would become Blake and Highland Streets. The same month, three men—nameless all—were hanged in Prickly Pear Gulch, to the north. The following month, another three men were roped to Helena’s Hanging Tree. Some died by strangulation, a painful slow choking, others by a neck-snap. As 1865 came to a close, the executioners had murdered thirty-seven people in barely two years’ time—“the deadliest campaign of vigilante killing in American history,” the author Frederick Allen later concluded.

  In November, a fight led to a fatality inside a saloon in Helena—gamblers taking on other gamblers. Guns, knives and fists were bared. One cardplayer pointed a gun at another, James B. Daniels, and was stabbed to death. The vigilantes seized Daniels and turned him over to a Republican judge. The jury, at first divided, ultimately brought a conviction equal to manslaughter. For this, Daniels was sentenced to three years in a frigid territorial penitentiary. His defenders said the penalty was too harsh—Daniels, they insisted, had acted in self-defense against a card cheat who drew a gun. Thirty-two citizens of Helena, including some of the men on the jury, petitioned the governor to pardon Daniels. Meagher did not have that power—only the president did, he felt. But he could grant a reprieve from the sentence while Daniels sought a presidential pardon.

  James Daniels, hanged by vigilantes from the Hanging Tree in Helena, Montana. Not long after Meagher granted Daniels a reprieve, the vigilantes seized him. March 1, 1866.

  COURTESY OF THE MONTANA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  The convict Tom Meagher knew what it was like to stare at the world from inside a cage, to feel unjustly punished, to be on the wrong side of authority. Under sentence in Tasmania, he’d lived among outlaws. His own father-in-law there—Bennie’s dad—had been banished for robbing a stage. Many of his fellow convicts in the penal colony were guilty beyond doubt. But a great many were not. And one of his earliest memories was of Waterford’s old wooden bridge where Francis Hearn was hanged by the British. After looking at the evidence, Meagher ordered Daniels released. As well, Daniels was Irish. Ethnicity hadn’t mattered, in Meagher’s view, during the New York riots. The mobs who burned Manhattan were violent criminals who should be brought to justice, as Meagher condemned them. But Montana was a place where the Irish could start anew without being looked on as second-class people.

  The vigilantes were infuriated. The Acting One had dared to cross them, and done so without showing the least respect. Already Meagher had angered the custodians of Montana law by siding with Democrats—on keeping the king’s Bible out of public schools, convening a legislature, insisting on publicly owned roads and riverways. He was proudly and loudly Irish and Catholic, an affront to the Masonic Order, Protestants and nativists. He feared no man in the territory. And he mocked those who disliked the immigrants who answered the call to New Ireland. “Let the marrowless bigot carp and deprecate,” he said in one Montana speech. “Let the hungry Puritan with his nasal music importune the God of Blue Laws to save the Yankee from the witchcraft of St. Patrick’s daughters and devilry of St. Patrick’s sons . . . The Irish people in America will not, and can not, forget the land of their birth, their sufferings, their dearest memories and proudest hopes.”

  Still, he had kept his distance from the organized killers. Now, on the dirt streets of Virginia City, when the vigilante prosecutor passed Meagher, he said nothing to the governor. Wilbur Sanders used his glare as a wordless warning, eyes that were normally vacant lighting on a target. To him, Meagher was already past tense. “He is dead beyond all hope of resurrection,” Sanders wrote to a friend. The Irishman shrugged it off. In a life of inexhaustible political pugilism, he’d fought the British Empire, the Know-Nothings and the Confederate States of America. A handful of self-appointed moral wardens in the vastness of the Rocky Mountain West did not make him cower. Who was Wilbur Sanders, anyway? “The most vicious of my enemies,” Meagher wrote to the White House, addressing the complaints of the right-thinking citizens, “an unrelenting and unscrupulous extremist.”

