Forgetting Ireland

PROLOGUE

The Conamaras Are Coming!

This is the story, as it has always been written:

IT IS 1880 on the Connemara seacoast due west of Galway—Iar Connacht, the poorest of Ireland’s provinces. Potato crops failed in 1878 and 1879. People are starving, again, as in 1846. The bottom has fallen out of the sea kelp market. Rents are unpaid, evictions rife, riots against landlords and their agents frequent.

The morning of June 11, the SS Austrian, bound from Glasgow to Boston, calls at the port of Galway. Three hundred thirty-eight people board. They are paupers, and most of them speak only Irish Gaelic. Chosen from the poorest and most pitiful charity cases along the distressed seacoast, they are bound for the far west of Minnesota, for Graceville.

Newspaper coverage on both sides of the Atlantic heralds their departure. Father Nugent of the Liverpool Relief Committee and editor of the Liverpool Catholic Times witnessed the extent of suffering along the Connemara coast on his fishing trip there in the fall of 1879. His pleas on behalf of the famine-stricken have enlisted the aid of Bishop John Ireland of Minnesota and the Catholic Colonization Bureau of St. Paul. The two clergymen have launched a charitable appeal to finance the relocation of up to fifty Connemara families to homesteads near the new Irish colony of Graceville, in Minnesota. The Irish of that state and New York have responded by donating thousands of dollars. The railroad has offered free passage from Boston to Minnesota. Father Nugent has made arrangements with local priests to select the emigrant families. The Liverpool Relief Committee and the New York Herald relief fund have contributed to the sea passage. The Allan Shipping Line has offered a special port of call in Galway to board the emigrants.

The ship sails with thirty-seven families. Irish Nationalists loudly decry this assisted emigration as an English plot to depopulate Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell is president of the newly formed Irish National Land League, which condemns Father Nugent as an agent of landlords and the British government. It also denounces the misguided Minnesota enemies of Ireland. In June, as the Austrian sails, Parnell and another prominent Irish political leader, Michael Davitt, sign a resolution that officially and vehemently condemns the assisted emigration of the Connemara paupers.

After a pleasant crossing, the ship docks at the Cunard wharf in East Boston on the night of June 22, 1880. The next day curious crowds throng to the wharf to get a look at the much publicized Connemara colonists. The sinewy, lean people are sunburned from the sea journey. The children are poorly clad, barefooted and bareheaded, as they run up and down the dock. Old men and women sit on boxes and tattered bundles, their faces set in a pensive gloom. They are met by the secretary of the Catholic Colonization Bureau, Dillon O’Brien. Over lunch that day, O’Brien remarks to a friend, It does look bad, but I’ll wager a new hat that before twenty years some of these same people will come to Boston dressed in broadcloth; that they put up at your best hotel and eat at the best table in the house.

At three o’clock in the afternoon, the colonists board the train for St. Paul via Chicago. William J. Onahan, city collector of Chicago and Land League supporter, greets them in his city on behalf of the St. Patrick’s Society, which feeds them and provides clothing. The condition of the travelers pains Chicagoans. To Onahan, the pilgrims look emaciated and squalidly wretched; their features seem quaint, pinched from famine, the arms and legs of the children shriveled.

The train reaches St. Paul on Saturday, June 26. A crowd awaits the new colonists and the Celtic tongue rolls as musically in Minnesota as among the rocks of Connemara. Bishop Ireland himself meets the train to welcome the newcomers and superintends the dinner reception prepared by the ladies’ sodality and the Emigration Committee.

The bishop and the railroad have provided each family with 160 acres of virgin prairie lands, a cow, work implements, and crop seed. On closer inspection, a few families seem unsuitable for the rigors of Minnesota prairie farming. Two are kept in the city, another three are sent as laborers to an established bonanza farm. Bishop Ireland also settles thirty-five grown-up girls into jobs in homes as maids and forty-five boys into work as laborers. Their wages will help support their families near Graceville until next spring, when they will join them to put in the crop.

Thirty families board a special express train loaded with flour, household goods, and farming supplies. Railroad baron James J. Hill personally attends to the emigrants. They ride to the end of the line at Morris. At stops along the railway line, villagers greet the approach of the train with calls of The Conamaras are coming! The Conamaras are coming! Local settlers along the route feel invested in the future of this trainload of people. Many of them have contributed anywhere from ten cents to a munificent five dollars to the charity subscription drive that brought the famine-stricken Irish here.

