THE story of American history would be barren and incomplete if the contributions of the nation's immigrants were not included in the saga. The story of the Irish experience in America can have no more colorful narrator than Thomas Francis Meagher. Born to privilege in Ireland, Meagher could not bear the injustices inflicted upon the Irish people, who were treated as if they were tenants in their own country. His commitment to the uprising of the Irish against British rule resulted in a sentence of transportation for life to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. But he escaped from the island-sending the governor a letter informing him that he was going to do so!-and made his way, after a grueling sea voyage, to New York City. There, he became a lawyer, a journalist and a citizen and, when the Civil War broke out, he formed the Irish Brigade to fight for the Union. After the war, a political career in Montana beckoned, and he went west, where met his death under circumstances that are still shrouded in mystery. Was he murdered by political enemies in Montana? Was he so drunk that he fell overboard from a steamboat into the Missouri River and drowned? The story of this Irish patriot and American hero is the saga of a man who lived his short life to the full and became a legend in two countries.