  But Sanders was an extremist with a long reach. When James Daniels returned to Helena the day Meagher let him out of jail, he was a free man awaiting a pardon. By 9 p.m. on the evening of his arrival, he was seized by the vigilantes. An hour later, Daniels was hanging from Helena’s most notorious tree—his windpipe throttled, his boots, pants and coat on, and Meagher’s reprieve in his back pocket. Even some of the pioneers of frontier justice were horrified at the suddenness of the killing. The Vigilance Committee “committed an irreparable error in the execution of this man,” wrote Nathaniel Langford. And Langford was a founding member of that committee. Still, his was a rare voice of dissent. The strangulation of Daniels was delivered with a blunt message to the governor. Witnesses reported seeing a note pinned to the dead man’s chest: “The Acting One is next.”

  21

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  The Remains of a Life

  From atop the treeless bluffs overlooking the big river, they could see them coming: high-decked, clangorous ships churning upstream to dock at the world’s innermost port. At the end of the marine highway to the West, at Fort Benton, the steam-wheelers spit out people, bearded and armed, their skin the color of the cliffs above the Missouri River. The prospectors hired wagons to take them farther into buffalo country or bought ponies to gallop south to the goldfields. They scraped and clawed at land stroked by water, and then moved on to scrape and claw again. They were in such a hurry. The Blackfeet, so named because of the dark markings on the bottom of their moccasins, called themselves Niitsitapi—the Original People. Their words had skipped along this river and their chants had disappeared into night skies long before anyone introduced a god on a cross or a gun that could fire a twelve-pound ball. When they had this part of the high, rumpled northern Rockies to themselves, they chased bison herds over drop-offs or cornered them in cul-de-sacs where the short grass ran into basalt walls. And when the bison herds thinned, and then didn’t appear at all, the Original People went hungry and became desperate and started to kill the new people. During a dark, cold spell known as the Starvation Winter, Blackfeet died in great numbers. At their weakest point, they were told to give up their language, their religion and their land. It was a federal crime, subject to jail or fine, to worship in the old way, an affront to speak the tongue of their grandparents. What had they done to deserve this? They had refused to stop being Niitsitapi.

  Thomas Meagher was recalling his own people’s years of starvation, his own fight against occupiers intent on emasculating a nation, outlawing a religion, banning a language, during his first journey to see the natives of Montana Territory. After descending by horseback on the bank along the great falls of the Missouri—a series of thundering cataracts that brought to a halt all upriver travel—he was a day’s ride from Fort Benton. This late in the year, in the flats, the river was no longer tawny and swollen, but clear and shallow, ice forming in pools along the shore. The land was the golden brown of a Tipperary spud, dusted by snow along the north-facing ridgelines, the cottonwoods bare in the canyons. Shunned by the ruling clique in Virginia City, the governor fell in again with a handful of well-read Jesuit priests. In them he found a world of acceptance and civility that he could not find in the capital. Around a campfire, he was back at Clongowes Wood, remembering much of his Latin, at Stonyhurst without the risk of getting his hand whacked by a disciplinarian in a clerical collar. The Jesuits, many of them from Europe, loved the stories of his life, which he would stretch over several winter nigh
ts. And Meagher loved telling them. “The springtime of my youth was renewed,” Meagher said, in recalling “the days of brightest happiness.”

  The American authorities of church and state regarded the longtime inhabitants of the territory with disgust. “The general condition of Indians of the Blackfeet nation, taken in light of civilization, is degrading in the extreme,” wrote Gad E. Upson, the government’s Indian agent. As the go-between of the native and American worlds, Upson was presumed to have some sympathy for the tribes, but he could not hide his hatred. In a similar vein, an early Catholic missionary wrote, “The Indian, as everyone knows, is a wild human being, bred in moral and material barbarism.” Meagher, with his keen ear for history’s echoes, might have heard in such talk the British Crown during the Great Hunger.

