21
The Invasion That Wasn’t
EMBERS DANCED LIKE fireflies and ash fell like snow upon the Fenian wagon train as it rattled north through an American cauldron. An extreme drought in the summer of 1871 had turned the Great Plains into a tinderbox. A red sea of flames washed over the middle of the North American continent from Kansas to Manitoba. Tongues of fire six to twelve feet high fed on the prairie grass and devoured freshly reaped harvests of wheat, oats, and corn, torching months of toil in an instant. Ordinary fire blocks proved impotent. Blazes hurdled over roads and leaped over rivers. The fires were so ferocious that they appeared to ignite spontaneously.
The first days of autumn brought little relief to a land so parched that even the soil burned. Driven east by scalding winds, the wildfires roared across the prairie like a buffalo stampede.* The inferno bestowed a perpetual twilight upon the middle of America. Great billowing smoke clouds dimmed the sun during the day, while an otherworldly orange glow floating above the horizon brightened the night.
The black soot of the charred prairie begrimed the faces and darkened the clothing of John O’Neill and a force of twenty-seven Fenians in the last days of September as they tracked the meandering path of the Red River dividing Minnesota from the Dakota Territory as it flowed north.
In spite of his previous pledges to the White House and his fellow Fenians that he would forever resist such temptations, O’Neill had been seduced yet again by a plan to attack Canada. The chance to cleanse himself of the shame of Eccles Hill and redeem his family name was irresistible. Hugh O’Neill might never have kicked the British out of Ireland as he’d hoped, but at least he had never suffered the shame of having been arrested on the battlefield by a local marshal.
As he looked out the window of his stagecoach, O’Neill saw the glimmer of the encircling blazes. The fires illuminated the way forward to Canada. Sometimes, though, those inextinguishable flames burned with such ferocity that the acrid smoke prevented the Fenian general from seeing what lay ahead.
This time, the plan to invade Canada wasn’t O’Neill’s but that of another son of Ireland—William Bernard O’Donoghue. When the Fenian general first met O’Donoghue several months earlier, he had seen in the twenty-eight-year-old something he liked—himself. The pair of Great Hunger refugees both favored action over oratory and harbored a smoldering hatred of the British, one that raged behind seemingly placid facades.
Born in Ireland’s County Sligo, O’Donoghue had already learned to despise the British by the time his family fled to New York City around 1848. Two decades later, the devout Irishman joined the western missions of the Roman Catholic Church in Canada’s Red River Colony, which lay north of Minnesota and the Dakota Territory. O’Donoghue taught mathematics at the College of St.-Boniface and studied for the priesthood, until he found a higher calling in taking up arms against the Crown.
O’Donoghue joined the Red River Rebellion launched in 1869 by the colony’s dominant ethnic group, the Métis, who drew their lineage from two centuries of intermarriage between French fur traders and Native American women. Fearing the loss of their rights as an ethnic, linguistic, and religious minority, the predominantly French-speaking Catholics launched an uprising to protest the transfer of their land from the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada and the appointment of an English-speaking governor. Led by Louis Riel, the descendant of an immigrant to Canada from Limerick in the early eighteenth century, they seized Fort Garry, present-day Winnipeg, and formed their own provisional government with O’Donoghue serving as treasurer. The Canadian government put down the rebellion in August 1870 and carved the confederation’s fifth province, Manitoba, out of the Red River Colony, but harsh feelings endured.
Forced into exile in the United States, O’Donoghue wasn’t willing to cede the fight. Rebuffed by President Ulysses S. Grant in a White House visit, the Irishman lobbied the Fenian Brotherhood to come to the aid of the Métis. He argued that because of their collective grievances at the hands of the British Empire there was a natural alliance between the Métis and the Irish. O’Donoghue also assured councilors that they would be supported and welcomed as liberators by the Métis, who accounted for approximately 9,800 of Manitoba’s 11,960 residents, although he had received no such pledge from Riel.
The Canadian government issued service medals such as this one emblazoned with the image of Queen Victoria to Fenian raid veterans.
With no stomach for another venture into Canada, particularly because there was still hope of uniting Irish American nationalists in the wake of the arrival of the Cuba Five, the Fenian council told O’Donoghue they would give him no aid except for their prayers. O’Neill, however, was so driven by redemption and vengeance toward the British Empire that he resigned from the Fenian Brotherhood in order to participate in the raid. In a concession to their former president, the Fenian council agreed to his request to not oppose or condemn the attack so long as he didn’t try to enlist any members of the brotherhood into his scheme. That would be the limit of their support.
Going it alone, O’Neill traveled across the Midwest, recalling his past glories in a lecture titled “Ireland, Past, Present, and Future” and secretly trying to raise men, money, and munitions. It was an unlikely scene: By night, O’Neill assured audiences that he had sworn off any interest in Canada. By day, he recruited former Fenian comrades to join his latest venture.
