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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626367319 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Myles Dungan is a radio broadcaster and the author of several books, including The Stealing of the Irish Crown Jewels and How the Irish Won the West. He lives in Ireland.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
REEL ONE
INTRODUCTION: HOW THE IRISH REALLY WON THE WEST
Sorry to disappoint, but ... the Pony Express went out of business after nineteen months, the gunfight at the OK Corral lasted less than thirty seconds, the Stetson was invented in Philadelphia, farmers outnumbered cowboys in the Old West by a thousand to one, Billy the Kid did not kill one man for each year of his short life, Frederick Remington never actually saw any cowboys in action because he was much too fat to get on a horse, Zane Grey was a New York dentist ... and so on.
The American 'Wild West' has been successfully mythologised over a period of a hundred years or more to the point where reality and fiction have become interchangeable. A young emerging American nation needed an heroic past of its own. Its very size, remoteness and harshness, as well as the hardy, independent characters who inhabited its space, meant that the American West was ready-made for hyperbole. Even before memories of significant historical events had begun to fade, storytellers were creating a mythic past from those very sources. It was 'a past that never was and always will be', as one student of the frontier has put it. Certain elements of that past were undeniably ground breaking and 'heroic'. But the nineteenth-century American West has been over-mythologised. Buffalo Bill, Frederick Remington, Hollywood and the 'dime' novel have seen to that.
Just as there are countless myths about the American West, there are many preconceptions about the Irish in the USA. They derive from convenient over-simplifications. One version of the Irish American story would have us believe that Irish nineteenth-century immigrants settled almost exclusively in the great eastern conurbations of New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Of course they did so in great numbers, but an interrogation of this particular myth quickly dispels it. Many, having acquired the urban skills they lacked on arrival, moved on from the stifling Irish ghettoes of the eastern seaboard. A significant percentage of those who did so settled in the West. In 1850 there were 900,000 Irish-born immigrants in the USA, only 0.4 per cent of whom lived in the western states. By 1920, one million US residents were Irish-born, 9 per cent of whom lived in the West. As historian David Emmons has put it in his monumental work on Butte, Montana, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town 1875 — 1925:
Contributing to the historical neglect of these westering Irishmen has been the assumption that the American West was the exclusive province of native-born Protestants who wished to farm or graze their cattle on it. Farmers and cattlemen there were, but there was also an urban West, filled with miners and smeltermen, loggers, railroad workers, longshoremen, and industrial tradesmen of every sort. Many were Irish.
There is a natural tendency to equate the words 'West' and 'frontier' and indeed they are often interchangeable. But while the 'West' was clearly the 'frontier' at one point in American history, the 'frontier' was as much an eastern as a western phenomenon. Arguably the American 'frontier' was to be found east of the Mississippi for far longer than it was located to the west of that great river. From the time of the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers until the late 1700s, American expansion was west-ward but the West itself was terra incognita. When Thomas Jefferson became president of the USA in 1801, two-thirds of the American people lived within fifty miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The USA itself ended on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Many of the men who had expanded the land area of the USA even that far had been Irish. They were the so-called 'Scotch-Irish', Protestant pioneers who had also played such a huge part in winning American independence and in formulating the US Constitution.
However, as the USA poured across the Mississippi and pushed, punched, cajoled, fought and cheated its way to the Pacific Ocean, the Irish pioneers who played a part in making a garden out of that wilderness were very different from the men who had helped bring America thus far. For a start, they were almost all Catholic. They were also, largely, from more impoverished backgrounds than the Scotch-Irish Protestants and Presbyterians who had preceded them. Mines, railroads and the army were the principal employers of the Irish in the American West. Most never rose above the status of lowly wage earner, but few became indentured wage slaves like many of their eastern counterparts. In states such as Montana there were no indentured employees. No company stores or company boarding houses ensured that the employee never escaped the economic grasp of the employer. There was also an abundance of land for the thrifty former miner, soldier or railroad worker who might decide to return to the avocation of his Irish ancestors.
In a newly minted society with few barriers to upward mobility, NINA (No Irish Need Apply) attitudes were not allowed to prevail. The Irish who moved west managed to avoid much of the bigotry and Know-Nothing spirit that pervaded many of the mid-nineteenth-century eastern cities. In New York, Boston and Philadelphia, the Catholic Irish from the 1840s onwards faced organised and improvised racism on a considerable scale. The Irish in the West faced no such condescension or discrimination in western cities, primarily because the cities didn't exist, at least not on the scale of the eastern seaboard. Institutionalised racism cannot thrive in the absence of institutions, and the West of the mid-nineteenth century lacked an entrenched WASP establishment of the kind that directed the suspicion and scorn of their stooges towards the immigrant Irish in the East. And where cities did begin to flourish, such as San Francisco, Butte or St Louis, they did so with a healthy proportion of Irish first-generation inhabitants who were not about to be dictated to by Know-Nothings or vigilantes.
