Early Life
Tom Allen was born in Kilrush, Ireland in 1838 to well-to-do parents. When he was eleven years old, he became a seaman and spent six years exploring the world. He finally settled in the United States and labored as a seaman on the Great Lakes for one year. During that time, he survived a shipwreck on Lake Erie and also became a proficient Mississippi River pilot. In 1857, he was an employee of the American Fur Company and traveled to the Rocky Mountains. He hunted and trapped animals from Yellowstone to the Taos Valley. During the summer of 1858, he spent some time at a ranch in New Mexico owned by Lucien Maxwell and Kit Carson. Both ranchers offered Allen a job as a partner, but Allen refused.
Read more about this topic: Thomas A. Cullinan
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)