Montana's Most Famous Irishman

The Australians have Ned Kelly. The Scots have Rob Roy MacGregor. How come Americans haven’t elevated Thomas Meagher to the status of national folk hero?

Tim Egan recalled feeling flat-footed when asked the identity of the man on horseback rampant before the Montana Capitol in Helena. At the time, he was unaware that Montana’s first territorial governor had a backstory with more thrills than a “Die Hard” movie and better taste in sequels.

“What I’m trying to do is rescue Meagher from the mist of history,” Egan said during a break from a cross-country book tour celebrating publication of “The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero.” “At one point, he was easily the most prominent Irish-American in the United States. Not until John F. Kennedy came along was there a bigger one. But when he went to Montana, he kind of fell off the map.”

Or was pushed, both figuratively and literally. Meagher spent his entire adult life cheating death from authority figures, before falling off a riverboat stateroom balcony into the Missouri River at Fort Benton on July 1, 1867. His body was never found. Egan cites extensive research indicating Meagher was probably assassinated by an agent of the Vigilantes, whose secret-society power he threatened by convening a publicly elected Legislature.

“Most of Montana’s early history was written by the people who may have killed him,” Egan said of Meagher’s first biographers. “They described him as a drunk and a whoremonger, and did not give him his due at all. But the official history of Yellowstone gives Meagher credit as one of the first persons suggesting it might be a national park. The Legislature he convened got the road system going, got the ferry system going, and then enemies got his legislation removed by Congress in an unprecedented act. But everywhere Meagher went, he stood against injustice.”

And it got him into constant fights.

Meagher was the son of a wealthy merchant family in County Waterford, but became radicalized during the Great Hunger of the 1840s when a million Roman Catholic Irish starved to death while their Protestant English landlords exported shiploads of food to foreign markets. While his speaking and writing skills roused a huge popular protest against English rule, Meagher realized an emaciated nation of paupers stood no chance in battle with the British Army. Nevertheless, he was captured and sentenced to death for fomenting rebellion.

The sentence was commuted to “transportation,” the English euphemism for exile to the island of Tasmania for the rest of a prisoner’s life. Meagher was allowed to live there like a parolee, in his own cabin but with regular appearances before a local magistrate and a ban on any contact with other exiles in neighboring districts. Egan wrote that Meagher flouted that rule by meeting a fellow revolutionary across a table the two men placed in a small stream that bounded their territories.

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