Out the train window, the emigrants see green, flowering prairie that stretches endlessly flat into the encompass of a wide sky, with only a few cumulus clouds interrupting its limpid blueness. On this warm summer day, the newcomers cannot begin to imagine a prairie winter. The rainy bogs and rocky coastline they left behind in Connemara were cool the year round, seldom colder than forty-five degrees Fahrenheit, seldom warmer than seventy.

The train arrives at the end of the line in Morris, a frontier town of one thousand. Townspeople, dignitaries of the Masonic Lodge, and railroad agents all turn out to witness the most interesting event to occur since the railroad tracks arrived in 1871. Graceville parishioners and River Irish members of Morris’s Assumption Catholic Church arrive with wagons to transport their new neighbors.

The colonists are driven the twenty-nine miles west through treeless prairie grassland along the old Wadsworth Trail, the army’s westward supply route into the Dakotas. They see farmers busy gathering one of the finest hay crops ever. They see fields of tall green wheat sheaves ripening in the sunny late June day. In the flat, empty distance of the horizon, there appears a copse of trees lining the banks of the pretty twin lakes. Here is Graceville.

Where Sisseton Lakota planted their summer gardens only a few years earlier, a bustling new town has sprung up. Bishop Ireland bought a soldier’s claim for the site of the town he founded just two years ago. Houses are going up, business establishments are being erected on mainstreet, a Catholic church is under construction, and the railroad is being extended from Morris through Graceville to the Dakota border. The people of the Graceville colony, while busy throughout the spring seeding their own wheat, have also been breaking five acres on each homestead and building wood-frame houses for the Connemara colonists.

The railroad lands where the bishop has placed the poor travelers are in Big Stone and Traverse Counties, 190 miles west and slightly north of St. Paul, on the Continental Divide of a flat glacial moraine, whence the Red River runs north to Canada and the Minnesota River runs south to join the Mississippi. Father Timothy Ryan, Graceville’s newly arrived parish priest, arranges for the Connemara colonists’ reception. The bishop has asked parishioners to take in one emigrant family each until their houses are ready.

The scrawny emigrants arrive dirty and worn. Local settlers call them the Conamaras—pronouncing the last syllables to rhyme with Clara. The name quickly assumes a negative connotation: locals do not approve of their manners. Their ways seem rowdy, their talk loud and rough. Mrs. Maurice Green, whose husband is the cousin of a Chicago bishop, is so disturbed to see them fighting like animals that she turns them away from her door. Miss Mattie O’Neill, the milliner and proprietor of the newly opened Graceville Bazaar of Fashion, feeds one large family supper and is aghast to observe the man of the family gobble down every last one of the little tea sandwiches on the plate set in front of him, instead of passing it around the table.

Sometime in early July, the families move into their half-built houses outside town. The one-room wood-frame shanties sit one-fourth mile apart on 160-acre tracts. Three to five acres constitute a normal-size plot back in Connemara, where people live in closely clustered clocháns of kinsmen. As promised, the homes are equipped with a stove, kitchen utensils, beds, tools, and farming implements. A year’s worth of seed is supplied, and store credit will be available later in town for a year’s food. All this the bishop has arranged. The houses are still unshingled but habitable in the fine summer weather. Potatoes, flour, and other food staples are provided for two months. A cow gives milk. Pickerel can be fished from the nearby lake.

The rough black sod of their virgin prairie claims will take a year’s work to break into arable land. Other work is available. Farmwork pays $1.50 to $2.00 a day; construction laborers get about the same, building the new granary depot and the railroad from Morris to Graceville, which is soon dubbed the Conamara Line. The grown children who were put to work in the Cities regularly visit and bring home their pay, $3.00 to $5.00 a week. Crops are good this summer for the established farmers. Wheat is yielding twenty to twenty-five bushels an acre. Hard red spring brings $1.00 a bushel. Land goes for about $5.00 an acre. At this rate, a claim can be paid off with one-fifth of the year’s crop income. Prospects look good for everyone in Bishop Ireland’s new Graceville colony.

Rumors soon begin to circulate. The Conamaras seem a profligate bunch of ingrates. Some of them have abandoned Graceville, which needs their labor, and gone off to Morris to work for a contractor who has offered them higher pay. Some colonists have even sold the seed grain and tools given them by Father Ryan from the bishop’s fund. They have a lot of hard cash and they are spending their day’s wages as fast as they earn them. They are seen carousing about town drunk. They have not yet shingled their houses, let alone sodded them in preparation for the winter. Some have even sold the wood originally provided them for finishing off their houses. When admonished to make provisions for the winter, to dig rootcellars for food storage and to sod their shanties against the coming cold, the Conamaras respond: The bishop has brought us over here with great promises and it is he who must provide for us.

