[DL] The Big Picture stuff

[Evil Robot Shane From Another Dimension <wishkah@redbrick.dcu.ie>]

 I happened across the following sub-thread on the newsgroups on my old
 college's computer society server, relating to an incident which apparently
 took place in and around 1866...


> And then there is that interesting footnote in American continental
> history were some US residing Fenians decided to invade Canada and hold it
> ransom for an independent Ireland...i expect they didn't get very far...

Fanbloodytastic story. Great tale, I used to have a couple of books on it
but gave them away :( Basically it was a coming together of Fenians aftyer
the Civil War who had fought the Rebels and needed an outlet. They were
actually quite successful initially and succeede in routing British forces
of far greater numbers. Thomas Meagher, who was one of the Young
Irelanders and had escaped from Australi by this time led part of the
force. They failed for a variety of reasons, firstly it was just a shitty
idea, they didn't have the power to take Canada but they weren't as
ludicrous as you think. We're talking about tens of thousands of well
armed troops, veterans of the American Civil War going up against Candian
Militia and small regular forces. The deciding factor was the deciions by
Grant to close the border to Canada and stop the Fenians shipping arms and
men over. The Fenians balked at the idea of fighting the US too and always
felt bitter about it as they understood that Washington would turn a blind
eye to it. They could never have freed Canada but they could have captured
large parts of it has the US been willing to take a neutral stance which,
of course, it could not.



 I dunno if it's mentioned in any Deadlands books (I assume not), but it
 seemed like yet another conflict to work into the world, if anybody's
 interested.  The guy who posted the followup above (he's something of
 a republican, so take it all with a grain of salt) pointed me to this
 website when I asked him about it:

http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~col/fenian/fen.html

 Wishkah 

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