Leadville, Colorado, at 10,200 feet in elevation (3,109m), is the highest town in North America. It was also the site of the largest and most politically important Irish immigrant communities in the Rocky Mountain West, which consisted of approximately 20% of the population during the early 1880s. This working class immigrant community occupied the most difficult jobs, struggled unsuccessfully to improve their working conditions, many died very young from harsh winters, sickness, mining accidents, and epidemics. Michael Davitt travelled to Leadville on a number of occasions, encouraging the workers and miners to remain united in pursuit of better pay and working conditions.Branches of the Irish National Land League were also established here following Davitt's visits. The Catholic Free section of Leadville's Evergreen Cemetery holds the remains of thousands of Irish immigrants, buried in sunken, unmarked graves. The average age of death was twenty-three and nearly half of them are children. Today, a major memorial to these 19th century Irish immigrants stands, comprised of a bronze sculpture of a miner with pick inhand, facing east towards Ireland with an Irish harp symbol. The monument names those in the unmarked graves and serves as a visual reminder of the human toll that industrial labour took on Irish immigrant communities across North America.
Dr. James Walsh is an Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver and specialises in the Irish Working Class Diaspora in North America. He is the co-author of Irish Denver and author of Michael Mooney and the Leadville Irish. Walsh has spent 20 years scratching around the remains of Leadville's 19th century Irish community, working to unearth the stories of those buried in sunken, unmarked graves in Evergreen Cemetery. Dr Walsh also leads a student study abroad programme in Mayo in collaboration with Michael Larkin and Michael Gill of the ATU Mayo campus, Castlebar.