Graceville intimates of Bishop Ireland pass the rumors about his wards on to him and to his secretary, O’Brien, whose nephews, the Crowes, live in Graceville. In mid-August, O’Brien and Bishop Ireland himself tour Graceville, bringing with them the head of the Irish Catholic Colonization Association, Bishop John Lancaster Spalding of Illinois—who exclaims over the size of the Minnesota cornstalks, already bending from heavy ears. They spend three days visiting every Connemara home. They hear, through a Gaelic translator, a few grumbles about the kind of work local farmers offer, some complaints about shabby treatment from employers. Four or five Connemara men appear to be shirkers, inclined to rely too heavily on the expectation of free handouts instead of work. To remedy the situation, the bishop sets up a system of public works that will pay a dollar a day. He issues a stern warning: anyone who does not work, either for the church or for local farmers, will find all future provisions and credit cut off.

The same week the bishops visit, the Morris Tribune publishes the talk going around the area: the Connemara emigrants are arriving in Morris destitute, with no food and no work, and no prospects of either. They are looking for work and complaining loudly about their bad treatment in Graceville. The people of Morris fear for the large number of poor families who were brought over here so late in the season. They fear that a terrible blunder has been made, that charity funds raised to aid the Conamaras have not been forthcoming. Morris citizens fear that a long and severe winter will leave these people to starve and freeze to death on the prairie.

Bishop Ireland responds to the implied criticism of his management of the Connemara project in a sharply worded letter that appears in the Tribune’s next issue. He states that no Connemara colonists are starving. It will be time enough to condole with them when they are actually reduced to suffering. Work has been offered them in Graceville. Those who work will not suffer. Those who do not work can starve.

By mid-September, three of the original families have left their prairie shanties for Morris or other towns. The heads of five families are working on Bishop Ireland’s projects at $1.00 a day, while the rest work for $1.50 to $2.00 on the railroad and elsewhere. Work progresses on the colony lands. In the warm Indian summer days of October, farmers prepare the land for spring seeding and put up hay for winter. Water wells are being dug. Houses are being sodded and shingled to make them warm for the winter. All the finishing and insulation work should be done before the winter snows start in December.

On Friday afternoon, October 15, 1880, a light rain starts to fall. Suddenly, it turns to heavy snow. For thirty-six hours, the storm rages wild and weird. Friday night and all day Saturday, gales heap the heavily falling snow in drifts that bury houses and barns. The blizzard suspends all normal activity. The railroads are blockaded, telegraph lines down, farm machinery abandoned in the fields, potatoes and vegetables frozen in the ground, livestock and poultry dead. Roofs are left half-shingled, houses incompletely sodded and insulated. Anyone caught out in the storm must battle desperately against the wind, blinded and confused in drifting snow.

Sunday morning finds the prairie covered in the peaceful quietness of a fresh-fallen snow, the landscape utterly changed in a matter of hours. Mountainous drifts heaped and packed in all directions make it look like March instead of October.

Over the next few weeks, the weather is bitter cold but fair enough for railroad workers to complete the tracks from Morris to Graceville and for the Conamara Central to begin daily runs between the two towns. Graceville now has four hundred resident families. Tradesmen have flocked to its mainstreet and a dozen new buildings now stand newly constructed, including a depot, an elevator, a warehouse, a large water tower, and a commodious general store with a big meeting hall on the upper story. A Thanksgiving fair benefiting the Catholic church is to be held in the hall on November 24 and 25. The fair is canceled, however, because of a series of blizzards that begin in mid-November. Strong north and northwesterly winds blow snow across the railroad tracks. Heavy drifts settle over the icy snowbanks already covering the prairie.

One day as the blustering storms die down for a spell, some German neighbors who have held claims in the area since about 1873 notice that no smoke is rising from the chimney of a nearby shanty. Rixe and Wulff go on snowshoes to see if they can help. They find a family of eight frostbitten and without food or fuel. The two men, though themselves poor and suffering from the extremities of the weather, bring some potatoes and wood to help their Irish neighbors survive the cold.

