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The Next Best Thing
AFTER DISCUSSING THE disastrous Red River raid with Fenians in Chicago, Henri Le Caron was certain John O’Neill would never threaten Canada again. “All denounce O’Neill in strong terms,” he reported to Gilbert McMicken. “He is a dead duck for ever.” By now, though, the British spy should have known better. Given his family pedigree, O’Neill could no sooner abandon the fight against the British than he could renounce his name. And anyone with Celtic blood coursing through his veins, as Le Caron claimed, would have known that seven centuries of defiance made the Irish a tenacious—others might say stubborn—people.
O’Neill still believed it was his calling to be at the head of an Irish army, but the time had come to change tactics. While O’Neill bided his time until the day he would liberate Ireland, he decided instead to emancipate the Irish from America’s noisy factories, filthy mines, and wretched tenements and deliver them to the fresh air and virgin prairie of the Great Plains.
Fenian leaders had long talked about the idea of establishing their own colonies in North America. O’Neill was determined to turn that talk into action. “Absolute possession of the soil is the only true independence for a laboring man,” wrote O’Neill, who believed the underlying cause for the Great Hunger was that absentee British landlords—not the Irish—owned the land.
A quarter century earlier, the Irish had migrated west to flee starvation. Now O’Neill thought they should follow the sun once again to escape poverty. While some claimed that Irish immigrants needed to break out of their insular enclaves and integrate themselves into American culture, O’Neill took the opposite tack. He wanted to remove his fellow Irish Catholics altogether.
The American West offered the Irish the prospect of cheap land. Under the Homestead Act of 1862, both native-born Americans and immigrants who applied for citizenship could take ownership of up to 160 acres of public land for an $18 filing fee as long as they lived on the parcel for five years, farmed it, and built a dwelling. Civil War veterans and other soldiers received added incentives. Irish American newspapers frequently printed advertisements such as one from the Union Pacific Railroad that promised “Cheap Farms! Free Homes!” in the “Garden of the West.”
As early as December 1870, The New York Times reported that O’Neill had embarked on a lecture tour to promote a scheme “for providing homes for his countrymen in the West.” At the time, his enterprise had been little more than a cover for his recruitment of men for the Red River raid. After the failed attack, O’Neill pursued it in earnest. He spent parts of 1872 and 1873 scouting locations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri before deciding upon a plot of land in the Elkhorn valley of northern Nebraska as a suitable place for planting his Irish colony. The general signed an agreement with the land agents Patrick Fahy and S. M. Boyd to colonize a settlement with twenty-five families in return for $600 and seventy lots.
Throughout the winter of 1873 and 1874, O’Neill toured traditional Irish strongholds—from the mill cities of New England to the copper mines of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. After regaling audiences with tales from his three raids on Canada, he delivered a sales pitch for his new business venture: “Why are you content to work on the public projects and at coal mining when you might in a few years own farms of your own and become wealthy and influential people?”
With the panic of 1873 triggering a severe economic downturn, O’Neill’s promise of a fresh start was especially appealing to those who were out of work. Using the same powers of persuasion that led hundreds of Irishmen to attack Canada, O’Neill persuaded an initial colony of thirteen men, two women, and five children to transplant themselves to Nebraska by giving them what he always gave his fellow Irishmen—hope for better lives.
Adrift on an ocean of tall prairie grass bending in the wind, O’Neill made the second exodus of his life in the spring of 1874. The general who had fled the Great Hunger had high hopes for his new venture. “We could build up a young Ireland on the virgin prairies of Nebraska and there rear a monument more lasting than granite or marble to the Irish race in America,” he wrote to Bishop James O’Connor of Omaha.
As the sun reached its zenith on May 12, 1874, the settlers finally arrived at their new home, originally called Holt City but quickly changed by Colonel James H. Noteware, immigration agent for the state of Nebraska, to O’Neill, in honor of the colony’s leader (to say nothing of his distinguished forebears).
