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  1. Hi Colleen,
    I was fascinated to learn that Charles Irish was the observer who wrote and published this pamphlet. Are the rest of the pp. of the pamphlet available via the digital library ? Irish was a railroad and mining engineer who moved out to the Comstock Lode in Nevada where he worked for the silver mining industry so geological matters were important to him. His brother, newspaperman John Irish also relocated West in the 1880s, moving from Iowa City to Oakland CA, to edit Oakland’s newspaper, after a long stint as editor of the Iowa City Citizen (early Press -Citizen). You probably already know all this — but Charles Irish was a railroad surveyor when he lived in Iowa City. He and Peter Dey (of Writers Workshop fame; i.e. Dey House) were both entrepreneurial railroad engineers, very invested in keeping Iowa City on the financial/industrial map. They brought the Burlington Northern into Iowa City; Dey surveyed the Union Pacific (transcontinental RR) route west of Iowa City to (eventually) Council Bluffs/Omaha. Peter Dey was not a poet…. thanks for this great posting, Colleen!

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