Furthermore, the environment in which the western Irish lived was more rough and ready than the one they abandoned (or avoided altogether in the rare cases of direct migration to the West) on the east coast. Despite many attempts to civilise the towns and cities of the West, middle-class, Protestant American values were slow to take hold in places that might not exist the following week if the gold/silver/ copper gave out, the army fort closed down or the promised railway line went elsewhere. Without wishing to reinforce certain familiar ethnic stereotypes, there was an elemental wildness about the West that suited the rebellious anti-establishment streak in the post-Famine Irish who were uncomfortable and often unwelcome in the Nativist Protestant enclaves of the East until they banded together and learned to manipulate the politics of the big cities.
Aside from which, everybody in the West was a migrant except the indigenous peoples. They would become far more plausible scapegoats for the tribulations of the region than the Irish had ever been east of the Mississippi. And when the Indian threat was gone, if the Irish had ever been an underclass in the West, they had been replaced by the Chinese and the Mexicans.
In his highly influential essay 'The Significance of the Frontier in American History', Frederick Jackson Turner proposed that 'in the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanised, liberated and fused into a mixed race'. He was referring to the eighteenth-century frontier but applies his proposition to the trans-Mississippi frontier as well. Was this true of the Irish? How quickly did those who ventured west become American?
Far more quickly than in the eastern cities, where they faced anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry. In a milieu where the Nativist had replaced the English as the oppressor, it was difficult not to cling to one's ethnicity and band together with one's countrymen for protection and in pursuit of political influence. But in an environment where preoccupations and priorities were somewhat different, it was not so essential to coalesce and cleave to one's Irishness. Granted, a remote California mining town like Bodie (population 10,000 at its height) might boast a branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Irish Land League, but that can be ascribed as much to nostalgia as to any distrustful clannishness. The Bodie Irish, comprising as they did 30 per cent of the town's transient population, did not need to band together for protection. In the book Irish Settlers on the American Frontier, Michael C. O'Laughlin suggests that the reason relatively little attention has been paid to the Irish story in the American West is because rapid assimilation became the norm. Because the Irish were more readily accepted, their own ethnicity became less significant. 'Being an American proved more important than being Irish. Becoming a successful part of this new nation, their older heritage was often set aside.' Perhaps 'new region' would be more appropriate than 'new nation' in this instance, but the nature of the assimilation of the Irish into western society has, ironically, led to their achievements often being overlooked. This is because they were not at the margins. Their experience was seldom at odds with the western narrative.
Although this study will concentrate on a few significant individuals, it is worth making some more general observations before launching into their stories. The classic image of the nineteenth-century Irish immigrant to the USA is of the peasant fleeing economic and political serfdom and sailing to North America in an unseaworthy 'coffin ship' — the indigent vassal on a leaky vessel. He (for the stereotypical Irish emigrant is male) would arrive in Boston or New York, stick close to his own, settle in an eastern urban ghetto and endure poverty and bigotry at the hands of the dominant WASP culture. He would become political fodder for an Irish Democratic Party ward heeler, probably become a trade-union activist and his children and grandchildren might, slowly and painstakingly, climb the political and economic ladder.
Like most stereotypes it has more than a grain of truth. But it can be challenged and questioned. What is outlined above was the experience of many nineteenth-century Irish immigrants to the USA (except for the gender balance — it was much closer to fifty — fifty). But, as we will see, a significant percentage didn't remain on the eastern seaboard. Many moved into the Midwest, to cities like St Louis and Chicago. Some even moved to the South, though there was a marked disinclination to do so because of the perception of antipathy towards Catholicism in the states below the Mason-Dixon line. What has gone largely unremarked is the significance of the American West to the Irish immigrant and vice versa.
The experience of the Irish in the West challenges certain axioms. It puts in some doubt, for example, the notion that the Irish did not engage with the land because the land had betrayed them. Aside altogether from the fact that many of the post-Famine Irish, despite their agricultural backgrounds, were not competent to work American farmland (assuming they could afford to buy it even on generous government terms), there is evidence that a significant percentage of the Irish who moved westwards did opt for the agricultural life. Work done on the 1870 and 1880 census in two Washington counties (Clarke and Spokane) shows that between 50 and 60 per cent of a substantial Irish population was working the land.
It also challenges the notion that in an industrial dispute the Irish were more likely to be on the side of labour than of capital. The West was good to Irish enterprise. Unshackled by the Freemasonry and exclusivity of the eastern capitalist cabals, many newly arrived Irish immigrants were able to stake their claim to wealth, literally and metaphorically. The 'Silver Kings' were merely the most famous of a range of rich mine-owning Irishmen (and women). In a town like Butte, Montana, where most of the miners were Irish, as were most of the mine-owners, ethnic cohesion and some element of fair dealing seems to have blunted the tendency towards industrial action. Between 1878 and 1916, the Irish-dominated Butte Miner's Union never led its workers out on strike. According to David Emmons:
there were times when ethnic nationalism and working class protest reinforced one another. But there was a far tighter seam that marked the place where the rights of Ireland were joined only with the rights of Irish workers and there were more times when that ethnic exclusivity was used against rather than in defense of the rights of all workers.
