Just finished one that may be of interest to some in this neighbourhood: Ridgeway, by .... Vronsky. It's an account of the only real battle in the Fenian raids into Canada. The Fenian forces, a couple of thousand of battle-hardened Civil War veterans, were opposed by half as many Canadian university students and shop clerks, most of whom had never before fired a shot,led by bungling amateur officers with no battlefield experience. The Canadians were appallingly ill-trained, ill-equipped, and ill-led, but there was some pretty vicious fighting, including some ugly bayonet work. Ironically, the incompetence of their leadership may well have saved the day for the Canadians: through a series of miscommunications and misunderstandings never satisfactorily explained, their "pursuit" of "fleeing" Fenians turned into a panicked retreat on their own part, which meant that they avoided running into a trap the Fenians had set for them, in which they would have been slaughtered, in all likelihood. The Fenian effort collapsed when the American government, to the surprise of the Fenians, blocked their supply and reinforcement lines from the States. This, and the failure of the Irish- and French-Canadians to rise up and join them, led them to abandon their campaign.

One of the many curious factoids that emerges is that one-third of the fifty or sixty Fenian prisoners taken by the Canadians were Protestants.

And the Fenian plan to capture Canada wasn't nearly as far-fetched as it seems at first blush. But it did depend on the goodwill of the US   government which it turned out - too late - they didn't really have (does that sound familiar?).