James Walsh: Stories are the only thing that makes us immortal.

Greg Labbe: The story that Leadville's telling is the story of the United States, the story of America.

Nicki Gonzalez: The Irish and Leadville represent so many, it's like a window into many different stories that have been untold in Colorado history.

James Walsh: Stories that have been buried can be unearthed.

Stories can begin to live again, to begin to breathe again.

The story is the closest distance between two people.

Charolotte Viscell: The Irish Memorial is a beautifully designed memorial, so that is to honor the people who have lived and struggled and died here Kathleen Fitzsimmons: In Leadville, our demographic has always been a community of immigrants.

Gloria Perez: I definitely define Leadville an immigrant community because there is, you know, such a big population of Latinos, Paul Burson: Cuz that's what the memorial is really about, is honoring those who have been before us, remembering of them, remembering of the people who have come after them and moved on.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: It isn't just about miners, it's about the struggle of immigration and really that human experience connecting the hope for something better and the risk of leaving something behind, and that transcends race and time.

♪ Narrator: This program was made possible by the history Colorado State Historical Fund, supporting projects throughout the state to preserve, protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural and archeological treasures.

History Colorado State Historical Fund, create the future, honor the past with additional funding provided in memory of Deanna E La Camera.

By Hassel and Maryanne Ledbetter and by members like you.

Thank you.

With special thanks to the Denver Public Library, History Colorado and to these organizations: Nicki Gonzalez: The story of immigration in Colorado has many common themes.

So there's multiple waves of immigration that would form our state.

Places like Leadville and other places that were like mining centers in the Rocky Mountains needed really any kind of immigrant labor that they could bring in.

And the Irish were a really good source of labor because one, there were push factors in Ireland, like the famine and poverty, ongoing poverty that really pushed people out, young, especially young people out of Ireland to seek better opportunities.

And two, they were in, they were English speakers.

And so that was a huge advantage that the Irish brought with them.

James Walsh: So the Irish, they were the largest immigrant community in the city by two to one at any given time in Leadville in the early 1880s, there were upwards of 3000 people who were born in Ireland, living in Leadville.

Now that's more people than live in Leadville total today.

So that tells you just how large this community was.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: When you think of the -- Leadville's, heyday in the 1880s and 90s, what was going on in the greater United States was mirrored in Leadville as well.

The disdain for Irish immigrants, stereotypes around the drinking of the Irish and the big families, and how Catholics were brutish and uneducated and leaving Ireland because of the great hunger just becoming a burden on society.

Nicki Gonzalez: The same time in Colorado, you have the rise of different groups that went on to become the second KKK, the second Ku Klux Klan.

At one point, it's estimated that about 5% of Colorado's population were clan members.

And they were not just targeting African Americans like they did in the South during the first Klan, but they were targeting anyone who they saw as Un-American.

So that included these newer immigration groups and anyone who is not white, anyone who's Catholic and Jewish.

So all of those immigration groups were targets.

And really the, the strong influence of the Klan in industry and politics in Colorado is partly a backlash to the influx of those immigrant groups.

James Walsh: The movement was dependent upon the way that the mainstream community saw these Irish immigrants who were already being demonized and dehumanized and caricaturized.

Nicki Gonzalez: Today we see those same sort of themes repeating themselves with newer immigrant groups.

One of them are the Latino immigrants coming from various Latin American countries, and we see the same patterns repeating segregation in housing, especially in the mountain towns in Colorado where, you know, the cost of living within these very nice mountain towns is out of reach for the working class.

And so you see them relegated to areas of town like, like shanty towns or entirely different communities.

Gloria Perez: The relationship of immigrants is -- is looking for work and looking to provide for your family.

Access to resources and basic needs and things that help families thrive.

We have a, a big Latino community that commutes to the neighbor ski resort towns to work.

Housing in Leadville used to be very much more affordable compared to our neighbor counties.

Most of the latino community lives in the mobile home parks.

James Walsh: I think 40% of the, of the city are immigrants, but many of the tourists would come here and visit and spend time here and have no idea that there's a large immigrant community here because that community is segregated and somewhat marginalized.

Gloria Perez: And so you think there's no immigrants in Leadville, but then you have boom days and you will see the, the immigrant community.

