Westward Cork Migration by Sail 1815-1860 by John Sutton

PART II EMIGRANT PERSPECTIVE

west, fresh game and timber for cooking fires. But the Platte also provided ideal conditions for disease: warm temperatures, alkali soil, and mudholes that acted as stewpots for organic waste. Historians now estimate that the toll from cholera was between twenty-thousand and thirty-thousand deaths between 1849 and the Civil War” (Buck, 2015) Two of the three major migrations of the 19 th century discussed herein, the transatlantic (sea) and the transcontinental (wagon), were plagued by high death rates due to disease. 1841. The Province of Canada (BNA). Following Lord Durham’s report, after the rebellions of 1837 and 1838, Upper and Lower Canada were reunited as the Province of Canada. 1841. Great Lake Propeller Steamers (US). The first Great Lake propeller steamer, Vandalia, was launched at the Sylvester Doolittle shipyard in Oswego, New York. Side paddle-wheelers were too wide to be accommodated by the existing canals (Jepson, 2023) 1842. American Notes by Charles Dickens, Travel on the Ohio (US). Dickens wrote of his 1842 Travels in America. He journeyed by canal, stage, and rail to Pittsburgh, where he boarded the Steamboat Messenger for a voyage down the Ohio River, accompanied by migrants, to Cincinnati, which he found charming, and quite active with a busy Temperance Rally underway when he arrived on 4 April. He enjoyed his encounter with an enthusiastic group of Irishmen carrying a poster of Fr. Mathew. On the river between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati he found few signs of civilization, except for a few small villages and clearings for isolated cabins. He boarded the Pike for Louisville, Kentucky on 6 April, and then voyaged on to St Louis, Missouri on the steamer Fulton . Father Theobald Mathew was a revered Franciscan Capuchin friar, who ministered to the destitute of Cork during the cholera epidemic of 1832 (and during the Famine). He leased land from the Cork Botanical Garden in Ballyphehane to provide burial grounds for the poor. This later became St Joseph’s Cemetery; a cemetery where five generations of the author’s family are buried. Across the river from Cincinnati is Kentucky, where Kentucky Bourbon was dubiously reputed to have first been distilled by Elijah Craig, a Baptist minister, in 1789. Elijah was a merchant of many talents, who was also jailed on a couple of occasions by Anglican authorities for preaching without a license - another little sample of inter-faith intolerance in the US. While it is intriguing that a Baptist minister was responsible for the creation of bourbon, following an act of due diligence, the author confesses that it’s unclear who really invented bourbon, as others give credit to a Welshman, Evan Williams, again a multitalented businessman, who settled in Louisville, Kentucky, and opened his distillery in 1783. 1842. Financial Assistance to Province of Canada (BNA). In 1842 the Province of Canada, as it was called, received a substantial Imperial loan (1.5 million) for roads to unite the province, and for waterway projects to enlarge the Welland Canal and improve navigation on the St. Lawrence River. All projects were under the direction of a Board of Works which provided a degree of centralization unknown in such matters in the United States (Larson, 1983). 1843. Competition for the American Grain Trade (US, BNA). Canadian Welland Canal project activity caused a stir in the United States. A Senate Committee on Commerce became aware of its implications for American trade by the report of a special legislative committee of the assembly of Canada. The report, dated February 1843, stated that while "colonies of the British Empire are maintained at . . . great expense for the sake of their trade, the securing and controlling (of the trade) of the (American) western states . . . making them in effect colonies . . . is an object of no little moment particularly when it can be obtained without expense or even negotiation." The Canadian policy, if successful, would have captured the American grain trade and taken business away from Buffalo, Oswego and New York City while greatly benefiting Montreal, Canada's major port (Larson, 1983).

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