`We Are Women Irish'

In 1904 Ellen Mulkerin joined thousands of other single young Irishwomen who had sought a better life in the United States. Leaving behind parents and customary life in County Galway, twenty one-year-old Mulkerin headed to Anaconda, Montana, the copper smelting town where her sister Nora had immigrated earlier. The thriving industrial community twenty-five miles west of Butte offered Irish immigrant women job opportunities and familiar surroundings, for it was, as one commentator complained, dominated by Irish Catholics and "getting to be thoroughly 'Mick'" ¹