Mining Irish-American Lives

Western Communities from 1849 to 1920
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 communitiesRandsburg, California; Virginia City, Nevada; Leadville, Colorado; Butte, Montana; Idahos Silver Valley; and the Comstock Lode, for exampleto 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 generation