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 1  A Train Butcher Raising the Wind THE FATHER—LIKE THE SON—WAS A WHISKEY MAN AND A LOYAL Democrat down to the bone. At the end of old Ed McDonald’s life, his many friends and neighbors from the Near West Side of Chicago who knew him in better days gathered by his bedside, recalling the throngs of little children tugging on his coat sleeves in the summer months. The youngest of the neighborhood waifs affectionately called him “Gampa,” as they pulled on his flowing white beard to see if it was real or not—the beard extended all the way down to his chest. Ed might have easily been mistaken for Santa Claus as he dispensed candy, trinkets, and a mischievous wink to the little ones. Along Ashland Boulevard, in this luxuriant neighborhood where the rich and wellborn lived side by side with the self-made Irish American politicians of Chicago, who elevated themselves up from hardscrabble, “Gampa” McDonald was regarded as a “good-hearted” man, free of malice and always quick with a joke. In wintertime, when the snow piled high outside the spacious family mansion Michael Cassius McDonald had acquired just a few blocks south from the estate of Carter Harrison Sr., the five-term mayor of Chicago whom old Ed’s famous and clever son had elevated to the pinnacle of political power, “Gampa” McDonald could be observed from the street sitting quietly next to the big bay window, observing the promenade as it passed before him.1 In the early winter months of 1895, Ed’s physical energy drained away. Death was near for the much-beloved eighty-nine-year-old patriarch, and he had only this last wish to convey. He summoned Mike to his chamber and asked if his son would be so kind as to invite his oldest and dearest friend, Danny O’Connor of Niagara Falls, New York, down to Chicago. Danny and Ed had known each other for seventy-five years. They were two of the old settlers of Niagara County; living portraits of age and wisdom. Upon receiving Mike’s urgent dispatch, Danny 8 A Train Butcher Raising the Wind 9 caught the first train out of New York and presented himself at Ed McDonald’s bedside for one last reunion, offering comfort and friendship up until the moment when the old man breathed his last and went out smiling. In those last few weeks of his life, Ed and Danny recalled the struggles of their early lives in County Cork and subsequent adventures in America. Ed McDonald reflected on the curious circumstances of his passage. His father was a tanner, but Ed didn’t have much use for the trade, so instead he stowed away on a vessel captained by an older brother and bound for Quebec. When the anchor dropped and the gangplank was lowered, Ed disappeared into the city. Ireland, and whatever attendant economic or family hardships he had endured, were relegated to the past. He was a full-bodied young man of thirtythree , looking to establish himself in North America. Ed briefly lingered north of the border, before crossing over into western New York, landing in Niagara County about 1837. Not far away, Irish laborers had dug the Erie Canal. The scattered settlement of farmers and homesteaders living in Niagara Falls lay adjacent to a military outpost guarding the doorway into western New York and Pennsylvania. Fort Niagara protected the waterway from the few remaining Seneca and Iroquois tribesmen skirmishing with the white men for control of the fur trade and the more omnipresent threat posed by Canadian separatists. Relations along the border were often strained, particularly during the Patriot War of December 1837, when French Catholics were in open revolt against the British colonial power, the expansion of English rectories, and the movement to unite Lower and Upper Canada.2 It was during these troublesome times when New York State helped elevate the Democratic Party, a popular political movement appealing to the small freeholders, immigrant Irish, and rural yeomanry, to national importance. Historians credit Martin Van Buren, “the Little Magician” from the Hudson Valley region, with fusing together an effective coalition of Jeffersonian Democrats , Southern landholders, and Western frontiersmen already loyal to Andrew Jackson into a cohesive party organization that gained its power and prestige through grassroots campaigning, the formation of local “clubs,” and ballot-box manipulation. The diminutive Dutchman was mostly a failure as president but an imposing figure in state politics...

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