SNIPPET: The first three decades of the 19th century saw a wave of immigration of Irish Protestants, most of them from Ulster, who arrived with skills and at least enough money to establish a business or buy a piece of land. Many were weavers, blacksmiths, stonecutters, and tailors, and they knew nothing of the hardship, deprivation, and discrimination that the next generation of Irish immigrants would face. Nor did they share the hard life of the pioneer Ulster Protestant Irish who had preceded them. In the 17th and 18th centuries, these immigrants had fanned out into the wilderness of Appalachia and the Blue Ridge Mountains, carving farms out of the rugged terrain rather than settling in the cities of colonial America. From these pioneering farming familes came familiar names from early American history, including Daniel BOONE, the son of Ulster immigrants. For the skilled Irish immigrants, most of them Protestant, who arrived at the beginning of the 19th century, America was everything it was promised to be. Their view of the New World was summed up by John DOYLE, who arrived in NY in 1818 and described his adopted land as a "a fine country and a much better place for a poor man than Ireland." Adjustments were necessary, he noted, and life surely was different; still , "an enterprising man is allowed to thrive and flourish without having a penny taken out of his pocket by government; no visit from tax gatherers, constable or soldiers."