The Irish had always lived off the land, but not land like that they found in Nebraska. The flat, desolate prairie and barren sand hills sported few trees to offer shade from the blazing sun, let alone timber for building and burning. The colonists who had lived shoulder to shoulder in the tenements of Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and St. Louis now found deer, antelope, coyotes, and wolves to be their only neighbors.
Shelter was the first order of business for the colonists. With the nearest timber six miles away, O’Neill and his followers built a sod house thirty-six feet long and eighteen feet wide to house the entire colony. The settlers jokingly dubbed their rude, crowded quarters the “Grand Central Hotel.”
It was a hard existence, but nothing ever came easy to the Irish. Unlike their ancestors in Ireland, many of the settlers who followed O’Neill were city dwellers with no farming experience. Already off to a late start in Nebraska’s short growing season, the settlers attempted to tear into the tough, knotted prairie sod and plant potatoes, corn, and other crops in the black, sandy loam. The blazing summer sun, however, brought drought and heat so suffocating that one pioneer reported that as he peered into the mirages shimmering on the horizon, he could see towns one hundred miles away “so plainly mirrored on the nearby prairie that one could see between the buildings.”
The pioneers had expected a land of milk and honey, only to discover that their Irish Moses had led them into the desert—devoid of trees, water, and comfort. And that was even before the arrival of a plague straight out of the Old Testament.
On a mid-July day, the skies above the Irish prairie colony blackened as a dark cloud dimmed the sun and emptied its contents. The storm that swept in from the northwest didn’t deluge the settlers with badly needed raindrops, however, but a shower of grasshoppers. The pioneers found themselves ankle-deep in “Rocky Mountain locusts” that crunched like snow underfoot.
While the wheat, rye, and barley crops were too ripe for the grasshoppers’ palates, they swarmed every stalk of corn, devouring them down to their cobs, and then ate those, too. The swarm stayed in O’Neill for a day, no more than two, before flying east to continue its destruction, leaving behind only the stubble of cornstalks.
The great “grasshopper raid” devastated the newly planted crops that the nascent colony relied upon for subsistence. The harvest of 1874 did not come close to approaching the 250 to 300 bushels per acre that O’Neill had promised.
Although newcomers had trickled in throughout the summer, by October 1, 1874, all but five of the original colonists had abandoned the settlement. As the first settlement prepared for the onset of winter, O’Neill returned to the East to begin recruiting his next colony.
Encouraged by a report from the land agent Fahy promising a large hotel and several businesses in a “thickly settled” colony, a second group of pioneers ventured to Nebraska in the spring of 1875, eager to settle in what they heard was a bustling hamlet.
The colonists arrived in a colony with no stores, no buildings. The town was just a motley collection of sod houses and dugouts. The settlers had visions of lazy afternoons rocking in chairs on the veranda of the Grand Central Hotel. They discovered it was a sarcastic moniker for the most rudimentary of shelters. They didn’t appreciate the humor.
Believing they had been swindled to come to a godforsaken land, many of the new arrivals blamed O’Neill. After all, his name was on the place. They thought the general who had led the Irish into a folly in Canada had now done the same in the American heartland.
Desperate to salvage his reputation from another tarnishing, O’Neill denounced Fahy in The Irish World and gave every man who purchased lots in O’Neill an equal number in a new eighty-acre addition to the town. The offer renewed public confidence in his embryonic Irish American colony.
The arrival of O’Neill’s wife, children, and two oldest nephews also buoyed his spirits. A pregnant Mary Ann had traveled west with the original colony the prior year but remained with the children in Omaha, 180 miles away, to give birth. Once O’Neill’s white clapboard residence was completed in 1875, baby Katherine, six-year-old Mary Ella, and eight-year-old John made their new house a home.
