The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

by Tim Egan

“The black heroes of the Union Army have not only entitled themselves to liberty, but to citizenship.” In that sentiment, he was well ahead of much of the country.

He made plans for public schools free of religious bias, angering Dimsdale, who doubled as the superintendent of education, and had insisted that the King James Bible be part of a child’s curriculum.

He further aggravated the territorial elite by taking a strong position against granting monopolies to a handful of businessmen (including vigilantes) for steamboat navigation and ownership of wagon trails. Roads and riverways belonged to all the people, Meagher insisted.

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.

Many of his fellow convicts in the penal colony were guilty beyond doubt. But a great many were not.

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.

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?

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.”

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.

Meagher, with his keen ear for history’s echoes, might have heard in such talk the British Crown during the Great Hunger.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More likely he was assassinated, these friends of Meagher believed.

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.

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.

She had returned to Montana but once, in the summer of 1887, to visit Yellowstone National Park. She was informed, as later scholars would discover, that her husband’s suggestion that the area be explored and considered as a preserve of some sort had contributed in a small way to the formation of what would become the world’s first national park.

Among those who had been with Meagher on that last day, no one backed the Sanders story.

Logic alone reinforced Baker’s conclusion. For what man of words would leave the world without a final word? What man readying to close out his final day would write his best friend on that day to outline ambitious plans for the future, a speaking tour of Europe, a family reunion, meeting a son for the first time? What suicidal husband would send a note of routine details and love to his wife? And what taker of his own life would cry for help in the grip of the river that carried him away?

It’s easy to blame it all on a drunken fall, as if that were the only fatal destiny for an Irishman who lived large. But that version also conflicts with witness accounts.

Sanders was never forced to explain the many contradictions in his telling of Meagher’s final night. By the time the Frank Diamond story broke, it was too late for a prosecutor to formally question Sanders. The vigilante leader had died in 1905—three days after the statue of Thomas Meagher was unveiled in Helena. From that week onward, no governor, legislator, lobbyist or citizen could walk up the steps of the Montana capitol without passing the imposing sculpture of the Irish revolutionary.

They found that the governor’s death was a homicide, and Wilbur Sanders was the culprit. If true, it meant that Thomas Meagher had lost his life for standing up to people who committed murder in the name of authority.

Meagher’s words had been resurrected by leaders of the fight in 1916. His speeches were reprinted, passed around in underground posts, muscled into service before blood was shed.