Historian's book clarifies critical role Irish had in West 11:00 PM, Mar. 15, 2011 | Comments "Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910" by David M. Emmons; University of Oklahoma Press; $34.95 Montana-based historian David Emmons' new book offers a different portrait of the often idealized American West. "Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910" examines the role of the Irish in westward expansion. The Irish didn't fit into the western myth or image, Emmons says during a recent phone interview. "There aren't any cowboy movies where John Wayne plays a hard rock miner in Lead, S.D., or a meat packer in Sioux Falls or South Omaha." Emmons, professor emeritus of history at the University of Montana at Missoula, became interested in the topic while writing a book on the Irish in Butte, Mont. He had discovered that Butte was the antithesis of the stereotypical West. Butte was ethnically diverse and had a large Irish population. He found that an incongruity existed between the myth and the reality of the West. "I was always struck by the contradiction between the myth of Montana - and South Dakota, for that matter - and the reality of Montana," he says. "It was a heavy industrial state. ... And yet the image of the state was always this kind of rural paradise. The same could certainly stand true of the Sioux Falls area." In addition, Emmons became interested in the involvement of Irish Catholics in an industrial work force. They were what Emmons calls the "blunt instruments of conquest": mining, building railroads and part of the Western Army. "It wasn't supposed to be an industrial West, and it most assuredly wasn't supposed to be a Catholic West," Emmons says. "America was very self-consciously Protestant at its origins, and those original American values were to be recaptured in the West, which meant that Protestantism was to be the dominant sectarian reality. Well, it wasn't." Historians in general haven't paid much attention to the Irish-American experience in western America, he says. "Historians tend to have a difficult time dealing with a people whose cultural identities were not exclusively, but were largely, formed by religious affiliation. In this case, Irish cultural identities formed by their Catholicism." Irish Catholics in the West were a minority in most areas and lived in enclaves. "I think part of that is because the world outside of their own was rather hostile towards them. They were forced to rely upon themselves," Emmons says. A lot of this came out of what happened to the Irish Catholics in Ireland in the 1840s when they were mistreated by the British, he says. Because the Irish Catholics were outside a cultural boundary, Emmons says they were outside of the American "pale," a term for an enclosure or boundary.