That was quickly followed by the construction of the town’s first general store, church, and school. After the discovery of gold in the nearby Black Hills, the merchants of O’Neill made the real fortune by selling supplies to the prospectors. Although the colonists continued to duel with the dreaded grasshoppers, relations with the native Pawnees remained friendly.
In the spring of 1876, O’Neill led a third colony of 102 men, women, and children to Nebraska and followed that the next year with a migration of 71 men. With plans to plant as many as one hundred settlements on the prairie, he established a Philadelphia headquarters for “O’Neill’s Irish American Colonies” and hired an experienced Fenian recruiter, Colonel William MacWilliams, to assist him.
By all outward appearances, O’Neill was fixated on his future in Nebraska. In actuality, though, he remained consumed by his obsession from the past.
The general called his colonization work “the next best thing to fighting for Ireland,” and while he thought it noble work, it wasn’t his true calling. “I shall continue at it despite every obstacle until called upon for sterner work when I will be found where an O’Neill properly belongs,” he wrote, “which is not so much in talking about Ireland’s wrongs, as in fighting for Ireland’s rights.”
O’Neill cryptically mandated that one-eighth of the land for each of his colonies be “devoted to the cause of Ireland,” and by the end of 1876 the general viewed his burgeoning colonies as bases of operation from which he could amass an army to rise against the British and possibly return to Canada. The profile of the typical pioneer—young, male, and daring—made for an ideal soldier. Plus, his secluded towns were away from the prying eyes of federal authorities and British spies.
“I had a double object in encouraging our people to emigrate from the overcrowded cities and states of the east to settle upon the cheap and free lands of the west,” O’Neill admitted. “The first was that they might better their own condition and that of their families and the second that they might be in a position, from their improved circumstances and their nearness to the contemplated field of future operations, to assist the cause of Irish liberty. I think I can safely promise from the colonies which I have already established at least some of the young men to assist on the battle field while the older ones are raising corn, flour, potatoes to help sustain them.”
The general received a report from the Black Hills that the Irishmen there were ready to follow his command to the battlefield whenever ordered. Until O’Neill was ready to move, they would bide their time and hone their skills.*1
“The prairies are wide, and there is plenty of room for drill and instruction,” O’Neill wrote, “and there is no law against shooting deer and antelope, in season which will be very good practice—until we can find other game.” There was little doubt that the game O’Neill coveted roamed north of the border and across the ocean.
The movement that O’Neill had helped give rise to fed off the fervor of its participants. But without Anglophobia, fresh memories of the Great Hunger, and nativism to fuel it, the Fenian Brotherhood had become a spent force by the time O’Neill settled in Nebraska. Forever mired in its foibles, it had become eclipsed, in the republican movement, by Clan na Gael (Irish for “Family of the Gaels”), which had been launched in 1867 as a haven for Fenians who had had enough of the organization’s dysfunction and lack of secrecy. The upstart organization raised funds and procured arms to free Ireland by physical force. But it forswore any raids on Canada. In 1876, Clan na Gael*2 staged the most electrifying moment for the Irish republican movement in America since the Battle of Ridgeway when it purchased the whaling bark Catalpa, sailed it halfway around the world, and rescued six Fenians held captive in the British penal colony of Western Australia.
The Fenian Brotherhood was a shadow of its former self. So was John O’Mahony, who had returned to lead the organization he founded after being elected head center in 1872. The Young Irelander was now anything but young. Years of stress and poverty had aged him beyond his years. The luster had evaporated from his deep-sunken eyes, leaving him “the mere framework of a mighty man,” according to John Boyle O’Reilly.
The Fenian Brotherhood survived until 1887, but O’Mahony wouldn’t last that long. With Bernard Doran Killian, who had directed the first Fenian raid from Eastport, at his side, the “Father of Fenianism” died inside a spartan fourth-floor garret atop a dingy New York tenement house on February 6, 1877, at the age of sixty-two.
