“I Saw San Francisco When it Was Only a Village”: The Voices of California’s Irish Pioneers

Great post

Irish in the American Civil War

Laurence Macken wasborn in Slane, Co. Meath on 12th May 1828. In 1850 he was a young man just three days shy of his 22nd birthdaywhen he landed in the California Territory, one of the thousands of emigrants and natives alike who had been infected by the gold fever that had spread like wildfire throughout the United States after 1848. The men who left their old lives behind to head West in pursuit of the precious metal would be immortalised as the “49...