When D’Arcy McGee was murdered, the first person to reach his side was Will Trotter, a pageboy and the son of McGee’s landlady. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime. Patrick James Whelan never denied that he was part of a conspiracy, but he always claimed he was not the man who killed D’Arcy McGee. He said that on the night of the assassination, he was drinking with “a fellow called Marshall.”
With those facts in mind, I wrote this story.
CONOR O’Dea and his father, Thomas, are fictitious. The death of Conor’s mother, Margaret, is based on actual accounts of hellish voyages from Ireland to North America.
Mrs. Trotter, who ran the Toronto House, was a widow, and her son, Will Trotter, was a pageboy. She also had a daughter. I know nothing about her, not even her name. So Meg Trotter is fictitious. I have no reason to believe that Mary Ann Trotter was a transcendentalist.
Clearly, this is a story set in the past, not a history text. I tried to stay as close to the facts as possible, but veered off them when I felt it useful to do so. The events of Confederation Day, the troubled election in Montreal, the Fenians gathering in the United States, McGee’s life as an Irish rebel and Canadian Father of Confederation, even his prophetic dream—they are all based on recorded accounts.
I played with time quite a bit and compressed much of the trial. For example, Joseph Faulkner did testify at the trial, but in the novel he is actually a combination of three people who testified. Whelan’s confession to Doyle in jail was reported by Andrew Cullen. I slightly changed the circumstances. The testimony about the footprints was raised in the police magistrate’s inquiry, not the trial itself. Much of the dialogue from the trial is taken from actual testimony. But the trial is much condensed and simplified.
I tried to make D’Arcy McGee, Sir John A. and Lady Macdonald as true to life as possible. From their speeches and diaries, one can get a sense of their personalities. I embellished things, certainly, but in an attempt to breathe life into their characters. Whenever possible, I used actual words and reported anecdotes. I pulled sentences and fragments from speeches and letters, and inserted them into dialogue. I admit to modernizing their speech at times to make conversation more readable.
The Macdonalds did live in a rented house called Quadrilateral on Daly Street in this era, and it did have terrible drainage problems. Later, they would move to Stadacona Hall, and later still to the much grander Earnscliffe, overlooking the Ottawa River.
Many of the anecdotes regarding Sir John A. Macdonald are based on reported stories. Some would have happened after the novel’s time period. For example, Lady Macdonald did discover toys that had belonged to her husband’s dead son, but she found them much later in their marriage. Macdonald reportedly did quip about not knowing ancient Greek but knowing politics; however, it was at McGill University, not Queen’s, and it was a later governor general speaking, not a professor. It simply made sense to place him in his beloved Kingston. There was a secret means of escape from the prime minister’s parliamentary office, but it was put in by Alexander Mackenzie, so while it makes sense to imagine Macdonald sitting at his desk, looking longingly for escape routes, he could not have done so until his second tenure as prime minister. Lady Macdonald did have a child in February 1869. It was a very difficult birth, and she could not have participated in the meeting as described. The Macdonalds would soon discover that their daughter, Mary Theodora, had been born with hydroencephalitis, better known as water on the brain. She would never fully be able to take care of herself.
The Toronto House burned down in January 1869. My timing is a bit off. Many felt the fire was set by Fenians. I should also note that the wooden toboggan slide was not built until the 1870s. It was a keen part of Ottawa’s winter life. But not yet.
Tex is loosely based on Morley Roberts, a British adventurer who worked on the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883. He was nicknamed Tex because he wore a Stetson hat. Roberts, by the way, was a transcendentalist.
Patrick Buckley was Macdonald’s favourite driver. He was charged with conspiracy and acquitted. Many people in Ottawa wouldn’t hire Buckley because of his alleged association with McGee’s murder, but Sir John employed him until the prime minister’s death, and Buckley remained steadfastly loyal to his employer.
D’Arcy McGee’s brother reported that Patrick James Whelan visited McGee at his home during the election campaign. It was used against him at the trial. I have the assassin visiting McGee instead, as it gave me an opportunity to have McGee tell the story of his rebellious past.
Gilbert McMicken did head a clandestine spying operation. Henri Le Caron, in his book: Twenty-Five Years in the Secret Service: A British Spy Among the Fenians, praises McMicken. Sir John A. Macdonald called him “a shrewd, cool and determined man who won’t easily lose his head.” He was not in Ottawa on July 1, 1867, but it was convenient to have him report to Macdonald on the day of Confederation.
Colonel Patrick O’Hagan is fictitious. There were many rogue officers in the Fenian movement, but he is an invention. Fenian general John O’Neill did invade Canada at Ridgeway and planned two more invasions—one in Quebec and one in Manitoba—but he was appalled by the murder of D’Arcy McGee. The meeting between the American president, Andrew Johnson, and O’Neill is from Le Caron’s book. I added O’Hagan to the mix.
The Fenian threat was real, or certainly perceived to be very real. The Fenian letters, chants and proclamations are shortened, but they are presented as they were written. The Fenians certainly saw McGee as a turncoat and an enemy, and he denounced their activities with passion, as depicted in this story. The threats to McGee’s and John A. Macdonald’s lives are accurate.
It was indeed a troubled time.
NOW, the fundamental question: Was there an assassin? Perhaps. Whelan was identified by his clothing and a matching boot print. He went to the gallows not only claiming his innocence but stating, “I know the man who shot Mr. McGee.” Many in the Irish community in Ottawa and Montreal felt that there definitely was a conspiracy, and that Whelan was not the murderer. After Whelan’s arrest, an informer reported to Gilbert McMicken that he was “almost sure that Whelan is not the man that assassinated McGee.” The rumour in Montreal, which has been passed down through the generations and was reported in T. P. Slattery’s They Got to Find Mee Guilty Yet, was that “Whelan didn’t shoot McGee. Whelan held the horse for the man who shot McGee.” David A. Wilson, McGee’s biographer, told me that “by the criminal law criterion of reasonable doubt, Whelan should be found not guilty. But by the criterion of the balance of probabilities, Whelan either shot McGee or was part of a hit squad that did.”
But who knows? An innocent man may well have hanged for the murder of Thomas D’Arcy McGee.