Confronting anti-Irish and anti-Catholic bigotry and racism was something many Irish were forced to do in the East and Midwest. This phenomenon was less prevalent in the West. In fact, if anything, the western experience reinforces the unpalatable fact established by the New York draft riots of 1863, namely that the Irish were just as capable of racism and bigotry as their oppressors. This is borne out by their treatment of the Native American, the African American and the Asian American.
The role of the Irish in the subjugation of the Native American population is largely beyond the scope of this work (because it is mostly associated with the US Army), but the evidence of Irish complicity in this nineteenth-century form of ethnic cleansing is compelling. Suffice it to say that the charity of a virtually destitute Choctaw nation in the mid-1840s in sending a large sum of money for the relief of famine in Ireland was not reciprocated in kind in the years that followed by Irish officers and soldiers in the western army.
The attitude of Irish communities on the eastern seaboard towards the issue of slavery has also been well advertised. In the near west and Midwest, the opposition of Irish settlers and labourers to the emancipation of slaves was hardly less virulent than was evident from the lynching of black men by Irish mobs in New York in 1863. As one historian of the Midwest has put it, 'There were antislavery Irish people, but contemporary observers agreed that the bulk of the Irish population in the 1850's was not moved by the abolitionists arguments. ' An Irish Midwesterner in the pivotal 1860 election wrote home, 'All Catholics here is Democrats or for slavery and all Republicans is prodestants [sic] or not for slavery but it is not known yet which will beat.'
In the far west the Irish had a highly ambiguous relationship with the Chinese. Thrown together on the Central Pacific Railroad in huge numbers, relations between the Irish navvies and the Chinese coolies were often strained and occasionally burst into open violence. In the city of San Francisco a strange paradox can be seen at its most stark. There
the Chinese presence was of great importance to the Irish. The cultural gulf between Chinese and white society ... was so great as to diminish, by comparison, almost to vanishing point the differences between the natives of Cork and Boston, Limerick and New York.
The point being made by historian R.A. Burchaell here is that the Irish were, to some extent, beholden to the Chinese for their own status in San Francisco society. The Chinese were a readymade underclass that discharged the Irish from their recurring obligation to be society's footstool.
This fact, however, did not prevent the Irish in San Francisco from discriminating against the Orientals in a mirror image of their own treatment in the mid-nineteenth-century in the eastern cities. Their colour meant they could make common cause with white groups who might, conceivably, have discriminated against them had the Chinese not been available as an alternative. Denis Kearney's Workingmen's Party of the 1870s, which advocated the expulsion of Chinese from the USA, was an egregious example of this phenomenon. Kearney himself was an immigrant, but that did not prevent him inciting violence against Chinese communities in the Bay area. Sadly, the same intolerance was often true of Irish trade-union activity: 'anti Oriental racism became the cement for labor union organization'. Ironically, the closest a No Irish Need Apply sign got to San Francisco was on a mill owned by a migrant New Englander in Mendocino County. The Irish riposte was to cover the sign in graffiti.
Because the West lacked a social register (money determined social status) and because there were more resources to be distributed amongst fewer people, the Irish race fared relatively well there. Cities such as San Francisco had a 12 per cent Irish population in the 1850s, with a far higher percentage in highly paid professional employment in the 1870s than in eastern cities. Individual Irishmen, such as the 'Silver Kings' of Virginia City or 'Copper King' Marcus Daly of Butte, made huge fortunes and became first-generation 'lace curtain' Irish. Protected from Nativist bigotry by their relative prosperity and the existence of ethnic groups more vulnerable to racism than themselves, the Irish made a better home in the American West far more rapidly than they did in the East. Their strange lack of political cohesion was a function of this assimilation. As James Walsh, who has made a particular study of California, has put it, 'In California Irish-Americans had never built a consistent political machine ... In San Francisco, Irish-American politicians acted as individuals for the most part.' There was little need for them to do otherwise. They had none of the impetus for self-protection that spawned Tammany Hall and other eastern 'Irish' political machines.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How the Irish Won the West"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Myles Dungan.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
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Table of Contents
Pre-credit Sequence ix
Opening Credits: A Nineteenth-Century Western Timeline xiii
Reel 1 Introduction: How the Irish Really Won the West 1
Reel 2 Mountain Men: Irish Pioneers of the Fur Trade 10
Reel 3 The Donner Party: Cannibalism on the Western Trail 40
Reel 4 Indian Agent: The Later Career of Thomas Fitzpatrick 74
Reel 5 Toffs: Irish Aristocrats West of the Mississippi 92
Reel 6 Not So Gentle Tamers: Irish Women Stake Their Claim 128
Reel 7 Heroes and Villains: The Irish Good, Bad and Distinctly Ugly 160
Reel 8 The Lincoln County War: Murphy, Dolan, Riley, Brady and Billy the Kid 206
Reel 9 Cameos: Pioneers, Plutocrats, Popinjays and Populists 255
Closing Credits: Acknowledgements 282
Notes 284