In , the year the Mackay family crossed the Atlantic, nearly half of the eighty-four thousand immigrants received in the United States came from tiny Ireland, and like thousands of their countrymen, the Mackays settled in New York City. The opening of the Erie Canal in had transformed the city into the most important port in the Western Hemisphere. Dense forests of masts and spars sprouted from ships docked against the piers, wharfs, quays, and slips cramming the southern shores of Manhattan Island. Banking, insurance, and manufacturing industries developed alongside the trade.
At that time, Five Points was the most notorious slum in the United States. Originally, Five Points had been an attractive marshy pond, the Collect. As the city expanded, tanneries and slaughterhouses set up on its banks and dumped their effluents into the pond. The Collect grew so disgusting that it depressed local real estate values. Without bedrock beneath it, the landfill proved too unstable to support major construction.
Speculators bought the land and erected cheap one- to two-and-a-half-story wooden houses among the businesses of the neighborhood. Property owners originally designed the houses for artisans, their families, and their workshops, but as budding manufacturing industries undercut the prosperity of individual craftsmen, landlords discovered that they made much larger profits by partitioning the buildings into tiny rooms rented to immigrants. Inside, entire families crammed into single rooms entered from dim, lightless corridors.
Unceasing din harried the inhabitants. Street noise reverberated in the front rooms. Rooms in the rear filled with the sounds of neighbors facing the backyards and alleys—spouses argued, babies screamed, siblings fought. Occupants shared filthy, overflowing outhouses with dozens of neighbors and drew water from common hydrants outside. The horses, mules, and oxen used everywhere for drayage defecated in the streets. The municipal government sponsored no garbage collection.
Foot, animal, and wheeled traffic churned the improperly drained streets and alleys into fetid quagmires choked with animal corpses, human and animal waste, kitchen slops, and ashes. The stench was overwhelming. Mice, rats, roaches, fleas, lice, maggots, and flies thrived in the squalor. Thousands of feral pigs roamed the streets. Among their own kind, the pigs rutted with loud, gleeful abandon. Refined Knickerbocker ladies sent up howls of protest, complaining that exposure to such indiscriminate sexual behavior undermined their respectability and lowered the moral tone of the whole city.
For Irish women, most of whom had been raised in a rural countryside, fornicating domestic animals barely seemed worth a raised eyebrow.
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Besides, the pigs supplied valuable meat. The outrageous quantities of animal and human feculence contaminated local wells.
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Dysentery, typhoid fever, diarrhea, and other waterborne diseases wreaked far more havoc in the immigrant wards than they did in the rest of the city, as did tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, mental disorders, and alcoholism. Crime and prostitution were ubiquitous, murder commonplace. Visiting journalists could seldom resist characterizing the Irish neighborhoods as nests of vipers and sinks of filth and iniquity, unable or unwilling to do justice to the poor, working-class families who lived there.
Most scribes, making brief forays into the slums, had eyes only for the dark side of the Irish wards. Immigrant families bent on improving their lot in the new country fought a constant battle to maintain any semblance of dignity in the face of such filth, squalor, and anarchic ruckus. The vast majority of Irish immigrants worked as hard as humanly possible to better their lives and the lives of their children as they fought to claw their way up from circumstances so desperate they were difficult for established Yankees to comprehend.
Among the thousands of immigrant families in New York City, the Mackays struggled forward in anonymity, and for their first two years in the United States, the family did reasonably well. Mackay scraped together enough money to send their ten-year-old son to school. In that, John Mackay was lucky. Only about half the school-age Irish children then living in New York City received any education at all. Disaster struck the family in The catastrophe forced eleven-year-old John Mackay to quit school and work to support his mother and sister.
Mackay could read, write, and figure, but he would never receive another day of classroom schooling. In an age devoid of social safety nets, when circumstances forced Irish boys not yet old enough to apprentice to earn money to help their family survive, most of them started selling newspapers or shining shoes. For a job so near the bottom of the capitalist ladder, selling newspapers forced the young boys to accept a whopping ton of risk. Most New York dailies sold for two cents, and newsboys made a half-cent profit on every sale. However, wholesalers forced the newsboys to purchase their supply outright, for 1.
The more fortunate ones, like John Mackay, knew how to read, since basic literacy conveyed a major selling advantage. Newsboys bought their stock of morning papers before sunrise and immediately hit the streets crying the headlines, their clear, young voices among the all-pervasive sounds of the New York streets.
Astute newsboys tailored their cries to their intended marks, touting commercial news at the approach of a Wall Street sharp or social happenings to a fashionable lady, and they all led a rough-and-tumble territorial existence. Newsboys staked claims to the best street corners and selling locales and fiercely defended their fiefdoms against interlopers. Fistfights were common, and John Mackay both received and administered his fair share of thrashings. Midmorning, newsboys who had exhausted their stock grabbed a bite to eat and then hustled odd jobs—perhaps sweeping street crossings or carrying packages for tips at a ferry terminal—until the late papers dropped in the afternoon.
An average newsboy, on an average day, earned twenty-five to fifty cents. A day with incendiary headlines might earn a newsboy as much as two dollars. Selling newspapers was an endless grind, but the newsboys reveled in their self-sufficient autonomy and liberty. Each boy worked on his own account, suffering no boss. Off-duty, they crowded the rowdy galleries of the Bowery and Chatham theaters, notorious aficionados of low entertainments and equally ardent spectators at prizefights and cockfights. The man he thought the greatest in the world was innovative newsman James Gordon Bennett, founder and owner of the New York Herald, a Scottish immigrant whom Mackay often watched hustle through City Hall Square with a bundle of newspapers tucked under his arm.
John Mackay sold newspapers and scrounged odd jobs for four or five years. And street-level competition was about to get a whole lot more ferocious, because on the other side of the Atlantic, disaster had hit Ireland. Dug potatoes emerged from the ground full and healthy, but quickly shriveled to repulsive, inedible slime.
The next year, the blight destroyed nearly every potato in Ireland. The population of Ireland collapsed. Starvation and disease killed a million and a half Irish men, women, and children out of a prefamine population of about eight million. Another million fled the country, most to the United States, where they inundated the port cities of the eastern seaboard. Predictably, the influx provoked a backlash among native-born Americans. Conditions could hardly have been more difficult for a young Irish immigrant struggling to gain a toehold on an American adulthood.
The first waves of famine immigrants arrived just as John Mackay reached the age at which he was old enough to apprentice. Without means or a secondary education, he needed a trade to carry him into adulthood, and the surge in anti-Irish sentiment made it harder to find a suitable apprenticeship.
All were within reasonable walking distance of the family lodgings on Frankfort Street. Webb shipyard, located on the East River between the ends of Fifth and Seventh streets. Whatever the reason, Webb provided an excellent opportunity. As Mackay advanced through the four or five years of his apprenticeship, his earnings would swell from fifty to seventy-eight cents per day.
Mariners considered William H. Out in the world beyond the shipyard, the United States had been fighting a war against Mexico since the spring of Major hostilities ground to a halt in the fall of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo formally concluded the war on February 2, Unbeknownst to both the Mexican and United States governments, nine days before they inked the treaty, an event of monumental import had occurred in California, in the obscure valley of Coloma in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains on the South Fork of the American River.
He pinched up a pebble of yellow metallic substance about half the size of a pea, then picked out a second piece. Biting, hammering, boiling in lye, dousing with vinegar and nitric acid, and a specific gravity test proved the substance. Nothing in North America would ever be the same. Good, hardworking Mormons, they finished constructing the mill before quitting. In the best pockets, the men scooped out gold dust by the glittering handful.
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Somehow, the Sierra foothills had kept their treasure hidden through seventy years of Spanish and Mexican administration. Rumors of the gold strike reached the small outpost of San Francisco soon thereafter. A sleepy village sited at the northeastern tip of a long peninsula that divided the waters of the wild Pacific from the deep bay into which drained the Sacramento River, San Francisco had about eight hundred residents in early , and it boasted two weekly newspapers, the Californian and the Star.
Brannan had arrived in San Francisco two years before, leading a group of Mormon exiles who had made the long voyage around Cape Horn from New York. Brannan had decided to make money outfitting and provisioning miners, and he wanted more of them in the goldfields. Gold from the American River! In California, the rush was on.
Sam Brannan had already bought every pick, shovel, and pan he could find. Church elders expelled him from Mormon fellowship three years later. The crucial detail was that nobody owned anything in the California interior, not the land, timber, or water, and certainly not the gold. Everybody took it for granted that the native tribes inhabiting the area could be muscled aside.
Historically, kings, queens, and governments had reserved gold mines for themselves; California possessed no such entities. No laws regulated mining—or much of anything else—in California, and considering the recently expelled Mexican administration and the light hand of U. For practical purposes, California had no government at all.
If I keep to my self-imposed schedule, it should be on Kindle by the middle of November. Little River Trilogy Update. I have decided to make all three books in the Little River Trilogy into one volume. The file has been uploaded to Createspace, and I'm checking it for errors and typos. If it looks okay, I'll probably format for Kindle. It actually makes a nice looking book.
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Daybreak at Little River was published today by createspace. It is available at their site now, at https: The third book in the Little River Trilogy is set to be published as a paperback in a couple of days. I'm about a third of the way through with the first book of the new paranormal romance series, The Goldfield Packs, the working title is Desert Fire. Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg.
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