Rumors once again circulate about the deplorable conditions of the emigrants. The Morris Board of Trade appoints a committee to investigate the state of the Connemara colony and on December 10 receives a report from Henry Hutchins, a Morris contractor and painter. The day before, Hutchins visited eighteen Connemara families in their shanties and found them in a terrible state of destitution, filth, and suffering. The Irish immigrants, Hutchins reports, are sick, freezing, and starving. The children are barefoot and nearly naked; the adults have the haggard look of the faces he has seen on those who were starved in Rebel prison pens. They told him stories about the inhumane treatment meted them at the hands of the priest, Ryan, who is supposedly ministering to their needs on behalf of Bishop Ireland.

A relief committee sets out the next day to carry clothing and foodstuff donated by Morris residents. Hutchins and his committee spend all day Monday, December 12, distributing their load of a thousand pounds of flour, seventy-five pounds of fresh beef, sugar, tea, dried apples, warm used clothes, and forty pairs of new shoes straight off the shelves of the Morris shoe store.

Immediately after their emergency meeting, the Morris Board of Trade notifies Governor John Sargent Pillsbury and Bishop Ireland of the Connemara colonists’ suffering. Hutchins also sends a telegram that same day to the St. Paul Pioneer Press and the Minneapolis Tribune. The next day an item reports the sad conditions. The Graceville priest, Father Ryan, is accused of withholding food and fuel from the colonists and is said to have expressed great indignation at the interference of the people of Morris. Describing his encounter with the priest, Hutchins quotes the priest as calling him a goddamn whoring son of a bitch. O’Brien, not only the Catholic Colonization Bureau’s secretary but also the editor of the Northwestern Chronicle, is interviewed in the next day’s Pioneer Press. He defends the Graceville priest and gives an accounting of how the five thousand dollars raised by the Irish of Minnesota for the Connemara emigrants was expended.

At Ireland’s urging, the governor appoints the Honorable Leonard B. Hodges, a widely respected state senator noted for his candor and ethical commonsense, to investigate. He is to meet O’Brien in Morris and the two are to travel together. The two emissaries, however, fail to find each other on the appointed day and end up conducting separate investigations. Meanwhile, a group of Graceville citizens decides to organize its own investigative committee. With an Irish-language interpreter, they visit twenty-one shanties and record translations of the statements given them in Gaelic.

On December 21 the St. Paul Pioneer Press prints Hodges’s report, which corroborates Hutchins’s report to the Board of Trade and denounces the priest Ryan as a heartless brute who has repelled all who applied to him for relief. If the governor and the bishop want a whitewash, they have chosen the wrong man.

The paper also prints a letter to the editor from O’Brien, responding to Hodges’s report in detail. And it contains the full text of a report by the Graceville committee. The versions of the facts conflict. Is it truly the story of amazing negligence and dishonesty at Disgraceville? Or is it a case of Morris bigots out to get the bishop? It is hard to tell.

The prairie winter of 1880–81, though, is indeed the worst one in living memory. The national press picks up the story of Grief at Graceville for holiday coverage. In the week just after Christmas, yet another storm buries western Minnesota. Temperatures fall to forty degrees below zero. A reporter visits the colony to see for himself the state of affairs, and on New Year’s Day the Minneapolis Tribune headlines Misery’s Depth and describes such scenes of abject poverty in the Connemara colony as never before witnessed in Minnesota. The Tribune demands immediate relief. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reports that there really is no problem. A New York Times headline pronounces that the hardships of the Connemara people in Minnesota are due to their unwillingness to work.

In the meantime, the citizens of Morris have been busy with quilting bees. They make for each of the wretched families two or three large, thick quilts from warm woolen flannel that James J. Hill has sent up on the train. The volunteers from Morris who deliver the sixty-three quilts lose their way home in a blizzard. They wander for three hours before finding a house to shelter them overnight.

In the late winter and early spring, Bishop Ireland evicts the Conamaras, removing them from the land he granted them. The history books will record the final ignominy of the Connemara exiles: as they are being transported away, they try to return to their shanties and hang on to their cows, which the bishop has reallocated among neighbors.

About a year later, one Sunday after mass, O’Brien drops dead in a conference with the bishop. The stress of dealing with Graceville and the Connemara scandal is said to have killed him. Bishop Ireland many years later confides to William O’Neill of Graceville that the pain and humiliation of the Connemara incident caused him his life’s greatest grief.

* * *

What the history books and newspapers do not record is that at least one Connemara family stayed. I grew up on a farm near Graceville. My great-grandparents were Larry Saile O’Flaherty of Loch an Beg and Mrya Conneely O’Flaherty of Seanaghorran in Connemara, Ireland. My grandmother Bridget Flaherty was a baby on the notorious ship of paupers that sailed in June 1880 from Galway. She was one of the barefoot, cold Irish children in the national front-page scandal.

