Kindred Spirits in County Cork, Photo courtesy of Gavin Sheridan
Irish rebel John Boyle O'Reilly arrived in Boston in January 1870, and almost immediately he became a powerful voice for the oppressed, including his own people of Ireland who were trying to break free of Britain, but also in the United States, Blacks, Chinese immigrants and Native Americans.
Like everyone in Boston's Irish community, O'Reilly was aware of the extraordinary act of kindness that happened in 1847, when the Choctaw people raised more than $170 ($5000 today) to send to the people of Midleton, County Cork, during the height of the Irish Famine, a five-year potato crop failure that devastated the island. The Choctaws themselves had just endured the arduous journey known as the “Trail of Tears," where they were forcibly relocated from their homes in the eastern part of the continent to what was called Indian Territory west of the Mississippi.
O'Reilly saw the British conquest of the Irish and Native Americans as similar episodes of colonialism and exploitation. Native land had been stolen in both Ireland and America by the British, and O'Reilly's sympathies were always with the oppressed and dispossessed.
O'Reilly's effective bully pulpit for speaking out was The Boston Pilot, a Catholic weekly newspaper with a national following and considered influential across the country. O'Reilly began as a reporter in 1870 and was soon moved to editor, and eventually he became publisher of the newspaper until his death in 1890.
Kintpuash, or Captain Jack of the Modocs
O'Reilly's ire was raised in spring 1873 when he learned about the murder of innocent Madoc men, women and children living on the Northern California/ Oregon. The Modocs, led by Kintpuash, also known as Captain Jack, had left the reservation in Oregon they had been sent to, and moved back to their native land in California, where they had lived for generations. A prolonged battle broke out with the U.S. Army, and during the fighting, US General Edward Canby was killed. When a group of volunteer soldiers were transporting Modoc prisoners back to the reservation, the Modocs were set upon by local militia and killed.
O'Reilly wrote in a June 1873 editorial:
"Could a man place himself a hundred years ahead and look back on the treatment of the Indians by our Government of today, what a contempt would rise up in his mind against us! And yet men will live a hundred years hence, in all probability, and we are unmoved about their opinions. They will read in their school books, or, at any rate, in the books of other countries, how certain white men, under pretense of holding parley with Indians, basely murdered them and escaped unpunished; how, some years after, a few Indians of the same tribe defied for months the power of the United States, and in a parley, retaliated by murdering the General and a few others; how these Indians, being taken at last, were loaded with chains and treated with cruelty, while the newspapers of the country howled for their blood.
"It is a wretched reflection, bringing a blush to the cheek of those who intelligently and truly love this Republic. The treatment of the Indians is a crying wrong, and it will not be altered by spilling the blood of Captain Jack and his men."
The men who led the massacre were never charged with murder, but later that year. Captain Jack was captured, and he and three other men - Schonchin, Boston Charley and Black Jack - were hanged on October 3, 1873 for killing General Canby. The heads of the four men were sent to the Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC and later placed at the Smithsonian Institute.
Read more about John Boyle O'Reilly and the public monuments that memorialize him in Massachusetts.
Research + Text, Michael Quinlin
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