The recent visit of President McAleese to the US state of Montana highlighted the fact that the "Big Sky" country once had an Irish-born (acting) first citizen of its own. The former Young Irelander, temporary resident of Her Majesty's Australian penal colony and Union General in the American Civil War, Thomas Francis Meagher, ran the newly created territory for two years, from 1865-1867, writes Myles Dungan.
Montana succeeded in doing what the British, the Australian climate and the Confederates had failed to do to Meagher. It killed him. In circumstances still cloaked in mystery and controversy, he drowned in the Missouri river.
Montana was one of Meagher's spoils of war. His leadership of the Irish Brigade during the War Between the States (to give it a Confederate billing) had earned him, so he figured anyway, the right to some manifestation of Washington patronage. The position of Territorial Secretary of Montana was the bounty offered by the federal government. If he was disappointed with the result of his visit to the trough, he buried his dissatisfaction and decided to make the most of the opportunity. Meagher graciously accepted the honour as his duty to his adopted land. He might have had some grandiose notion of leading an Irish exodus, Mormon-style, to a new Canaan. He might have had ambitions to become the first Montana senator when the territory became a state. Instead, he was unwittingly walking into a bear-pit that would make his stay in Van Diemen's Land seem like a fortnight in Sandy Lane.
He might have begun to suspect that all was not right with his new posting when the incumbent governor, Sidney Edgerton, used the same stagecoach by which Meagher had arrived to make good his own departure. With hardly so much as a "You're in charge now", the former Clongowes "old boy" had become an acting governor.
He didn't have much time to let it all go to his head before he fell foul of the Vigilance Committee. This was not a group of attentive and observant citizens but a belligerent coterie of vigilante Republicans (Meagher was a pro-Union Democrat). Before the departure of Edgerton they had awarded themselves numerous official territorial posts and voted themselves healthy salaries to boot.
When Meagher indicated his intention to summon the Montana Legislature with a view to formulating an application for statehood, this was taken by the shadowy Vigilance Committee as a declaration that hostilities had begun. The Republican campaign against their Democratic opponent began with a strategy with which he would have been very familiar from his native land: character assassination.
To this day there are many Montanans who believe that Thomas Francis Meagher spent his 20 months as acting governor in a state of permanent inebriation. At the time his Irishness was advanced as undeniable proof of his sottishness. Meagher was known to be partial to a drink, but had he consumed the prodigious quantities of booze suggested by his adversaries he would have fallen victim to the liver rather than the river.
The vigilantes also resorted to another customarily rewarding ploy, intimidation. In the winter of 1865-66 Meagher defied the Vigilance Committee by (illicitly) pardoning an Irish-American, one James Daniels, who had been convicted of manslaughter. The self-appointed guardians of Montana law and order decided to ignore this display of clemency and lynched Daniels anyway. A note was pinned to his clothing which read: "The Governor is next". Despite the omission of the prefix "Acting", the Irishman could be in no doubt to whom the hangmen were referring.
But "Meagher of the Sword" had larger problems to worry about. In 1866 the so-called Fetterman massacre by Red Cloud and the Sioux of 80 officers and men of the United States Cavalry set nerves jangling throughout Montana. Meagher raised a militia force of 600 men and managed to persuade a reluctant Western military commander, the famous General William Tecumseh Sherman, to supply the troop with 2,000 rifles. It was while he was attempting to collect these from the Missouri river town of Fort Benton that he met his mysterious end. On the night of July, 1st, 1867 he fell overboard from a steamboat into the swirling waters of the majestic river, which has refused, so far, to give up his body.
His many enemies claimed he had been "falling down" drunk all day and exhibiting signs of utter paranoia. His defenders insist that he was sober, but feverish and disoriented, and that a missing rail on the upper deck of the steamboat caused his death. Accrued legend has him being murdered by (a) vigilantes, (b)British agents, (c) Fenians angry at his opposition to the invasion of Canada.
Bizarrely, more than 20 years later a petrified body with a neat bullet hole in the skull was found down river from Fort Benton and exhibited around the US as Meagher's. In an ironic twist, it was even brought to Australia.
Meagher has not been forgotten in modern Montana. A county is named after him there. A statue of the general mounted on a formidable-looking horse stands outside the Capitol building in the state capital, Helena. It had fallen victim to a century of weathering and bird droppings before the local Ancient Order of Hibernians had it cleaned up last year to mark the 140th anniversary of Meagher's appointment.