Irish orphan trains to South Dakota
My immigrant ancestors from Germany and the Netherlands settled in South Dakota in the 1880s and 1890s. I didn't realize "the Irish make up 10% of the population (there) and rank as the 3rd major ancestry group after the Germans - 37%, and Norwegians - 12%." That quote comes from a 2011 article by Robert E. Lyons about Irish orphans sent to Yankton, SD, to help create an independent Irish Republic:
The first Irish immigrants were drawn to Yankton in 1869 by John Pope Hodnett of Chicago, a native Irishman from Cork who had been appointed assessor of internal revenue for Dakota Territory by President Ulysses S. Grant. Mr. Hodnett worked heartily to build up and develop Dakota Territory and to encourage the tide of immigration which was flowing out from the Eastern states.
He had a dream to establish an Irish colony in Yankton, the territorial capital. Hodnett, a thirty year old young man from Youghal, County Cork, had been a leader of a political element known as Irish Republicans, the Fenian Brotherhood. Along with many Irishmen after their service in the Civil War, he joined the Fenians and was dedicated to the establishment of an independent Irish Republic finally emancipated from England.
George Kingsbury, in his History of Dakota Territory -- South Dakota: Its History and Its People, credits this new Irish republican organization with becoming a weighty voice in the arena of politics in America, and the voice was being uttered in distinct tones and in unambiguous language by hundreds of eloquent Irish republicans: "On the free soil of the West that had never been tainted by the footprints of a slave, Irish republicanism had its birth."
Lyons goes on about the Irish settlements at Yankton. Here's a link to the full article:
