O’halloran’s luck Click the underlined detail that supports the idea that people were naive about life in America.
They were strong men built the Big Road, in the early days of America, and it was the Irish did it.
My grandfather, Tim O'Halloran, was a young man then, and wild. He could swing a pick all day and
dance all night, if there was a fiddler handy.... Likewise, if there was a man to be stretched, he could
stretch him with the one blow.
I saw him later on in years when he was thin and white-headed, but in his youth he was not so. A
thin, white-headed man would have had little chance, and they driving the Road to the West. It was
two-fisted men cleared the plains and bored through the mountains. They came in the thousands to
do it from every county in Ireland; and now the names are not known. But it's over their graves you
pass, when you ride in the Pullmans. And Tim O'Halloran was one of them, six feet high and solid as
the Rock of Cashel when he stripped to the skin.
He needed to be all of that, for it was not easy labor. 'Twas a time of great booms and expansions in
the railroad line, and they drove the tracks north and south, east and west, as if the devil was driving
behind. For this they must have the boys with shovel and pick, and every immigrant ship from
Ireland was crowded with bold young men. They left famine and England's rule behind them-and it
was the thought of many they'd pick up gold for the asking in the free States of America, though it's
little gold that most of them ever saw. They found themselves up to their necks in the water of the
canals, and burnt black by the suns of the prairie-and that was a great surprise to them. They saw
their sisters and their mothers made servants that had not been servants in Ireland, and that was a
strange change too. Eh, the death and the broken hopes it takes to make a country! But those with
the heart and the tongue kept the tongue and the heart.