For five years, beginning in 1845, a plant disease ravaged Ireland and destroyed the country's basic food crop, the potato, and there was subsequent widespread disease, malnutrition and starvation. By 1850, over a million Irish men, women and children were dead, and those who could afford to leave headed primarily for America. During and immediately following the famine over one and a half million Irish citizens came to the United States. One of them was a young man named William MURPHY, who immigrated with his younger brother James and searched for work. Even when he found a steady job constructing railroad bridges, he was moved from Virginia to California and many states in between. In December 1880, Murphy wrote the following letter to his sister and her husband in Belfast to share his thoughts on the American experience: "Dear Sister and Brother, I have to knock around so much at the work I follow that I am hardly ever more than a week or two in one place. And I make up my mind to write home every place I go. But when I get there, I think this way: "Well, I'm not going to be long here; perhaps the next place I go I can wait and get an answer." And so it goes. No doubt you think, why don't I settle down like other people? I have asked myself that question a thousand times. I have gone further - I have tried to do so. But when I try, I soon get tired and the restless spirit gets the best of me all the time. The fact is, traveling is so natural to me that I might as well try to live without eating as without wandering around. But what difference does it make? Life is but a dream, and although I know that my last days will be spent in all probability amongst strangers, I almost wish sometimes the dream was over. Don't think for a moment that I am despondent or downhearted. But just think for a second of the past that has gone, never to be recalled. It seems but yesterday since we were a happy and united family - mother, father, brothers, and sisters. Where are they now? 'They grew together side by side, They filled one hall with glee. Their graves are scattered far and wide, By mountain, steam and sea.' James, the latest of our loved and lost, laid him down to rest in the far away California. He like thousands more tried to find a fortune and instead he found a grave. But where could he find a more fitting resting place than in Lone Mountain? The last rays of the setting sun kiss his grave as it sinks behind the waters of the Great Pacific, and his spirit has crossed the Great Divide and joined the others in that better land beyond. Dear sister and brother; may God bless and preserve you is the earnest prayer of your affectionate brother." William -- Excerpt, "Letters of a Nation," ed. A. Carroll