Among the more than 100 Irish soldiers who marched with Custer was a “Sergeant Thomas Murray, born in Co Monaghan”
Long-time readers of this column may recall that the Diarist’s namesake grandfather was once, among other things, a deputy sheriff in Montana, back when that was the Wild West or nearly.
When I wrote about all this in 2007, my grandfather’s Montana-to-Monaghan trajectory led one waggish letter writer to wonder if he was “the first cowboy to have joined Fianna Fáil”. Fathers of few words aside, another impediment to research was a severe lack of relatives on the paternal side of the family. My grandfather’s marriages yielded a mere two children.
But Murray was an official hero of the larger theatre of war that late June day, awarded a Medal of Honour for relief efforts on behalf of the parts of the regiment that survived. Murray is often mentioned alongside another Medal of Honour recipient, Thomas Callan from Louth, who led a party to fetch water from the Bighorn for the wounded.
Those include two well-known GAA brothers from Clones, whose heroics under fire from the notoriously hostile Kerry tribesman in a drawn All-Ireland semi-final of 1985 would suggestBut Thomas Murray’s exact place of birth in 1836 does not seem to be recorded anywhere – at least where I can find it. As for his grave, in Washington DC, that’s a tight-lipped, military affair – recording only his name, regiment, receipt of the MOH, and date of death: August 4th, 1888.
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