Butte, America (On the Irish Side)

In addition to reckoning a U.S. population of 308,747,716 persons, estimating a mean travel time for work of 25.4 minutes (for those older than 16 years) and discovering that an average household has 0.58 of a person living there alongside 2 other whole persons, the Census of 2010 revealed that Butte, Montana is the most “Irish-American” city in America.  Something just below 24% of the residents of Butte identified themselves as having Irish ancestry.

No small accident caused Butte, Montana to have a higher percentage of Irish-American citizens than any other city.  In fact, a census taken as the 1900’s dawned also saw Butte with the highest number of citizens identifying themselves as having Irish lineage.

The Irish flooded to Butte near the end of the 1800s to work the rich copper mines at the dawn of the age of electricity.  Many of the immigrants were still trying to recover from the famine that had gripped Ireland only a decade before the mining boom in the American West.   Remote and hungry for men to work underground, Butte made room for the Irish immigrants.  By the turn of 1900s, Butte, with a population of something around 50,000, boasted 1,200 Sullivans in the mix.  If you start counting Sullivan families in Butte today (present population about 40,000) you will garner something near 100 Sullivan families.

The influx of Irish immigrants to the remote Rocky Mountain outpost of Butte shaped its growth as a city.  New arrivals from the Irish homeland found familiar faces on the streets when they arrived in the mining city.   George Everett notes, in Butte, Montana: Ireland’s Fifth Province, that identifying yourself as being Irish in Butte soon had enough appeal that a an Arab rug merchant named Mohammed Akara legally changed his name to Murphy for “business reasons.”

I once heard that Butte, Montana also boasted the most taverns per capita of any city in America.  I have not confirmed that information.  But here is the math:   Heaviest Irish Population + Most Taverns = ? 

Even in the present, more than 30,000 people gather annually to celebrate St Patrick’s Day (March 17) in uptown Butte.  On that day, everyone in the crowd, including the Native Americans and the Samoan football players from Carroll College, will claim some form of Irish heritage.  And, yes, more than a few glasses of Irish whiskey are raised.

--Mitchell Hegman