Emerald Fire: The Goldfield Packs, Book Two

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Free eBook offer available to NEW subscribers only. Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices. Tell us what you like, so we can send you books you'll love. Sign up and get a free eBook! Price may vary by retailer. Add to Cart Add to Cart. It was the most notorious slum in the world.

The poorest and most wretched population that can be found in the world—the scattered debris of the Irish nation. He was born into dire poverty near Dublin, Ireland, on November 28, Mackay, his younger sister, and his mother and father shared a crude cottage with the family pig. That was in no way unique, for grinding need wore at the foundations of nineteenth-century Ireland.

Walls of loose-stacked stone slathered in mud enclosed the one-room shelters that housed fully half the Irish population. A roof of tree branches, sod, and leaky thatch protected them from the worst of the Atlantic rains; an open peat fire warmed them through the dark winter months. Beds and blankets were rare luxuries. Most Irish families slept on bare dirt floors alongside their domestic animals. Pigs and manure constitute their only property. Interested only in extracting rents and raising grain and cattle for cash sale in England, those absentee owners typically spent the bounty of the Irish countryside supporting lavish lifestyles in England while the laborers and tenants who worked their estates endured desperate poverty.

Irish tenants exchanged their labor for the lease on the small plots of dirt they needed to feed themselves. On such meager acreages, only the potato yielded sufficiently to feed a family.

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Poor Irish men and women ate them at almost every meal. Chronically indigent, often underfed, unable to purchase land, deprived of political power, and ferociously discriminated against for the sin of being Catholic, more than a million people left Ireland in the first four decades of the nineteenth century. The Mackays held firm until , but when young John reached the age of nine, the family immigrated to America.

In , some 35, Irish men and women lived in the United States. When the Mackay family arrived forty years later, that number had bloated to ,, the overwhelming majority of them poor and barely educated.

Unskilled laborers nailed to the cross of extreme poverty, most Irish male immigrants did casual day labor, taking whatever employment they could find. Ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week, they performed the brutal, backbreaking toil nobody else would do, for paltry wages, digging sewers and canals, excavating foundations, loading ships and wagons, carrying hods of bricks and mortar for skilled masons, paving streets, and building railroad beds. Irish women worked as washerwomen and domestic servants, or sewed piecework in the needle trades.

In New York City, Irish peddlers lugged merchandise to every neighborhood, hawking sweet corn, oranges, root beer, bread, charcoal, clams, oysters, buttons, thread, fiddle strings, cigars, suspenders, and a host of other inexpensive items. Rag-clad Irish children scavenged wood, coal, scrap metal, and glass, swept street crossings for tips, shined shoes, dealt apples and individual matches, and sold newspapers.

Many Protestants judged Catholicism—with its devotion to an imagined papal dictatorship—to be philosophically incompatible with the ideals of American democracy. Established, respectable Americans discriminated ferociously against the filthy Irish suddenly infesting the slums of eastern cities and manning the work camps of railroad- and canal-building concerns. In , the year the Mackay family crossed the Atlantic, nearly half of the eighty-four thousand immigrants received in the United States came from tiny Ireland, and like thousands of their countrymen, the Mackays settled in New York City.

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The opening of the Erie Canal in had transformed the city into the most important port in the Western Hemisphere. Dense forests of masts and spars sprouted from ships docked against the piers, wharfs, quays, and slips cramming the southern shores of Manhattan Island. Banking, insurance, and manufacturing industries developed alongside the trade. At that time, Five Points was the most notorious slum in the United States.

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Originally, Five Points had been an attractive marshy pond, the Collect. As the city expanded, tanneries and slaughterhouses set up on its banks and dumped their effluents into the pond. The Collect grew so disgusting that it depressed local real estate values. Without bedrock beneath it, the landfill proved too unstable to support major construction.

Speculators bought the land and erected cheap one- to two-and-a-half-story wooden houses among the businesses of the neighborhood.

The Bonanza King

Property owners originally designed the houses for artisans, their families, and their workshops, but as budding manufacturing industries undercut the prosperity of individual craftsmen, landlords discovered that they made much larger profits by partitioning the buildings into tiny rooms rented to immigrants. Inside, entire families crammed into single rooms entered from dim, lightless corridors.

Unceasing din harried the inhabitants. Street noise reverberated in the front rooms. Rooms in the rear filled with the sounds of neighbors facing the backyards and alleys—spouses argued, babies screamed, siblings fought. Occupants shared filthy, overflowing outhouses with dozens of neighbors and drew water from common hydrants outside.

The horses, mules, and oxen used everywhere for drayage defecated in the streets. The municipal government sponsored no garbage collection. Foot, animal, and wheeled traffic churned the improperly drained streets and alleys into fetid quagmires choked with animal corpses, human and animal waste, kitchen slops, and ashes. The stench was overwhelming. Mice, rats, roaches, fleas, lice, maggots, and flies thrived in the squalor. Thousands of feral pigs roamed the streets. Among their own kind, the pigs rutted with loud, gleeful abandon.

Refined Knickerbocker ladies sent up howls of protest, complaining that exposure to such indiscriminate sexual behavior undermined their respectability and lowered the moral tone of the whole city. For Irish women, most of whom had been raised in a rural countryside, fornicating domestic animals barely seemed worth a raised eyebrow.

The Bonanza King | Book by Gregory Crouch | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster

Besides, the pigs supplied valuable meat. The outrageous quantities of animal and human feculence contaminated local wells. Dysentery, typhoid fever, diarrhea, and other waterborne diseases wreaked far more havoc in the immigrant wards than they did in the rest of the city, as did tuberculosis, diphtheria, smallpox, measles, mental disorders, and alcoholism. Crime and prostitution were ubiquitous, murder commonplace. Visiting journalists could seldom resist characterizing the Irish neighborhoods as nests of vipers and sinks of filth and iniquity, unable or unwilling to do justice to the poor, working-class families who lived there.

I am married and a homemaker. My hobbies are reading, writing, computers, plants, and photos. Read, enjoy, and constructive criticism is always welcome, and please leave honest feedback. Thanks to all my readers and supporters. I appreciate all of you. Your encouragement keeps me striving to improve. Are you an author? Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography. Learn more at Author Central. Everyone, I've been out of state since the middle of November.

Desert Fire: The Goldfield Packs

My mother-in-law had a stroke, and I've been out there trying to help my husband tie up her business. I haven't been able to access the internet, so I haven't been able to log on to my blog. Needless to say, the timeline for the second book in the Goldfield Packs series is taking longer than I intended. We'll set the end of December, or the first of January as the new target date. I've got one mor.

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The complete set of Little River books is now available on Amazon in Kindle format, the paperback will be available in a few days. Also, book two of The Goldfield Packs is coming along very well. The expected publication date is still the end of November. The Goldfield Packs, Book One. The second book, Emerald Fire, is coming along very quickly, and should be out by the end of the month.

Thank you all for reading, and I hope you enjoy. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Nov 09, Jessica rated it really liked it Shelves: A lot of magic and shifter-ness. It was a good read. You really felt for the characters but they weren't really developed. I did enjoy the story, just wish there was more to it. Mandy rated it really liked it Mar 17, Melissa rated it liked it Nov 11, Christine marked it as to-read Jan 10, Alisa marked it as to-read Jan 20, Elizabeth added it Jan 24, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.