In Joseph Burke's short life, he travelled thousands of miles across the western hemisphere.
Born in Ireland around 1836, he immigrated to the United States in search of a new life,
which he found in the gold mines of California. Unable to strike it rich, he enlisted in the
California Battalion in January 1863, a regiment raised in San Fransisco, but attached to the
Second Massachusetts Cavalry. Burke journed back across the continent to Massachusetts
before being sent to Virginia in the spring. In February 1864, he was captured by Confederate
forces, and Joseph Burke made his last journey - not to the green hills of his birthplace,
or to the golden valley he called home, but to a barren red field in southwestern Georgia.