We have had an event, we call it Fiestas Patrias, which is like the Latino country's independence celebration.

It's all like the month of September.

And you get to see that the immigrant community, you know, is there.

James Walsh: Leadville's always been a place where immigrant workers find opportunity and hope and community and that continues today.

But the struggle and the ostracism and all of that is still very real today.

That hasn't gone away.

Paul Burson: There's a sense of maybe forgetting that others are really just doing their best to survive and might think of my ancestors who wants to leave their homes.

I'm sure their loved ones in Ireland, who wants to leave their loved ones in the Dominican Republic and, and Honduras and El Salvador and Guatemala, who wants to leave, leave their communities out where they grew up in.

You don't do that unless you have to.

You feel forced to.

Greg Labbe: The story of the Irish diaspora is a Leadville story too.

They are an important part of this history.

Most of the Irish came during the famine.

James Walsh: Well, there were multiple famines in, in Irish history.

The one everyone knows about that's often called the potato famine is 1845 until 1852.

And the population of Ireland went from over 8 million to around 5 million.

The Irish, it became dependent upon the potato because you can feed a lot of people for cheap.

So the potato allowed the Irish population to grow, and then the fungus killed the crops and killed successive years, and they were completely vulnerable.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: The time period of the 1830s, 40s and 50s in Ireland, the great hunger created such a need in which you couldn't survive necessarily in Ireland.

That immigrating was one of the only choices in going to the United States held that promise of a better life.

James Walsh: The Leadville Silver Rush started.

So you have hundreds of Irish families fleeing, and they're hearing about Leadville, Greg Labbe: The Irish who, who came here.

And most of them came from what's called the Beara Peninsula, which is southern Ireland, which is at sea level.

There was a lot of mining there.

So what they brought to Colorado to Leadville was mining.

They, they, they were experts, they were miners.

They had been all their lives, sometimes they were multi-generational miners, and they brought that expertise to Leadville.

And it was, it was of great value.

Nicki Gonzalez: The decision to come to America from Ireland was dangerous from the beginning.

I mean, they called those ships coffin ships because many of them never made it.

And the people back home would never see their relatives or their friends ever again.

So if they even made it to the United States that that was progress, it took a young person with a long life ahead of them with this, these hopes and dreams of creating this, this better life in America.

So that drew a lot of youth.

In addition, the work itself, the backbreaking work of miners, really required a young body and made those young bodies old very quickly.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: Leadville in and of itself was one of the largest per capita concentrations of Irish people in the American West.

They were largely young males unmarried and not planning to move to Leadville to make a home and start a family.

But the idea was to get rich and then go and go somewhere else where home really was.

Nicki Gonzalez: Mining in general, the conditions were deplorable.

Mining was one of the most dangerous industries.

The job itself very dangerous.

You're using heavy machinery, you are going into dark places.

And the Irish were a very easily exploitable labor force.

And so that just compounded the, the danger of the job.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: The health conditions for the Irish immigrants and most immigrants to Leadville were super challenging.

There was no such thing as a paid sick day.

If you missed a day of work, you just missed a day of work and you'd be lucky if your job was there when you got back.

Nicki Gonzalez: There were no benefits for these workers.

This was, you know, before the successes of the labor movement really took place.

Whatever support was provided usually came from the community itself and not the the company because they, they didn't have to, they they could get away with not taking care of their labor force.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: The working conditions, as in most early industrial places were very atrocious.

And the tension between the worker and the owner was significant.

Nicki Gonzalez: The labor movement emerged in places that had these heavy industries, very exploitive industries.

And in Colorado that was mining.

They saw a lot of the, the labor activity and eventually some of the strongest unions that came out of the mining industry.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: There were several labor strikes that happened.

They were put down violently and they were not largely successful.

At one point, the National Guard was brought in to put down strikers.

There was clashes and violence.

At one point they locked arms across the street for the National Guard to be coming up.

And they were bayoneted and several of them were killed.

James Walsh: The Irish began the first labor unions here to push back against conditions in low pay and to demand the right to form a union.

The Irish formed labor unions through the Knights of Labor, which was the, the first national labor union in the United States.

