Unequal Justice: The Metis in (W.R.) O'donoghue's Raid of 1871‪.‬

We have passed through a frightful crisis and have escaped by the skin of our teeth.... The danger was not from without, but within.... But if 200 French Halfbreeds had joined them on the frontier, we should have had a rough time of it.(1) With these words, the Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba Adams Archibald informed the Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. Macdonald, about the attack by a combined force of Irish Americans and Pembina Metis on the Hudson's Bay Company Post at the international border in October of 1871. Most recent historians have dismissed this event as marginal to the mainstream of Canadian history and even Irish and American writers of Fenian history have rarely considered it a true "Fenian" raid; some have even neglected to mention it.(2) Although the Fenians provided money to buy rifles and some prominent members of their organization, General John O'Neill, General Thomas Curley of St. Louis, Mo., and Colonel J.J. Donnelly of Utica, New York, answered W.B. O'Donoghue's call for military support, the Fenian Brotherhood did not officially sanction the action.(3)