John James Murphy

John James Murphy was born in 1822 at Haysland, Kilrane, Co. Wexford. On 13 April 1844 he left Kilrane by cart for Wexford and a boat to Liverpool, and on 21 April he sailed on the brig William Peile with 115 Irish emigrants. Becalmed for about three weeks, the ship reached the River Plate on 25 June 1844, and Murphy landed with £1. The departure of Murphy and his companions is remembered in The Kilrane Boys, a song by the teacher Walter McCormack.

His first years were the hard ones. He dug boundary ditches near Chascomús, the first Irish sheep district, for an Argentine family that never paid him; fences did not yet exist. Smallpox disfigured him while he lay alone in a shanty, kept alive by an elderly criolla neighbour who brought water. He then spent eleven years sharecropping and renting in Chacabuco. By 1855 he was an estanciero in Rojas and Salto. He bought La Flor del Uncalito in Salto, about 1,748 hectares, in 1854, La Caldera in Rojas, 4,050 hectares, in 1864, and on 15 March 1883 eight leagues in southern Santa Fe from Eduardo Casey. He was reportedly the first in northern Buenos Aires to wire-fence his land, and in the drought of 1859 he kept his sheep alive by carrying water in buckets. As sheep gave way to cattle and grain he leased land to Italian colonists for maize and wheat. His wife, Ellen Roche, made the family's clothes; her sisters married other Wexford pioneers.

Murphy's rise from ditch-digger to the owner of two estancias is the story the migration is remembered by, and it was rare. Edmundo Murray estimates that only about one emigrant in ten could buy land, and Patrick McKenna's reconstruction of camp life records shepherds broken by solitude and drink, settlers killed by raiders and flocks lost to flood and drought. The land lay on a moving frontier where, McKenna says, creole owners financed immigrant shepherds partly as a buffer against Indigenous groups. Murphy's own letter of 20 October 1867 complains of the disorder of Westmeath men. He died in Buenos Aires on 13 July 1909, leaving his heirs about 40,000 hectares in Buenos Aires and Santa Fe, and is buried at Recoleta. In 1911 the railway opened Estación Murphy on his former land, and the town of Murphy in Santa Fe carries his name.