Most of his overtures, though, were met with rejections, except for the one toward General John J. Donnelly, his chief of staff, who had been among the wounded at Eccles Hill. Having managed to recruit an army of barely more than two dozen men, the persistent O’Neill traveled west to take Canada once again.
As O’Neill’s posse traveled through the incinerated grasslands of the Dakota Territory, the Canadian spymaster Gilbert McMicken trailed just behind them on the road north to Fort Garry to begin his new assignment. When rumors of a Fenian raid reached Manitoba in late August, a panicked lieutenant governor, Adams G. Archibald, beseeched the Canadian prime minister, John A. Macdonald, to send help. In need of a trusted set of eyes to keep watch over the internal and external threats in Manitoba, Macdonald appointed McMicken agent of dominion lands for Manitoba and dispatched him to Fort Garry.
Passing through Chicago, McMicken had met with Colonel Henri Le Caron, who informed him that an attack was imminent. After the disasters at the Battles of Eccles Hill and Trout River and O’Neill’s imprisonment, Le Caron had concluded that the Fenian threat to Canada had finally dissolved. “I had no thought of its ever reviving again,” he recalled. The spy thus put his career in espionage to rest, returning to his medical studies before opening up a practice in Wilmington, Illinois, where he lived with his wife and three children.
That life took a turn when he was handed a telegram written by O’Neill, summoning him to a meeting in Chicago on June 15. More than a year had passed since their last encounter, when Le Caron watched with a wry smile as O’Neill was arrested behind Alvah Richard’s farm and forcibly removed from the battlefield. The secret agent, his confidence undiminished, assumed the former Fenian general had come to pay him back the hundreds of dollars he had borrowed. He was surprised, then, when O’Neill produced letters from O’Donoghue detailing the Red River plot.
O’Neill told his confidant that he needed the weapons from the Fenians’ cache that had remained hidden after the prior year’s raids. Only Le Caron knew their location. Would he help O’Neill recover the four hundred surplus Springfield rifles and ammunition? Le Caron obliged. He accompanied O’Neill to a hidden repository in Port Huron, Michigan, containing the rifles that had been contracted by the Fenians the year previous.
In the Fenians’ wake, along the Red River, McMicken collected scraps of information about their plan, like bread crumbs left behind on the trail. He transmitted them in coded messages back to Prime Minister Macdonald in Ottawa. From an Irish stagecoach driver who groused that the Fenians had made a “damned mistake” not waiting until November, when the frozen rivers would have impeded the arrival of Canadian reinforcements, McMicken learned that the raiders’ plan was to meet in Pembina, a village just south of the Canadian border in the Dakota Territory, and start the march for Fort Garry on the morning of October 5.
Like giant wooden guideposts, a string of newly planted telegraph poles that awaited the draping of wires shepherded the Irishmen into Pembina, the only permanent white settlement in the Dakota Territory north of the 45th parallel. After passing ramshackle cabins cobbled together by impoverished squatters, the expedition arrived in the town huddled on the west bank of the Red River two miles south of Canada. With a population of only 250 residents, Pembina was still the most populous town in the Dakota Territory. Twice every year, the Métis gathered in the border town for their traditional buffalo hunts. Now O’Donoghue used the village as the rendezvous point for an army stalking a more elusive prey.
As the days until the raid dwindled, the Fenians continued their recruitment efforts among the discontented Métis who had fled to Pembina after the Red River Rebellion. When O’Donoghue finally reached out to the Métis leaders in Manitoba, two nights before the attack, however, they made it clear to their former treasurer that they had no interest in his scheme.
The refusal dealt a terrible blow to O’Donoghue’s plans. His army of three dozen men, mostly Fenians, was absurdly small for a force intending to take over a vast province. Still, he knew that the charge of a light brigade such as theirs might work. After all, the provincial militia wasn’t much bigger. Archibald had a garrison of only eighty men to defend Fort Garry and much of Manitoba, and the makeshift force called out by the lieutenant governor still hadn’t left Fort Garry. They remained a two-day march from the border. And O’Donoghue held out hope that once he crossed the border, Riel would change his mind and mobilize the Métis to join the rebellion.
In Washington, D.C., Secretary of War William W. Belknap told Secretary of State Hamilton Fish that he entertained “little apprehension of any organized invasion of Manitoba from the territory of the United States.” O’Neill and O’Donoghue were about to prove him wrong.
O’Neill, O’Donoghue, and their men slunk out of Pembina on the morning of October 5 while the village slumbered. By dawn’s early light, three dozen men had gathered their rifles and set off for Canada. Around 7:30 a.m., the raiders marched across the international boundary that had been surveyed by the U.S. Army major Stephen Long in 1823, five years after a treaty between the United States and Great Britain established the 49th parallel as the international boundary.