  Among the Jesuits were a few men who showed more tolerance of the tribes, trying to learn their language and something of their ways—all in service of converting them to Roman Catholic Christianity. The Indians put up with the spiritual condescension, with the missions rising on the buffalo grounds, in the hope of finding a powerful antidote to the plagues besetting their people. They wanted Big Medicine from the black robes. The native population had crashed. White ailments—cholera, smallpox, measles—to which the Indians had no immunity, took out young and old in mortal sweeps. To the north were the Blackfeet and three related tribes, feared by Lewis and Clark, feared by their enemies the Nez Perce and the Shoshone. Disease had taken much of the fight out of them. To the southeast were the Crow, more docile, trembling at the advance of their traditional Indian foes from the east. Looming over all were the mighty Oglala Sioux, led by Red Cloud, the most brilliant Indian tactician of the nineteenth century. He had proclaimed 1866 the year to rid Montana of whites. His plan was to close the door to immigration by making the main wagon trail into the territory a war zone.

  At Fort Benton, more than 7,000 natives massed for a treaty session, led by Gad Upson with the Jesuits as interpreters. Meagher was an observer. He learned quickly how homelands were broken up by the government. The Blackfeet and the Piegan were expected to relinquish all land south of the Missouri and Teton Rivers and east of the Milk River—the heart of some of the most bountiful bison country—to occupy a rectangle to the northwest, hard up against what would become Glacier National Park. In return, the bands would get an annuity of $5,000, and each chief would be paid $500 for twenty years. Many of the payments would be in farm implements. The Blackfeet, horsemen and hunters for generations, were expected to become ranchers and wheat growers. Some of the chieftains signed, others did not. As governor at the treaty session, Meagher was offered gifts of buffalo robes by the tribal leaders; he turned them down. “You are poor and need to keep your property,” he told them. “Keep it for yourselves and your children.”

  Meagher was astonished that a nation could be diminished so cheaply. “The original owners of this vast domain,” he noted later in a speech in Virginia City, had given up everything for “a comparatively small reservation.” But he did not object—not publicly. No sooner had the treaty papers with tribal X’s on the signature lines been folded into the pocket of the Indian-hating Indian agent Upson than some of the Blackfeet realized they’d been taken, and attacked a few white stragglers around Fort Benton.

  The Sioux refused to take the treaty bait. Like the Comanche in the southern plains, they used torture as a deterrent. They honed their skills on fellow Indians, cutting off noses and ears, fingers and toes, lopping penises from bodies and stuffing them into the mouths of victims. With enemy tribes, the goal was to deny them passage to the afterlife in anything but a mangled body, leaving them incapable of enjoying the pleasures of heaven. With whites, the aim was to plant fear, and occasional cottonwood stakes, in the hearts of interlopers. Throughout the second half of 1865 and into 1866, the Sioux attacked cavalrymen, wagon trains and miners on their way to Virginia City. With more than 2,000 warriors, Red Cloud moved freely throughout large parts of Montana and Wyoming Territories. He disdained the trinkets, blankets and money promised by the Americans—wakpamni, the bribes designed to get natives to give up their land, as well as miniwakan, the water that makes men crazy. By early 1866, he’d been so successful that the government closed most of the Bozeman Trail, which cut north from the Oregon Trail and could save 400 miles, or almost six weeks, of a journey to the goldfields of Montana.

  The attacks sent the population of whites into a panic. They appealed to Meagher for help, and he turned to the federal government. If Meagher wanted soldiers in Montana to defend against Indians, he was told that he would have to go through the man in charge of the upper West, the commander of the Department of the Missouri—William T. Sherman. The general’s opinion of the native population in the territories was little better than his opinion of Georgians during his march to the sea, or the Irish who’d fought for him at Bull Run. “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop progress,” Sherman wrote to the War Department. Still, a grudge was a grudge—envenomed martinet—and the general refused Meagher’s request. Nor would he grant him the respect of his title; he addressed him as “secretary,” though Meagher had been the sole governor of the territory for half a year.

