Work in America
Work in America
While most Irish settled in the major east coast cities such as New York and Boston, many moved west as work became available building roads, canals and railways. Sometimes they found it easier to find work if an enterprise was owned by an Irishman. In Butte, Montana, the Anaconda mines, which were owned by Irishman, Marcu Daly, employed thousands of Irish workers. For example thousands of Irish men took up the back–breaking work of digging the Erie Canal in the 1820s. The work was hard, the pay low, the living conditions poor and sickness and disease were common. A worker on the canal, Timothy Geoghan, wrote to his sister in Ireland telling her of the hardship of his work, “ I don’t know, dear sister if any of us will survive, but God willing, we will live to see a better day”, he wrote from his tent near Utica in 1819.
“Six of me (My) tentmates died this very day and were stacked like cordwood until they could be taken away. Otherwise I am fine”.
The Irish were known for their colorful ways and lilting songs such as:
We are cutting a Ditch through the gravel,
Through the gravel across the state, by heck!
We are cutting the Ditch through the gravel,
So the people and freight can travel,
Can travel across the state, by heck!
Immigrants helped America make the transition to an Industrial society. Chinese and Irish railroad gangs, recruited to meet the urgent labour demands, laid tracks that brought the East and West together in 1869 - the Chinese from the West on the Central Pacific and the Irish from the East on the Union Pacific. Above, a photograph of the construction of the St. Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad in 1887
The dangers to which the Irish were exposed are illustrated in the following quote from one middle class emigrant
“How often do we see such paragraphs in the papers as an Irishman drowned – an Irishman suffocated in a pit – an Irishman blown to atoms by a steam engine - ten, twenty Irishmen buried alive in the sinking of a bank –and other like casualties and perils to which Pat is constantly exposed, in the hard toils for his daily bread”
(Quoted in Miller, Kerby A, Emigrants and Exiles, Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985.)