Irish American on the Western Frontier: The Uncommon Case of Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil

Adopting the point of view of David Emmons, who analyses the experience of the Irish in western rural America through the myth of the American frontier, this essay takes into consideration a specific text, Black Soil, written by Josephine Donovan and published in 1930. Through a discussion of this novel—an account of the arrival and settlement of an Irish American pioneer woman in the Iowan prairies in the second half of the 19th century—the essay first of all gives voice to the little-known endeavour of the Irish on the American frontier. In the middle of nowhere, in close contact with American Natives and subject to the extremities of an unforgiving nature, Black Soil tells a completely different story from the “porvertiresque” narrations of the “disproportionate numbers of impoverished immigrants from Catholic Ireland” in eastern American cities.