During the nineteenth century, like a shadow cast by the sinking sun, the frontier line of the USA moved inexorably towards the Pacific Ocean. As it did, entire nations of native Americans, or 'Indian tribes' as they were called, were swept before it like so much dust before a broom into large tracts of land preserved for their use because they were unwanted by the white man. Those who were not brushed aside were wiped out by famine, disease and warfare.

One of those nations, the Choctaw, was a settled, agricultural people. In 1830 thousands died in a forced march from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to a reservation in Oklahoma. In the 1840s, scratching out an existence in the unpromising land to which they had been consigned, the Choctaws came to hear stories of a stricken people in a far-off land, a people who were unable to feed themselves because of the failure of their staple crop and who were dying of starvation and disease. The Choctaws knew nothing about Ireland, they lived in a remote part of the USA, far from the great Eastern port cities into which the economic refugees of the Great Famine were flocking. But still, moved by what they heard, they gathered the sum of £750 together and sent it to help the starving Irish. In the 1840s it was a large sum. To the Choctaws, who would have raised few cash crops, it was colossal.

This is one of the few recorded instances of any awareness in the 1800s on the part of native Americans of the existence of Ireland. Many Irish, on the other hand, were to become very familiar with the Native American. The Irish 'diaspora' of the 1840s and 1850s ensured that Irishmen came into direct contact with native Americans. They saw them at close quarters and, more often than not, they killed them. The Irish who constituted 25 per cent of all immigration into the US during that period were generally impoverished, uneducated and unhealthy. The 'No Irish Need Apply' signs erected by employers were not to be found over army recruiting centres, so the Irish joined in their thousands and, incidentally, later deserted in their hundreds. In 1850 and 1851, for example, the US army (a relatively small force of between 15,000 and 25,000 men) accepted 5,000 new recruits. Of these 2,113 (42 per cent) were Irish. During the decade following the Civil War (1865-1875) 183,659 men enlisted in the army. Of these 38,649 admitted to having been born in Ireland. Others, perhaps, who sought advancement in the army may not have [admitted to this].

John Ford and others in the US movie industry have perpetuated the stereotype of the Irish sergeant (inevitably played by Victor McLaglen or Ward Bond). Stereotypical though it is, the notion of the ubiquitous Irish NCO is not an entirely erroneous one. In Custer's 7th Cavalry in 1876, for example, there was at least one Irish-born sergeant in every single company, a total of eighteen divided among the twelve companies (although enlistment in the army did not confer any status on these lowly immigrants).

From the Appletree Press title: Distant Drums - Irish Soldiers in Foreign Armies.
Also from Appletree: Irish Battles.