Bluffs up to 120 feet tall once hugged the Missouri River by Kansas City — making it difficult to traverse the landscape and expand the growing town. So in the mid-1800s, a Catholic priest named Father Bernard Donnelly recruited hundreds of Irish immigrants for a dangerous but critical task: sculpting the city's streets from mountains of rock and mud. KCUR's Jacob Smollen reports. 

This episode of A People's History of Kansas City was reported, produced, and mixed by Jacob Smollen with editing by Suzanne Hogan, Mackenzie Martin and Gabe Rosenberg.