Hero’s burial for man who rode with Custer
July 1999
A Wexford man who fought in the Indian Wars alongside General Custer is to be reburied among fallen comrades, 99 years after being interred in a pauper’s grave.
Michael Keegan, who escaped Custer’s Last Stand at the Battle of Little Big Horn after being assigned to guard supplies a few miles from the site, died penniless in Chicago in July 1900.
His lonely fate was uncovered by Vietnam veteran Randy Johnson, whose Veterans of Foreign Wars group successfully applied to Cook County Circuit Court to have Michael Keegan disinterred and reburied on Veteran’s Day next November.
The former 7th Cavalry private will be buried then alongside three of his cavalry comrades at Fort Sheridan, ‘ to give this once-forgotten veteran a proper military burial’.
The ceremony will include the Union Army of Illinois and surrounding areas, which will take part in blue uniforms, caissons, drummers, cannon salutes, buglers, and period flags.
‘If it was me, where would I rather end up - in a pauper’s grave as a nobody, or at a regular military cemetery as a recognised veteran, with three guys I served with?’ Mr Johnson asked.
‘I felt bad for the guy that he served 21 years in the military during his career, and yet did not receive a proper military burial when he died. This will put that right, even if he has had to wait almost 100 years,’ he added.
Michael Keegan was born in County Wexford around 1832 and arrived in the US sometime before 1855, when he enlisted in the US Army in Missouri.
Assigned first to the 2nd Cavalry and later the 5th Cavalry, Keegan fought against the Confederates in the Civil War before being discharged as a private in Tennessee in 1867.
His whereabouts for the next five years are a mystery but he re-enlisted in 1872 and was assigned to the 7th Cavalry.
Four years later and a few days before the Battle of Little Big Horn on June 25, 1876, the cavalrymen were split into patrols to search for Indians. Keegan and some other men were left at the Powder River, to guard supplies.
Six miles away, Custer and most of his men were massacred after falling into a trap laid by the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes.
Keegan left the army a few months later with a disability pension for arthritis, and spent the rest of his days in so-called ‘soldiers homes’, which in reality were flop houses for destitute army veterans. He died a pauper on July 19, 1900, and was buried accordingly.
At the hearing earlier this year that approved the exhumation, Circuit Court Judge Stephen A. Schiller approved the plan after hearing that Keegan did not appear to have any surviving family.
The court was presented with a document Keegan signed two years before his death stating that he never married and never had children, and no other descendants of any siblings have been found either.