Mining Irish-American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920

by Alan J. M. Noonan

Overview

Mining Irish-American Lives focuses on the importance and influence of the Irish within the mining frontier of the American West. Scholarship of the West has largely ignored the complicated lives of the Irish people in mining towns, whose life details are often kept to a bare minimum. This book uses individual stories and the histories of different communities—Randsburg, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Leadville, Colorado; Butte, Montana; Idaho’s Silver Valley; and the Comstock Lode, for example—to explore Irish and Irish-American lives.
 
Historian Alan J. M. Noonan uses a range of previously overlooked sources, including collections of emigrant letters, hospital logbooks, private detective reports, and internment records, to tell the stories of Irish men and women who emigrated to mining towns to search for opportunity. Noonan details the periods, the places, and the experiences over multiple generations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He carefully examines their encounters with nativists, other ethnic groups, and mining companies to highlight the contested emergence of a hyphenated Irish-American identity.
 
Unearthing personal details along with the histories of different communities, the book investigates Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans through the prism of their own experiences, significantly enriching the history of the period.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781646426638
Publisher:	University Press of Colorado
Publication date:	07/15/2024
Series:	Mining the American West , #1
Pages:	378
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Alan J. M. Noonan is an independent historian based in Cork, Ireland, and the inaugural Historian in Residence for Cork City Libraries. He earned his PhD in history from University College Cork in 2013 and has received several prestigious history fellowships including the Glucksman Government of Ireland Fellowship at New York University and the Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3

1 Varied Hues of Green 20

2 Digging Lumps of Gold 43

3 Mirages in the Desert 99

4 Mollies in the Mountains 131

5 In Search of Respect 166

6 Oro y Cobre, Gold and Copper 194

Conclusion 229

Appendix 1 Irish Poems, Songs, and Notes about Mining 249

Appendix 2 Transcript of Official Oath of the State of Nevada 263

Appendix 3 Parentage Percentages and Figures, American West 265

Notes 267

Bibliography 329

Index 353

Editorial Reviews

“Noonan’s work shines as an analysis of Irish mining networks in the American West, and as a call to better understand the important ethnic history littered across the ghost towns of this region that once churned out gold and silver.”
—James Walsh, University of Colorado Denver

“This book is a valuable, new contribution to the history of the Irish diaspora.”
—The Western Historical Quarterly

"Noonan has fashioned a complex and persuasive analysis, built on a truly remarkable array of sources, that will be welcomed by historians of Irish migration, western community building, and the American mining industry."
—Pacific Historical Review

“Alan J. M. Noonan has written a richly documented book. . . . historians can profit from reading it.”
—Journal of Arizona History

From the Publisher