HistoryMyles Dungan, the former host of RTÉ's Rattlebag and the author of two books on Irish involvement in the first World War, has shifted his attention across the Atlantic in his latest book, How the Irish Won the West.
In it, he attempts to broaden the popular understanding of both Irish immigration and the historical dynamics of settlement in the trans- Mississippi west more generally.
Dungan's attack on commonly held myths begins at the book's outset, where he reveals, among other things, that "the Pony Express went out of business after 19 months", "the gunfight at the OK Corral lasted less than 30 seconds" and "Zane Grey was a New York dentist". Rather than rehashing the image of the west that aficionados of the classic westerns may admire, Dungan presents the reader with a more complicated old west, in which not everyone was a cowboy or American Indian and not all the white folk talked like John Wayne.
This book breaks no particularly new ground among historians - or among those of us who grew up in the American west and knew plenty of people with Irish surnames. The west of the 19th century was a polyglot area, with Asians, Latinos, and Afro-Americans as well as white people of various national extractions, and much recent work on the region has explored precisely this complexity. Dungan is aware of this, and he namechecks the work of several important historians of the American west at the outset.
This is not an overarching survey of the Irish experience in the west. Large groups of Irish people, such as railroad workers and miners, barely make an appearance. Instead, Dungan focuses on characters and their stories, and he generally handles them well. Of course, with whores and cannibalism and homicide and Oscar Wilde's drinking bout with a group of hard-bitten western miners it would be hard not to construct a narrative that is frequently gripping.
While Dungan is mindful of the context in which these episodes occur, that context generally remains in the background. And though his view is not comprehensive, it takes in not only gunfighters and pioneers and cowboys, but prostitutes, painters, and whiskey peddlers as well.
But how important is it, really, that South Pass was - at least arguably - not discovered by American Jedediah Smith but rather by his Co Cavan-born lieutenant, Thomas Fitzpatrick? Or that it was a Dubliner who first raised the idea of cannibalism on the ill-fated Donner Party expedition? Quite often, his main characters - who range from Anglo-Irish grandees blithely reducing the stock of American bison on profligate hunting expeditions to boom-town merchants and cowboys - are not, in the main, defined by their ethnicity upon reaching the west, but more by gender, occupation and race. The book's title, though cute, is misleading, as Dungan admits. The Irish did not, as such, win the west. On the contrary, their assimilation into the mainstream of American society occurred more quickly there than it did for their more numerous fellow countrymen in the Irish neighbourhoods of New York and Boston.
This is not to say that Thomas Fitzpatrick's activity as an Indian agent was insignificant, or that female merchants such as Co Cork-born Nellie Cashman, whose business ventures led her from boomtown to boomtown, are not illustrative of larger patterns. It is rarely asserted that their stories in the west were distinctively Irish, and when it is, not always convincingly. It is only near the end of the book, in a discussion of the Lincoln County War in New Mexico (famously involving Billy the Kid) that Irish ethnicity clearly becomes decisive in the fate of any of the protagonists of this book. In that liquor-soaked and heavily armed community, what had been a pattern of violent conflict between the Mexican and "Anglo" (white) communities in the 1870s soon expanded to include religious and national hatreds among the white population, and Dungan does a capable job with a convoluted story of political rivalry, revenge, and violence.
Dungan does not, to his credit, indulge in fulsome praise of his subjects or make cheap appeals to ethnic or national pride. Some figures are presented as downright villains. A case in point is Jim Kirker from Co Antrim, who after coming to the United States eventually became an Indian hunter, and whose depredations, in Dungan's words, would now "be called genocide or, at the very least, ethnic cleansing". The book's Irish protagonists run the gamut of human types, from the desperate to the avaricious to, at times, even the virtuous.
How the Irish Won the West, though perhaps not a groundbreaking book, is nevertheless a good book by a sensitive and capable writer.
Quincy Lehr lectures in American history at Trinity College Dublin
How the Irish Won the West By Myles Dungan New Island, 304pp. €24.95