Her grandchildren did not know that Gramma was what our town called a Conamara. We did not know that Connemara was a place, a district in Ireland. Nor did we know the history of Disgraceville, or that our migration saga gave our town’s founder, the revered Bishop Ireland, what he told our good neighbor Bill O’Neill was the greatest grief of his life. In the blurry history we grew up with, we knew that the Conamaras were a bunch of people the church brought over from Ireland a long time ago. They were so lazy and stupid that they couldn’t make it as farmers. They were failures and they all left. The word Conamara meant a lazy, drunken, no-good son of a bitch, too dumb to farm, a welfare bum. We were successful, hardworking farmers. We had nothing to do with all that.

What follows tells the Conamara story from the vantage of western Minnesota farmers. This rural version of what really happened in 1880–81 and in the ensuing two decades is testimony that challenges the facts behind everything hitherto written about this small, but much commented upon, incident in prairie history. As a daughter of the prairie farmlands around Graceville, I care profoundly about this story, which set me off on a ten-yearlong journey-quest to learn the truth behind the tales, both told and written, about the Connemara colonists. In my research journeys, I have discovered what made me grow up to write about rural and migrating peoples and to become a scholar of oral folk epic and cultural identity.

Some may find this a book about Archbishop John Ireland. More important in this version of the history, however, are ordinary folks caught in extraordinary circumstances, at odds with giants of the earth: forces of man and nature, the climate, the railroad, and even their church. This account of the Conamara story is a communal memoir, a felt history, told in story and anecdote—an oral-poetic history of my people. That the role of one of the most influential men in nineteenth-century America, the pioneer bishop John Ireland, should turn out to be much more than incidental to the story is purely accidental.

What follows is also the story of how my family recovered its identity. The epic emigration of the Conamaras turned out to be our story, the story of forgetting Ireland.

Bridget Flaherty, the Thousand Dollar Bride, as a teenager

The October Blizzard of 1880 on the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, about 130 miles south of Graceville

Graceville, about 1912

The view from Graceville east to Johnson, five miles distant, about 1920

Farming at Jim Flaherty’s, Leonardsville Township, north of Moonshine, 1920s

Denis and Bridget Flaherty Burns, about 1930

Denis and Bridget Flaherty Burns’s house in Moonshine Township

Bishop John Ireland, 1887

Father Hanahan, Father Kennedy, Archbishop Ireland, and Father Morgan, probably in 1908, during Graceville’s thirtieth anniversary celebration

Part One

OBLIVION

• 1 •

Bridget Was Her Name

Brighid, flame and honeycomb,

Brighid, lead me home.

The genealogy of the Lady

Bride, red-gold Woman,

Wet-nurse to the holy babe,

Daughter of Daghu,

Druid God of gods …

Every day, every night that I sing

the genealogy of Bride

shall I be safe:

I am safe

singing Her genealogy.

O Bride, lead me home.

Ancient Celtic invocation to the Goddess Brighid

BRIDGET! Have you been reading the newspapers we’ve been sending you? It’s the damnedest story! My brother Cappy was on the phone from his farm in Minnesota, telling me a wild yarn. These Irish guys have been coming over here trying to find out about Gramma. They think they know who she was … as if we didn’t!

All through the summer of 1991, Cappy had been sending me our hometown newspaper. One story featured pictures of him in his bib overalls as he climbed off a combine in the midst of the busy summer farming season to talk to a visiting Irishman. Now ordinarily, Graceville, Minnesota, with a population of about 750 and dropping fast, situated in the middle of wheatfields not far from where the Badlands begin, does not get too many foreign tourists. This particular tourist was Tom Flaherty, an Irish cop who had come to an international policeman’s convention in Tennessee. He had grown up hearing stories about his great-grandfather’s brother who had gone to Minnesota to farm. He decided after his convention to drive up to Graceville to find his cousins.

Cappy told me with great relish about Tom Flaherty’s visit and the bottle of Paddy’s Irish Whisky he had brought. He also told me about an Irish journalist, a fellow named Joe Cook, who had been visiting Graceville fairly regularly to interview people about our gramma for a radio program and a potential television documentary film.

It’s really the damnedest thing! my brother repeated. You’ve just gotta go to Ireland while you’re over there and check this story out. They’re saying Gramma was a Conamara. Can you believe that?!

Unbelievable indeed. The telephone’s ring had interrupted me as I sat at my desk in Paris puzzling over manuscripts of