  Meagher called the legislature into session on March 5, 1866. The House of Representatives assembled on the second floor of a saloon; the upper body met in a billiard hall. Snow buried Virginia City, but Meagher warmed the politicians, most of them Democrats who’d been elected under the previous governor. He said the territory should be governed free of ethnic or religious taint. Those who fought for the Confederacy were as welcome as those who had tried to kill them. Radical Republicans could find common cause with Copperhead Democrats. He reiterated his position on public schools: they should not teach religion. The lesson of Great Britain—forcing the Crown’s faith on the people of Ireland—had never left him. And when Dimsdale, the British-born editor of the Montana Post, attacked Meagher for this stance, the governor fired him from his position as school superintendent. Later that year, the first public school in Montana opened in Virginia City—without the king of England’s Bible.

  He kept the frontier lawmakers furiously legislating. He also kept them fed and lubricated. His saloon bill, “for food and wet goods,” was $434 over 38 days, a sum that paid for 74 meals, 19 bottles of wine, 12 pitchers of beer and 43 cigars. And when the legislature tried to pay Meagher $2,500 in salary, he turned it down, even as his remaining personal assets were running perilously low. “I do not wish to have a single dollar voted me out of territorial funds,” he said. “The federal government ought to provide for its officers.” The governor in motion was his own force of nature—equal parts nudge, threat and silky-voiced eloquence. In the Ireland of his birth, he could not have served in Parliament without denouncing his faith. In Tasmania, the prisoner could only write by pen name from the underground, helping the ex-convicts of the penal colony force the Crown to grant them self-government. But under the big sky of Montana, he was the executive branch, with a veto threat to back his powers of persuasion. By the close of the session, Meagher sent the citizen legislators back to their gold diggings and homestead shacks, but not until they’d passed sixty-four bills.

  “Everything is delightful to me,” Meagher wrote Secretary of State William Seward, “with the exception of those ill-bred bigots . . . who vent their vexation against me in vulgar and infamous detraction.”

  Those well-placed enemies steamed and plotted. Meagher had unleashed a citizen government of populist Democrats, and the mechanics of that rough-edged democracy sent the vigilantes into fits. At the same time, they continued with their executions. In February, two men were strung up in the community of East Gallatin. The next month, just as the legislature convened, another man was hanged in Helena, and a fourth victim was strangled by rope in Deer Lodge, bringing the total number of vigilante killings to forty-six. If there was a pattern to the death sentences, it was noted that most of the victims were Democrats and lab
orers. A store owner who shot and killed his business partner was given a pass. Wilbur Sanders, the self-proclaimed vigilante prosecutor, Republican leader and aspiring congressional delegate, could barely contain his rage at the Acting One for the crime of acting as governor. In a letter to a supporter about what to do with Meagher, he wrote, “We must put a quietus on the doings of this pretender.” The word could mean only one thing.

  Meagher exuded invincibility. Could the vigilantes of Montana seriously hope to do to him what the British Empire, the governor of Tasmania’s penal colony and the Confederate generals could not? A wanted man? Take a number.

  All of Virginia City, or those who could get in, packed into the People’s Theatre on St. Patrick’s Day, 1866, to hear the orator in a mile-high performance. He did not seem like someone afraid of the noose. “Sixteen years ago I spent the 17th of March in the forest of Tasmania,” he told the spellbound audience. “It was a very beautiful island, which her gracious majesty of Great Britain enabled me to visit, having placed a sloop of war at my disposal for that delightful purpose.” Laughter. Meagher turned serious, his voice almost a whisper. He closed his eyes to show himself in a dream state, then opened them, slowing his words to let the audience in on a secret. He was a homeless exile, he explained, as he had told Libby when asking for her hand, a man cast about on three continents. One thing had sustained him through the despair of the open sea aboard the Swift, through the smothering of life in the penal colony, through the butchery of friends at Marye’s Heights. One thing: he had figured out a way to summon Ireland—in color and sound, scent and texture. No idle reminiscence, this was a trick, born of internal discipline, he had practiced in the first weeks of his banishment, then mastered during his bleakest hours in Tasmania.