Irish Immigration To America Essay

Irish Immigrants in America

Before the outbreak of the dread Irish Potato Famine, the people of Ireland had been a relatively small demographic in America. The immigration of Irish males had increased in the 1820 's, due to an abundance of jobs created by the building of the Erie Canal and other canal, road, or railroad projects, but when the famine struck, entire families flocked in droves to the United States. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," they heard our country call, and they came by the thousands, hoping to find, if nothing else, a decent existence.

Between the years 1820 and 1930, an estimated 4.5 million Irish came to America. They settled their families mainly in Midwestern or Northeastern

Daly was the first Irish immigrant millionaire in the United States. He was born in Caven, Ireland, on December 5, 1843, the youngest son in a poor farm family of eleven children. He immigrated to the United States in the year 1856 with few possessions, little money, poor education, and few professional work skills. After a few years of laboring in New York, Daly went to California, to live with his sister. It was there that Daly got his first taste of mining, the enterprise that would one day make him his fortune. Daly quickly picked up the trade, and got a steady job as a miner in the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada. By 1871, he became the foreman of the Walker Brothers mining syndicate in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1874, eighteen years after he first arrived in America, he became a citizen of the United States. Two years later, his employers sent him to Montana for silver interests. He purchased the Alice mine for the company, keeping twenty percent of the interest for himself, but then sold his share of the mine in 1881. He, along with other, more affluent men who provided financial backing for his enterprise opened his own mine, which became known as the Anaconda mine. The Anaconda mine was intended to produce silver, but after a few months of digging, the men discovered a deep underground vein of copper, three hundred feet deep and one hundred feet

With his business partners, he developed the mine and the area around it, essentially building the Montana town of Anaconda to provide a place for his workers and their families to live. By the year 1890, Daly was rich beyond his wildest dreams, with the mines of Butte producing over seventeen million dollars worth of copper annually. Daly was an inspiration to all hardworking Irish immigrants, and he made sure to provide jobs for all his native brothers.

Without the Irish, America would not be the nation it is today. The people of Ireland were essential to the construction of the transcontinental railroad and the Erie Canal, both of which were indispensable factors in the development of the United States. The Irish also drove the formation of workers’ unions in America. After so many years of oppression, poor wages, and awful living conditions, these people banded together to gain fairness and equality for all hardworking laborers. Without the tireless efforts of the Irish, America, in all her glory, would never have developed at the rate it