Sherlock Holmes: The American Years (27 page)

“He made one small slip. When the cast was ordering breakfast the other day, he asked for ‘a egg.’ Not ‘
an
egg,’ but ‘
a
egg.’ ”

“How odd. But I don’t see what that—”

“In certain parts of the South, that is a very common usage. However, it is virtually unknown in the North, which made me suspect he was not all he claimed to be.”

I shook my head. “But that’s such a small detail, Holmes.”

“My dear Booth, details may be small, but they are often anything but insignificant. They can indeed be the difference between—well, as in this case, between life and death.”

Holmes left New York soon after our production closed, and some months later I received a postcard from him, sent from Chicago. After that I heard nothing—until I began following his exploits in London some years later.

As for me, I went back to my life as an actor without further incident. My part in the ongoing life and adventures of the great detective was over . . . the rest is silence.

Now we find Holmes in the Midwest in Peter Tremayne’s study of the lesser-known history of the Irish in Civil War America.

by

PETER TREMAYNE

H
ow very singular!”

The exclamation came from my estimable friend, the consulting detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes, as we sat sipping brandy one evening in front of the fire in our rooms in Baker Street. Holmes was going through a pile of old newspapers, cutting out the occasional item for the scrapbooks that he kept. These items were usually confined to matters of arcane and peculiar events, in which Holmes delighted to indulge. He would spend hours in pursuit of solutions to the mysteries that they often contained.

I glanced across to the yellowing newspaper that he was peering at and found it was an old edition of the
New York Times.
Some friend or acquaintance of Holmes’s in New York, knowing of his penchant
for scouring old newspapers in search of such matters, had recently sent him a pile of that paper.

“Singular, Holmes?” I said. “Pray, what is it that you find singular?”

Holmes put the newspaper on his knee and tapped at it with a lean forefinger.

“There is an item here that informs me that Holt City, in Holt County, Nebraska, is being renamed O’Neill. Not that the place was ever a city in the way we might interpret it. It was only a small collection of homesteads when I passed through it. And, to be sure, it is singular that they choose to name it after a distinguished Irish rebel.”

I was puzzled.

“You say that you have been there, Holmes?” I was astonished, as I had not realized he had ever traveled across the Atlantic.

“I was in that very town just over ten years ago. I had the fortune to discover the would-be assassin of General O’Neill.”

“General O’Neill?” I said truculently. “I thought that you just said that he was an Irish rebel?”

Holmes leaned back in his chair and smiled curiously. He took his pipe from the side table and spent a few moments igniting the noxious mixture with which he had filled it.

“My dear Watson, I shall tell you a story, but it is one that I strictly forbid you to turn into one of those penny-dreadful accounts that you turn out for the popular magazines . . . at least, not until I have shuffled off this mortal coil.”

He paused a moment or two in order to gather his thoughts and then continued:

I had finished my studies at Trinity College, Dublin, and won a demyship to Magdalen College, Oxford. The demy
is derived from
demi-socii
, half-fellows, and it is a scholarship that my acquaintance Oscar Wilde had previously won from Trinity. Before starting my course at Oxford, I had some leisure and, with money and little concern, I resolved to visit some members of my family in the United States. One of my cousins was then residing in Holt City. He was Toorish Sherlock, after whose branch of my family I was named. I believe that I have already confided to you that the Sherlocks were one of the most important families established in Ireland after the Anglo-Norman invasion. They became thoroughly Hibernized, unlike my branch, the Holmeses of Galway.

Toorish Sherlock had graduated from the Royal College of Physicians in Dublin and left for America. Thus he found himself one of a few medical men in Holt City in that year of 1877. The designation of “city” was a misnomer, for I found it no more than a hamlet of several wooden houses sprawled over quite a distance on the Great Plains of the Midwest. Indeed, it was in a vast area that had recently been designated the State of Nebraska, which, I was informed, was from the native Chiwere word meaning a place of “flat water.”

I had arrived by an exhausting method of a steam locomotive and a journey by a very uncomfortable mail coach. Rather weary, I had just reached my ultimate destination, the house of my cousin, when the door flew open and he came out bearing his physician’s bag and evidently in a great hurry. There was a pony and trap outside the house with an elderly servant holding the horse’s head.

“Holmes!” he cried on seeing me, and halted abruptly and in some consternation. “I was expecting you any day, but you have arrived at an inopportune moment. I am called away urgently. A
case of suspected poisoning. The general, no less. I am not sure how long I shall be.”

Indeed, for a moment I was put out by this cavalier greeting after so long and tedious a journey. Then my curiosity got the better of me. Even as young as I was, I was still then consumed by a fascination for poisons and mysteries, and the mere mention of such quickened my blood and awoke all my senses.

“A general has been poisoned, you say?”

“I do say. His manservant has just come posthaste by horse. He rode off as soon as he secured my word I would follow him this minute,” replied Toorish solemnly. “He says the general is at death’s door.”

“Have the police been informed?”

“Police? Holmes, this is a small settlement in Nebraska. It’s hardly fifteen years since the Homestead Act. People have not been settled here long enough to acquire the services of a police force. There is a sheriff here who goes about with a large pistol at his waist. It is not like towns that you know of. Besides, there is no word as to whether this matter is an accident or not.”