Unlike at Eccles Hill sixteen months earlier, there were no Canadian forces waiting to ambush O’Neill and his men once they set foot on foreign soil. The men carried Fenian guns, but O’Neill maintained his pledge to disassociate the attack from the brotherhood. No green flag led the charge into Canada; none of the soldiers wore green uniforms or brass IRA buttons. As the force approached its first target, the Dominion Customs House, the men hid in a ravine until receiving the all-clear signal from Louison “Oiseau” Letendre, one of the Métis from Pembina who had joined the mostly Irish ranks.
Stirred from his sleep by a report of an armed force approaching, the assistant customhouse officer A. B. Douglass might have thought he was still dreaming when he looked out of his window. On constant guard against Native American raids, Douglass instead saw the Irish O’Neill carrying his sword at his side, leading a Lilliputian force armed with breech-loading Springfield rifles, bayonets, and sidearms. O’Donoghue trotted alongside on horseback. Lest their intention be in doubt, rolling behind them were three carts full of arms and ammunition, as well as an empty double wagon waiting to haul the supplies they planned to seize from a nearby Hudson’s Bay Company trading post.
After awakening George W. Webster, a courier en route to St. Paul with a dispatch from Archibald, Douglass sprinted from the customhouse to warn the Hudson’s Bay Company post. However, O’Donoghue tracked him down on horseback and pointed a revolver at his head, and the Canadian official thought better of his plan.
The raiders advanced to the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post—a complex that included a store, a warehouse, and several outbuildings hidden behind a rough-hewn log stockade eight to ten feet high, with bastions at all four corners. They burst through the gates so quickly that William H. Watt, the one-armed trading post manager from the Orkney Islands, couldn’t lock the doors in time. O’Neill’s men faced no resistance either from the other occupants of the post—Watt’s clerk and an older married couple.
For their first order of business, the invaders took breakfast. Then, rifling through the post’s provisions, the Fenians plundered food and supplies, which they loaded onto their wagon and a boat they planned to launch down the Red River to Fort Garry, seventy-five miles away.
As the morning sun brightened, the marauders captured unsuspecting passersby on the road to Pembina. By 9:00 a.m., at least twenty were roaming inside the trading post’s stockade. One Métis prisoner from the American side of the border pleaded with his captors for his release by virtue of his citizenship. The raiders agreed to liberate the American. Unbeknownst to them, he carried a secret plea for help penned by the Canadian occupants of the customhouse, Douglass and Webster.
While O’Neill held a war council with his fellow ringleaders around noontime, a breathless Fenian sentinel burst in with the startling news.
“The American troops are coming!”
O’Neill looked out to see the U.S. Army captain Loyd Wheaton, the commanding officer at Fort Pembina, riding a four-mule wagon. He was accompanied by a line of about thirty armed soldiers advancing on the “double quick” with an army ambulance. Apparently, the American prisoner who had been released did not seek help from Canadian authorities but instead ran three miles south to deliver his note to Wheaton inside the U.S. Army’s Fort Pembina.
Wheaton had been stationed at the citadel, which had been completed the year before, to enforce the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie signed by the Dakota Territory’s white settlers and the Lakota. He never expected to be drawn into a confrontation on the prairie between Irish exiles and the British Empire. But when the loose lips of a Fenian sympathizer in Fort Garry revealed the entire plot to the U.S. consul James Wickes Taylor after one, two, three pours from a decanter of gin, Wheaton received orders to prepare the Twentieth Infantry to respond to a possible attack. Archibald also informed Taylor that the Manitoba and Canadian governments would not object if the United States sent troops across the boundary to suppress a Fenian attack.
Although the invaders had a slight numerical advantage and a superior defensive position behind the trading post’s stockade, panic spread among O’Neill’s men at news of the arrival of American troops. Colonel Thomas Curley ordered the wagons laden with plunder to move immediately. But the Irishmen scattered in every direction—through the trading post gates and into the woods or the brush along the Red River. With his one arm, Watt failed to grab O’Donoghue before he fled on horseback. O’Neill scurried so abruptly that he left behind his trusty sword.
Wheaton ordered his men to fire a volley over the heads of the Fenians, but when that failed to stop the escape, the thirty-three-year-old captain drew his pistol and galloped in pursuit of the raiders. The Fort Pembina commandant would not have to worry about return fire; even for the cause of Ireland, a former Union soldier like O’Neill would never sanction firing at another man in blue. “I had fought too long under the Stars and Stripes to want to fight United States troops, whether they had crossed the line legally or illegally,” he later recounted to the St. Paul Pioneer.
The captain arrested O’Neill, Curley, Donnelly, and ten of the rank and file without resistance. Like children, the Fenians were made to unload their wagons before their punishment was inflicted. The federal troops seized seventy-seven breech-loading Springfield rifles, seventeen muzzle-loading rifle muskets, five carbines, eleven sabers, and twelve thousand ammunition cartridges.
