Mining Irish-American Lives

Western Communities from 1849 to 1920

Alan J. M. Noonan

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781646426638
  9781646422500
• eBook ISBN:
  9781646422517
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

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.
 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Varied Hues of Green
• 2. Digging Lumps of Gold
• 3. Mirages in the Desert
• 4. Mollies in the Mountains
• 5. In Search of Respect
• 6. Oro y cobre, Gold and Copper
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Irish Poems, Songs, and Notes about Mining
• Appendix 2: Transcript of Official Oath of the State of Nevada
• Appendix 3: Parentage Percentages and Figures, American West
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index