A couple of years back I was standing outside my home in Dunlo Hill talking to my old friend the late Dermot Tierney. A car pulled up, its lady driver hopped out and approached me. One of the Hanniffys from Creagh, I thought initially. "No", I said to myself, "she's Mary Moore's sister". (Mary's my neighbour on the other side of the Trench Monument).

"How're you keeping"? I said.

"I've got a book for you", she said, handing me a fine colourful hardback. "Sr. Ita gave me this for you." Sr. Ita, I thought to myself. Sr. Ita Moore had grown up with us in Brackernagh, joined the Medical Missionaries and has since laboured all over the world from Chicago to Kenya.

"Go raibh maith agat", I said, taking the book. "King of the Rockies", I said to Dermot. "What's it about?" I wondered out loud. "Maybe Rock and Rollers", laughed Dermot. "King of the Rockies". The Life of John Kernan Mullen, Colorado's Premier Irish Patron by William J. Convery III. Never heard of him, I said to myself. The book is the biography of Ballinasloe-born John Kernan Mullen.

An extraordinary life about an extraordinary individual.

Mullen's life opens in Ballinasloe in the 1840s. The Great Famine "An Gorta Mór" is raging. Although relatively prosperous (Clancarty power at its peak) - two breweries, three mills, the Grand Canal recently opened 1828 linking us to Dublin - Ballinasloe obviously suffers from poverty and emigration.

From this humble impoverished beginning Mullen goes on to become a multi-millionaire philanthropic mill owner. His grain empire centred around Colorado, stretched from Texas to Oregon from Missouri to California.

In Ballinasloe the Mullen Brothers Dennis and Thomas are coopers making barrels for the local breweries. Dennis is married to Ellen Mulray (1816-1888). Their first child Bridget is born in 1841 other children follow, Maria (1842), Patrick (1844), our hero John (1847), Dennis (1850), Kate (1853), Ella (1855).

Emigration was rampant; over a million Irish fled from their tragic starving homeland in ten years.

In 1856 the Mullen family joined the exodus fleeing to Boston. From Boston the Mullen family moved out into Oneida County in New York State. (Incidentally my wife Sheila and myself, son Ciarán and his Kerry-born wife Margaret spent a night camping beside Lake Oneida.)

The mill town of Oriskany Falls became the Mullen family's new home.

John wasn't too fond of school and soon got a job in the local Millers Flour Mills. His education from then on would be informal practical and self-regulated. Work was hard and physical - for the rest of his life Mullen carried his seared, calloused hands as a badge of distinction for a self-made man.

Catholics, and in particular Irish Catholics, suffered religious discrimination; "Paddy Bashing" was a favourite sport. The leading Irish Catholic in Oneida was an Attorney Democrat politician called John Francis Kernon. He was Mullen's hero figure and he now called himself John Kernon Mullen.

The young hard working Mullen moved westwards eventually settling in Denver, Colorado. Here he married a young Irish school teacher, Catherine Smith from Cavan.

Mullen prospered becoming part of the prosperous middle class and distancing himself from the working class Fenian, Land League, Irish class.

When J. K. Mullen arrived in Denver in 1871, he had little in the way of education or wealth to distinguish him from other working-class Irish immigrants. When he died 58 years later, in 1929, he was eulogised as a multi-millionaire, president of a five-state milling conglomerate, a real-estate giant, bank director, philanthropist and social reformer. During the First World War Mullen's Mills are credited with feeding the Americans.

Born 11 June 1847 in Ballinasloe, died 9 August 1929 in Denver, "the friend of the friendless".

As John Boyle O'Reilly, Irish-American Fenian writer, wrote of Mullen: "He was Irish and American both but he was more than both - for all humanity was his kin."