When O’Donoghue was in the clear, he traded in his horse for a canoe. He paddled five miles north on the Red River toward the Métis settlements, where he expected to be given safe haven. Instead, he found himself captured by two of Riel’s scouts, who tied him up with ropes and brought him back over the border to Wheaton that evening.
The raid passed without any injuries or damage, and the Fenians were thwarted with nothing to show for their efforts, newspapers noted, outside “a hearty breakfast.” O’Neill was in a familiar place—American custody. He was loaded into an army ambulance for the ride back to Fort Pembina. It was the American government that had cut his supply lines after the Battle of Ridgeway. It was the same that dragged him off the battlefield at Eccles Hill. And once again, it was the United States, not Canada or Great Britain, that thwarted his plans.
“I believe the action of Colonel Wheaton to be entirely unauthorized, in crossing into British territory and arresting anyone,” O’Neill later groused to the St. Paul Pioneer. He was wrong in more ways than he knew.
Surveyors in the nineteenth century knew it was far easier to draw a border on a map than to mark it on the ground. In the decades after Major Long surveyed the international boundary using the heavens as his guide, both the American and the British governments eventually concluded that his dividing line was actually south of the 49th parallel, although exactly where the formal divide actually lay was in dispute.
In May 1870, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveyors, under the direction of Captain D. P. Heap, resurveyed the border and concluded that Long’s frontier was 4,763 feet—nearly an entire mile—south of the 49th parallel. That meant that, according to Heap’s redrawn border, the Dominion Customs House and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post seized by O’Neill’s men were not a quarter mile north inside Canadian territory as they believed, but actually three-quarters of a mile south of the border, on American soil.
While the U.S. State Department was willing to honor the long-established dividing line for commercial purposes, pending an official joint boundary survey, that wasn’t the case for military jurisdiction. Although Wheaton had been granted permission by both the Canadian and the Manitoba governments to cross the border with the Twentieth Infantry, the U.S. Army captain believed it irrelevant when it came to the Dominion Customs House and the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post outside Pembina, because they sat on what he considered American land, south of Heap’s border.
O’Neill was unaware of Heap’s survey. That meant that not only had he failed to invade Canada, he had failed to enter Canada—at least in the eyes of the U.S. government. What that also meant, however, was that O’Neill and his fellow raiders could not be prosecuted for violating the Neutrality Act. Technically speaking, they had never in fact attacked Canada.
Citing a lack of evidence and “want of jurisdiction,” the U.S. commissioner George I. Foster of the Dakota Territory dismissed the case against O’Neill and his fellow marauders on October 9 after two full days of proceedings. O’Neill was a free man. But in a sense, this was a fate worse than conviction. It was the ultimate humiliation for the hero of Ridgeway. Not only couldn’t he capture Canada, but he couldn’t find it.
In the days following the attempted invasion of Canada, newspapers ridiculed “the Fenian fiasco,” calling it “another reckless and ridiculous Fenian raid.” O’Neill’s former friends and followers were hardly kinder in their assessments. “This time the attempt was even more farcical than his performance of St. Albans,” groused The Irish-American, which made it clear that “O’Neill’s folly” was his and his alone. “The application of the term ‘Fenians’ in the narrative is a misnomer, as O’Neill has been repudiated by all sections of that organization, and his movement was in no sense a Fenian affair.”
The “Garibaldi of the Green Isle” no longer inspired respect; now only laughter and pity. After the Red River disaster, Ridgeway—and not Eccles Hill—appeared to be the fluke in the general’s record. O’Neill blamed the expedition’s failure on “a mere accident” of geography. But his ignorance of the resurveyed boundary was more gross negligence than mishap.
In addition, just as he had done with the French Canadians in Quebec in previous raids, O’Neill had again miscalculated the extent to which the enemy of his enemy would be his friend. O’Donoghue’s sales job had convinced O’Neill that they could count on support from the Métis. The Irishman’s stature among Riel and the Red River Colony was much weaker than he advertised. Not only did Riel refuse to aid O’Donoghue’s venture, but he pledged the allegiance of the Métis to the Manitoba government, providing scouts to guard the frontier from further raids from the United States.
While the press depicted the Red River raid as a comic opera, it also revealed a tragedy worthy of Shakespeare. O’Neill’s hasty insistence, his default to action, obliterated his ability to see any distinction between courage and recklessness. O’Neill had become so consumed by the sense of his own abilities and his hatred of the British that it blinded him to reality—that Le Caron was a spy, that O’Donoghue lacked the support of the Métis, that the borderline was off, that he and O’Donoghue were by then a pair of quixotic romantics tilting at windmills. The Fenian fire that burned so hot inside O’Neill’s zealous heart no longer lit the way. It clouded his vision.