They formed a minor's union here, and they struck in 1880 and 5,000 miners walked out of the mines led by this 28 year old Dublin born Michael Mooney, Nicki Gonzalez: Michael Mooney, what a character and his story was not told in the traditional narratives of Colorado history.

And his contributions were great.

He contributed significantly to the working class movement in Leadville.

James Walsh: Michael Mooney is one of the most important figures in Colorado history.

No one's ever heard of.

He was chosen by the miners as their leader in 1880 when they decided to strike the miners were paid $3 a day.

They were fighting against very unsafe conditions.

When the bosses responded to their organizing efforts by banning them from talking when they were working, that was the straw that broke the camel's back.

And the miners walked out paraded through Main Street from south to north, 5,000 miners in single file in silence.

I mean, try to imagine the power of that.

They said, Michael, you're our leader.

He was so respected.

His approach was, we are non-violent movement.

We will stay peaceful.

He understood the importance of the way that the mainstream community saw these Irish immigrants who were already being demonized and dehumanized and caricaturized.

There wasn't a single act of violence committed during that strike.

But the business community responded as if the city had just been occupied by an armed force.

Led by Horace Tabor, the business community used their political leverage and leaned on the governor to declare martial law.

Martial laws declared hundreds of soldiers are stationed in Leadville with orders to arrest all strikers on vagrancy laws and force them to work in chain gangs, building roads.

After a few weeks, they realized they couldn't, they couldn't win this.

And so the strike was crushed militarily.

Nicki Gonzalez: Those strikes were unsuccessful because it was during the Gilded Age when the federal government really took the side of corporations.

It was during that early progressive era when we start to see people working, class people attaining a working class collective identity, beginning to come together and to organize against their, their managers, the owners.

The fate of Irish miners was overall, it was a sad, sad story.

It's a sad narrative.

Many did not live to old age.

They died young because of the nature of the job.

And if it wasn't the dangers of the daily life of a minor, it was the toll it took over time.

It was a life that was cut short.

You know, coming in with big dreams, the American dream, believing that the streets were paved with gold here in the United States.

And then meeting that fate of backbreaking labor, very little recognition for your labor, a denial of dignity.

And, and in most cases, an early death.

James Walsh: Leadville was not a social space where people were coming here and, and finding their dream and striking it rich.

Leadville was a place where mining had become corporatized.

And the, and the, the only mining you will be doing here is for a wage and for a very low wage and to make other people rich.

And so the exploitation of immigrant workers was how that whole system worked.

And so that Pauper Cemetery is the most prominent visual representation of that, of that economic system that exists.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: They were just struggling to get by.

And I think that that's why you see so many of the pauper's graves filled with Irish people because they couldn't afford even to buy a burial plot.

Nicki Gonzalez: It has everything to do with social class.

We see the history of that class segregation in the way people are buried.

Many of them were just placed in pauper graves, like the one in the Evergreen Cemetery in Leadville.

Even in death, those rigid segregation lines are enforced.

♪ I wish I was ♪ in Carrickfergus ♪ James Walsh: These sunken graves are pauper's graves, sometimes called potter's field.

Typically they were buried in cheap pine boxes and they couldn't afford to pay the $15 fee for burial.

That would've been about a week's wages for a miner.

So they were buried in rows.

You can tell that they did their best to make them a dignified burial.

They put wooden slabs next to the graves with the names etched on them in ink.

There, there are more pauper graves in that cemetery than there are marked graves.

And that tells you all you need to know about Leadville.

To go there and see that section and wander through the forest for acres and acres.

That's, I think, what makes the space so powerful.

There's a visual and a visceral impact to be there and to see that.

And you can't help but notice the human toll of industrial labor when you've, when you see those sunken holes, and especially when you know that half of them are children, that 45% are under the age of five.

The average age of the people buried there is 22.

So when you begin to absorb that, it completely removes one from the glorified wild west history that has been pushed on us.

And we recognize that these social spaces that we call mining booms were not the wild West where people struck it rich.

They were places of intense exploitation of predominantly immigrant labor.

Nicki Gonzalez: Everyone's story matters.

So I always think about it as Colorado history is one puzzle.

And without the stories of those paupers, those people who never made it into the history books, we don't have a complete picture of what Colorado history really is and how we got to where we are today.