“Then let me dump my bags here and come with you,” I suggested with enthusiasm, all thought of fatigue vanished from my mind. Indeed, it is my nature that conundrums and the oddities of life keep my brain from ossifying. Physical exhaustion seemed to vanish as well. “Perhaps I can be of some help?”

Toorish gave me a wry look.

“I doubt it,” he said, for honesty was his forte. “You have no medical training, although I am told that you are studying chemistry, among other things. Besides . . .” He hesitated.

“Besides, what?” I demanded.

“It is a known fact that your brother, Mycroft, is now working in Dublin Castle.”

Dublin Castle was the seat of the British administration in Ireland, and Mycroft, my elder brother, had entered the Imperial Civil Service.

“What has that to do with the matter?”

Toorish hesitated again.

“The general . . . well . . .” He shrugged.

“We are wasting time,” I snapped. “Your patient may be dead or dying. You can tell me what you mean on the way.”

Toorish signaled to the man who had been holding the horse’s head and instructed him to remove my bags into the house. Then he motioned me to climb into the trap. He threw his bag behind the seat and climbed in. I gathered the general’s house lay in its own grounds on the far side of town. We trotted along at a fast rate.

“Now,” I said, “tell me how Mycroft’s work in Dublin Castle comes into this story?”

Toorish glanced at me grimly.

“The general that we are going to see is John O’Neill.”

The sight of my blank expression disappointed him.

“You have not heard of him?” he asked in astonishment.

“I am not interested in military matters,” I declared. “Nor political ones, come to that.”

“Then let me explain. O’Neill came to this country from Drum-gallon, in County Monaghan. At the age of twenty-three he joined the army. During the Civil War he rose to the rank of colonel, commanding the Seventh Michigan Cavalry on the Union side. He had a distinguished career and he was wounded during the battle for Nashville in December of eighteen sixty-four.”

He paused a moment and then went on: “Like most Irishmen here, he never forgot the homeland and the struggle to make Ireland an independent nation again. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and so, when the Civil War ended, he was given command of the Thirteenth Regiment, as it was designated, of the Irish Army of Liberation.”

I must have smiled.

“It was no joke,” admonished Toorish. “Irish veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies joined by the tens of thousands. In June of eighteen sixty-four, the leaders of the IRB had realized that they could not transport an army of twenty-five thousand veteran soldiers from America to Ireland with the ships of the Royal Navy to block them. They decided that the best way to free Ireland was to invade the provinces of British North America. The idea was to head into the French-speaking areas, like Montreal, where the French, such as the Parti Rouge, also wanted to be free from the British. They would seize the saltwater seaports along the St. Lawrence and then negotiate with Britain. A quid pro quo. Leave Ireland and the Irish would leave British North America.”

I was still smiling. “A capital idea, but it needs men and experienced soldiers not a bunch of idealists.”

Toorish regarded me with a pitying expression.

“Have I not just told you that these were veterans of one of the fiercest wars ever fought? And twenty-five thousand of them with the latest weapons, cannons, even Gatling guns and three warships that they had bought surplus from the U.S. Navy.”

“It is hard to believe,” I said, shaking my head.

“But it is true. They were commanded by Major General ‘Fighting Tom’ Sweeney from Cork, who lost his arm in the Mexican
War, and in the Civil War commanded a division under Sherman. As I say, there was no joke about it when these Irish veterans, in regiments and brigades, gathered along the border with the British provinces and launched a three-pronged attack. One division was to go from Chicago and Milwaukee across the lakes to make a feint against Toronto. A central division was to make another feint from Buffalo along the Niagara Peninsula. But the main attack would move from St. Albans and Vermont toward Montreal with some sixteen thousand men and a brigade of cavalry to capture the saltwater seaports along the St. Lawrence. Once secured, they would provide a base for the three rebel Irish warships.”

“And it was your general who led this?”

“No, that main attack was commanded by Brigadier Sam Spear.”

“So how does this general fit into the picture?”

“Come the day of the attack, and in Buffalo things were not going according to plan. Not all the division due to make the feint from Buffalo had mustered, and even the commander, Brigadier William Lynch, had not arrived to take command. O’Neill found himself the only senior officer at the rendezvous. Knowing how much was reliant on the feints to deflect the British elsewhere while Spear began his main attack, O’Neill decided to lead the crossing to Fort Erie with what men he had. Only six hundred men, instead of the designated five thousand, crossed with him. British troops were already moving to face him. He managed to set up positions beyond Fort Erie at Ridgeway. The British Queen’s Own regiment arrived and were promptly sent flying from the field. But O’Neill had intelligence that more troops were on the way, so he moved back to Fort Erie, where he won another skirmish before he withdrew his men.”

I was surprised at hearing this news, for, frankly, it was an event totally unknown to me. Subsequently, I checked this in the local newspapers of the day and found that every word of what Toorish said was true.

“Good luck favored the British,” went on my cousin. “Although Spear began his crossing, and won a few skirmishes against the British advance guards, President Johnson concluded a deal with the British ambassador, Lord Monck. Britain agreed to pay many millions of pounds in compensation and reparation for supporting the Confederate army during the war. Britain also agreed to give up some of their claims to western territories. The president then sent General Grant to cut off the Irish supplies and prevent reinforcements crossing. The invasion collapsed.