O'Donoghue, William Bernard (1843–78), treasurer in Louis Riel's provisional Red River government and leader of the last ‘Fenian’ invasion of Manitoba, was born in Co. Sligo in 1843. Little is known about him before his involvement in the Red River rebellion in 1869, though he had emigrated to New York by 1848. At Port Huron, Michigan, in 1868 he met the oblate Vital-Justin Grandin, coadjutor bishop of St Boniface, and accepted the offer to serve in the western mission of the church. He went with Grandin to the Red River settlement in Rupert's Land (Manitoba), where he taught mathematics at the college of St Boniface and began to study for the priesthood. By the autumn of 1869, however, he questioned his calling, quit his studies, and was drawn to the Métis protest movement headed by Louis Riel. The Métis (descendants of European fur traders and natives), who were generally Francophone and catholic, were concerned about the expansion of Canadian authority westwards and sought some guarantee of their political rights and culture. The area was administered by the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), and arrangements were made to transfer sovereignty to Canada.
In November 1869 O'Donoghue was elected to represent St Boniface in the first Red River convention to help determine the settlement's future and negotiate entrance into confederation with Ottawa. Métis opposition in late 1869 caused the Canadian government to refuse to take over the territory on 1 December as had been agreed, and matters soon escalated when Riel's followers, who had already prevented the appointed lieutenant-governor, William McDougall, from entering the settlement, seized the HBC funds at Upper Fort Garry (Winnipeg). Within a week a provisional government was declared, with Riel as its leader and O'Donoghue, a relative outsider, appointed treasurer. In January 1870 O'Donoghue was elected to a second convention of the settlement and confirmed as treasurer.
O'Donoghue assisted in the initial drafts of the Métis ‘list of rights’, which sought guarantees of bilingualism in any proposed provincial legislature, a bilingual chief justice, and arrangement for Métis land treaties. The ‘list’ was taken to Ottawa in March 1870 during negotiations to enter confederation. On 18 February O'Donoghue participated in the capture of a number of Canadians from Portage la Prairie, including Thomas Scott (qv), who had planned to overthrow the provisional government. He witnessed Scott's execution, which further hampered Canadian–Métis relations, in particular giving Ottawa more leverage in dealing with Riel. By August 1870 Canadian patience had worn thin and, when troops arrived at Fort Garry, Riel and O'Donoghue were forced to flee to the USA. Riel and O'Donoghue had by this time come to a parting of the ways: O'Donoghue saw Riel as too pro-British and compromising, and Riel saw O'Donoghue as more concerned with striking a blow against Britain than sincerely working to alleviate the plight of the Métis.
In the autumn of 1870 O'Donoghue took his annexationist plans to Washington, DC, where he received both a hearing before the US senate and an audience with president Ulysses Grant on 28 January 1871, but neither made any promises to his entreaties. Unperturbed, he next turned to the Fenian Brotherhood in New York, again making a pitch before its council for intervention in the Red River settlement, and again being politely dismissed. He did, however, win over the Fenian general John O'Neill (qv), the hero of Ridgeway, who came to a compromise with the Fenian council in that he would resign from the council and not expect any resources for a raid, and in return would be given its moral support for the intended raid. O'Donoghue drafted a constitution for the proposed republic of Rupert's Land, with himself as president. The plan was to invade from Minnesota, declare a republic, and hope that the Métis, and numerous Irish veterans of the American civil war, working as labourers on the Northern Pacific Railway, would join the cause.
In the early morning of 5 October 1871, O'Neill, O'Donoghue, and about thirty-five other men crossed from Minnesota into Rupert's Land and captured the HBC trading post at North Pembina. They took prisoner the proprietor and twenty other men they came upon, including an American who protested so much he was released and promptly informed the nearby US army post, who sent calvary and took the trading post. The US cavalry captured O'Neill and ten others; as he tried to cross the Red River in a canoe, O'Donoghue was seized by a group of Métis who delivered him to the US authorities. He was eventually released without charge as he had been captured on British soil by British subjects. Although more an invasion led by Fenians rather than a Fenian raid, O'Donoghue's incursion was the last attempted invasion of Canada.
Following his return to Minnesota after the abortive raid O'Donoghue worked as a teacher in Dakota County for a number of years. In February 1875 he wrote to the Canadian house of commons pleading for the amnesty that had been granted to Riel and others involved in the Red River rebellion; amnesty was initially denied but subsequently granted in 1877, following the influence of the Irish-Canadian MP John Costigan. In 1877 O'Donoghue moved to Rosemount, Minnesota, where he unsuccessfully ran for the post of county superintendent of schools. In the same year he became engaged to Mary Callan, daughter of James Callan, Dakota County commissioner, but shortly afterwards he became ill with tuberculosis. He moved to St Paul for treatment, but died 26 March 1878. His fiancée died soon after him, on 3 May 1878.