And so by uncovering, by exploring, by examining who is buried in the pauper section of the Evergreen Cemetery, we get a fuller picture of our state.

And we also understand the experiences of the working class in Leadville.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: Dr. Jim Walsh has devoted his life to really learning about the Irish in Leadville and labor struggles around the American West.

He has been able to learn about the folks who are buried out there in Evergreen Cemetery and look at records that people have not seen in a very long time.

Greg Labbe: He has made this a labor, a labor of love, if you will, to uncover those.

And he and his students spent, have spent years, he's been working on for almost 20 years, have spent years and years trying to find historical records.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: And Dr. Walsh's research has been able to literally and figuratively bring those names up again for their family and loved ones to find.

And to me that's what's so compelling and exciting about this work is how we can bring them back to life and honor them and connect them with their families who maybe never knew what happened to them after they went west of the Mississippi.

James Walsh: When I was earning my doctorate, I was learning my own genealogy and I was learning that almost every branch in my family were famine refugees from Ireland.

I would come up here for a week at a time and Annunciation Catholic church gave me a key to the rectory so I could sleep on the couch, I would pour through their records.

And I met Kathleen Fitzsimmons as part of that process and she said, one day I have to show you something.

Well, Kathleen brought me to the pauper section and she somehow knew that that was where I needed to be.

And she brought me back there and I stood there and, and I, I just remember standing in the midst of all of those sunken graves.

And because I was in the process of learning about my own roots and who I am, I think it was the perfect time in my life to be in that space.

This is what historians the work we come to do.

We have to love it and to love it.

We have to feel connected to it.

And I knew that this was the work I wanted to do.

I started telling people about it and I started writing about it.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: So the research has surfaced ages and names and surnames and where they came from.

And it is such a wealth of information.

♪ James Walsh: A good friend, he called me one day and he said, that cemetery in Leadville, Jim, the Irish government needs to know about this cemetery.

They need to know.

And I said, why would the Irish government care about some small town cemetery?

And the next thing I know, he fired off an email to the consulate's office demanding that they come to Leadville and see this cemetery.

It worked to the, the consulate general visited maybe just a month or two later and we made a commitment that we were going to memorialize not just the Irish, but all the people buried there and those sunken holes.

Kathleen Fitzsimmons: So part of the work that has come out of Jim's research is realizing that of these 1400 graves, 75% have Irish surnames or came from Ireland again.

And it shows how significant Leadville was as an Irish destination.

The Irish government has an entire section of funding and historical focus on the Irish diaspora, the spread of Irish all across the world.

And to be able to find something like Evergreen Cemetery where you can actually see the names of these people, that was something very significant for the Irish government.

And so they have written several grants which have provided a lot of the funding to create the Irish miners memorial.

So the Irish Miners Memorial is a gathering place in which folks can visit Evergreen Cemetery and get a sense of the sacred space that is the pauper's graves.

The focal point statue is looking just over the rock facing Ireland and then surrounding him are panels with the names of everybody who's buried there.

And for some of these, this may be the first time their name has, has seen the light of day since they were buried.

And so the, the Irish Minders Memorial, it isn't just about the Irish, it isn't just about miners, it's about the struggle of immigration and really that human experience connecting the hope for something better and the risk of leaving something behind.

And that transcends race and time.

James Walsh: The majority of the immigrant community today are from Chihuahua, but I, I see that community as representing the exactly what the 19th century Irish community represented, which was finding some strength in numbers and some stability in numbers and and scratching and clawing for a dignified existence.

And so this is a continuation of the cy -- the same cycle.

Paul Burson: I would hope that by connectedness to our ancestors, we would wake up to the fact that many still are living precarious lives and we don't forget that.

That's what I would hope.

So the Leadville story and the memorial that's being built in the cemetery speak to the traumatic history, has been forgotten or ignored or or pushed way deep down inside, not passed down.

This pauper cemetery symbolizes not just those buried there but other working class communities.

It's a little memorial but it's, it's symbolism has, has a radius that's continues to grow.

And that's exciting because we're moving the lens of history from the, the movers and shakers to the people who had to practice different forms of resistance 'cuz they didn't enjoy any political or social or economic capital.

♪