“He was not merely the guide or fabricator of Fenianism. He, more than any man alive or dead, was the spirit and subtending principle of the movement,” O’Reilly wrote. “His whole life and aspirations were bound up in one word—Fenianism.”
The Fenian Brotherhood decided to honor O’Mahony by re-creating one of his greatest triumphs, the transatlantic farewell for his fellow Young Irelander Terence Bellew MacManus in 1861. The Fenians embalmed O’Mahony’s body in preparation for a send-off worthy of a head of state. After a solemn requiem funeral Mass celebrated by three Jesuit priests who ignored the Vatican decrees about the Fenian Brotherhood, thousands of Irishmen accompanied a plate-glass hearse that bore O’Mahony’s body up Fifth Avenue and down Broadway to a waiting steamship that bore the child of Erin back to mother Ireland.
Following torchlight processions through the streets of Queenstown and Cork, O’Mahony’s coffin arrived in Dublin, where Cardinal Paul Cullen shuttered the doors of the city’s churches to the Fenian founder. Cullen’s decision only strengthened the resolve of the Fenians to turn O’Mahony’s funeral into a political protest. On Sunday, March 4, 250,000 people participated in one of the biggest public demonstrations seen in Dublin since the mock funeral for the Manchester Martyrs as O’Mahony’s funeral cortege rolled through the city’s muddy lanes to Glasnevin Cemetery.
Fenian hands lowered O’Mahony into the same grave containing the bones of MacManus. After mourners showered flowers on the lid of his casket, they shoveled the Irish earth on its native son. “Outlaws and felons according to English law but true soldiers of Irish liberty,” read the inscription on the monument eventually erected over the grave of O’Mahony, MacManus, and four other Fenians. “Their lives thus prove that every generation produces patriots who were willing to face the gibbet, the cell, and exile to procure the liberty of their nation and afford perpetual proof that in the Irish heart faith in Irish nationality is indestructible.”
Back in the United States, O’Neill continued his fight. He split his time between growing his colonies in Nebraska and touring the country in search of more recruits who might eventually join his next army. The workload took a toll on his health, and when the general returned home after delivering a lecture in Little Rock, Arkansas, in November 1877, Mary Ann O’Neill could see that her husband was not well.
A cold he had developed on the five-day journey home exacerbated his chronic asthma. Then, on his first night home, he suffered a slight stroke. After he recovered for a few weeks at home, Mary Ann, pregnant once again with their daughter Genevieve, took him on the long trip to St. Joseph Hospital in Omaha for further treatment. As her husband’s condition improved, Mary Ann felt confident enough that he was on the road to recovery to return home to their three children. Following Mary Ann’s departure, however, O’Neill contracted pneumonia after falling and spending hours on a cold floor before anyone discovered him there.
He passed away during the final hour of January 7, four thousand miles from home.
Unlike O’Mahony, the forty-three-year-old O’Neill was buried in American soil, but not in the town that bore his name. Too many of the Irish colonists there remained bitter toward the general, believing him a swindler who had falsely represented Nebraska as an Eden for the Irish. The hard feelings remained even a decade after his death, when a proposal was made to rebury O’Neill in the town. “Leave him in Omaha,” said a town spokesman. “He led the Irish astray, and was the cause of their suffering tragic hardships.”
He might have had detractors, but the Irish would remember O’Neill as the dashing hero of Ridgeway, a soldier who defeated the British on their own soil. Some wished that the climactic moment of his life had come at the end, rather than at the beginning, of his Fenian career. “In our short-sighted human judgement we cannot help wishing rather that, ere errors of head, not of heart, diverted him from the path of true patriotism, he had fallen, in the flush of victory, at Ridgeway, like so many of his race with the old flag over head, and the charging cry of Ireland ringing in his ear,” declared The Irish-American.
Perhaps the Fenian general felt the same way. John O’Neill had been born to fight the British and die on the battlefield for Ireland. He managed to fulfill half of his destiny.