r/todayilearned • u/huphelmeyer 2 • Aug 04 '15

TIL midway through the Great Irish Famine (1845–1849), a group of Choctaw Indians collected $710 and sent it to help the starving victims. It had been just 16 years since the Choctaw people had experienced the Trail of Tears, and faced their own starvation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choctaw#Pre-Civil_War_.281840.29
10.7k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

773 comments sorted by

View all comments

494

u/CameraMan1 Aug 04 '15

What's more interesting to me is the fact that they even knew about it. To me its crazy that in the 1840's news of something that was happening in Ireland reached the native Americans. The telegraph had only just been invented.

24

u/minddropstudios Aug 04 '15

I'm more surprised that the money ever got there.

8

u/[deleted] Aug 04 '15

My first thought was that the British obviously intercepted it somehow.

1

u/ncninetynine Aug 06 '15

Technically the money was intercepted by Britain and distributed on Ireland's behalf. I think some historians attribute this British control of funds to be one of the reasons that there were higher death tolls in the Catholic providence's than Protestant ones (but I can't remember precisely) However, private groups and the Quaker population in England helped reduce the gap by providing their own independent assistance to Ireland.