Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier: The Prose Writings of Eoin Ua Cathail

Eoin Ua Cathail (ca. 1839–1928) and his prose and verse tales about his purported exploits on the American frontier, including bloody encounters with Native peoples, occupied an unusual spot in the story of twentieth-century literature in Irish. Multiple scholars discussed the Limerickman's writings, but few other readers had the opportunity to peruse Ua Cathail's compositions, which long remained unpublished and available only in manuscript copies in a small number of research libraries in Ireland and abroad. Now, almost a century after Ua Cathail's death in Pentwater, Michigan, and after an unsuccessful attempt by Douglas Hyde, the prominent Irish-language activist, scholar, and folklorist (and later president of Ireland), to spur publication of Ua Cathail's work in the 1920s, readers finally may sample many of those writings in Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier.In this attractively produced book, Patrick J. Mahoney presents Ua Cathail's original Irish-language prose tales (but not his verse) alongside the editor's English-language translations, and an insightful introduction and notes augmented by material, including letters and photographs, from the Ua Cathail family collection. At a time when scholars in the field of Irish-language studies have renewed and expanded their interest in the language and its culture, from survivals of folklore to contemporary transnational writing among the Irish diaspora, this first edition of Ua Cathail's prose narratives is assured a place in reading lists of related academic courses. In addition, the translations facilitate those without Irish, including in North American historical and literary studies, in learning how Ua Cathail drew on nineteenth-century United States popular culture as he sought to depict aspects of life on the American frontier for an Irish-language readership primarily in his homeland.Mahoney leaves Ua Cathail's idiosyncratic spelling of Irish and uncertain command of the language's grammar as they were in the manuscripts. For reasons unexplained, however, the volume excludes Ua Cathail's three verse tales—admittedly lengthy and repetitive—about the reputed capture of him and his friend by Native Americans, while they were serving in the US cavalry. Nevertheless, reducing the number of pieces about violent clashes with Native warriors in the book causes their absence to act as a corrective. Much of the fascination for Irish-language scholars who commented on Ua Cathail's writings and—one imagines—for present-day Irish readers accessing them for the first time, stems from the perception of the exotic: texts in Irish about the Wild West reminiscent of what we have seen in film and on television. Only 4 of the 13 Ua Cathail tales in the volume—plus a separate recollection by a Cork-born immigrant—deal directly with bloody confrontations with Native Americans. The other narratives focus on life in the forests, including encounters with wild animals, such as bears and wolves, and a series of pieces about human foibles, which provide some nuance in depictions of Indigenous peoples. In contrast, the tales about fearsome encounters with Natives offer offensive stereotypical caricatures: they are invariably “fealltach” (pp. 52–30) [treacherous] and “ag casgairt, ag réabadh, a's ag sgriosadh gach aon nídh rómpa” (pp. 30–1) [wrecking, violating, and destroying everything before them].Ua Cathail's favorable portrayal of Métis—mixed-race offspring of Indigenous and French parents—counters the jingoistic and propagandistic statement by Charles Mair, the nineteenth-century Canadian imperialist, that “in general the Frenchman married the Indian and sank to the level of her tastes and inclinations. In general the Englishman married the Indian and raised her to the level of his own” (Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914, University of Toronto Press, 1970:58). Clearly, Ua Cathail shared with many of his compatriots sympathy with the French, not just for their republican aspirations for liberty, equality, and fraternity, but also as a manifestation of Irish folk memory of Bliain na bhFrancach (the Year of the French), when French revolutionary troops landed in western Ireland to support the ultimately unsuccessful United Irishmen rebellion in 1798.Surprisingly and regrettably, Mahoney does not provide a succinct biography of Ua Cathail in his introduction. Instead, the reader must scan footnotes for useful information buried within. For example, Ua Cathail's personal life was colorful. As Mahoney observes in a footnote, Ua Cathail married five times. But Mahoney omits the disclosure mentioned by other scholars that Ua Cathail deserted his first wife in Ireland, leaving for the United States, never to return. Mahoney is on more secure ground in tackling Ua Cathail's bald assertions that his American Frontier War tales were autobiographical. Ua Cathail was attached to the United States cavalry in Arkansas around 1864–1865, but “he seemingly never had an active military role” (p. 25). Far from being part of the unit sent out to avenge General George Custer's death in 1876, he was a police officer in Chicago at the time. Mahoney frames this discussion in the context of the influence of William F. Drannan, a contemporary dime-novel fabulist, who proclaimed a little too loudly that his accounts of his exploits on the American frontier were autobiographical, and not least, the Irish storytelling tradition with which Ua Cathail was familiar from his Irish upbringing. In fact, Ua Cathail name-checks heroic figures from the Irish tradition in several tales, thereby providing familiar reference points for his intended readership.One legend is that Limerick people regularly moved Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (Scribner, 1996), the first-person narrative of the author's miserable and poverty-stricken youth in that city after his family's return from the United States to Ireland, from the nonfiction shelves to the fiction section of local bookshops. McCourt's primary target readership for his fable was in North America. As Recovering an Irish Voice from the American Frontier demonstrates, Ua Cathail, his fellow Limerickman, had attempted this trick in reverse earlier, presenting tall tales that fed the preconceptions and misconceptions of the target readership in Ireland about North America.Historians may easily spot nonfactual elements in Ua Cathail's writings and, as Mahoney notes, historians have dismissed Drannan's tales—and by extension, those of Eoin Ua Cathail—as fictitious. But where historians denounce what they perceive as bogus, the rest of us, mere folklore and literary scholars and other readers, may enjoy the imaginative and a good story well-told, even as we decry caricatures of Indigenous peoples, past and present.

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