Quotes About Pioneers

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

I've always been a big Western fan.

Well, pioneers always suffer. I don't care who is the first to embark upon things. For instance, settlers that settled the West, Western Canada and the U.S... they went though hell doing it, but it had to be done.

I think that in our part of the world, Scandinavia, we are one of the pioneers of showing that gastronomy can be something - high gastronomy can be something very, very present and doesn't have to involve, you know, what is perceived as the normal luxury items that belong in a high gastronomy restaurant.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

There's something nice about being part of a trailblazing group. It's hard to look at myself that way because I look at Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoops and Rebecca Lobo and Dawn Staley in that way.

And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me?

Platte River Road Narratives

The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.

The original Pikers from Kentucky and Missouri, in the words of pioneer diarist William Audley Maxwell, were considered "of a 'backwoods' class,

The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.

It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Now I knew a little bit more about how the pioneers felt as they embarked for the West. It was my jumping-off time and I was getting jacked around by the outfitters. •

On May 14, nineteen days after leaving St. Louis, the brothers crossed the Missouri River and landed on the town site of Omaha, then a community of cotton tents and shanties, where lots were being

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone,

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers.

One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it's not a very glamorous or interesting job. You have to depress for a while before you can get down to doing it. Then, once you have depressed into a really low-key mood, it isn't so bad.

Bears were so abundant that Boone killed 155 in one season, and he killed one monster bear that weighed between five hundred and six hundred pounds.

All pioneers are considered to be afflicted with moonstruck madness.

We rarely hear the names of these early Western photographers now, though they were quite important: Carleton

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin

This country goes three thousand miles west, now. It goes 'way out beyond Kansas, and beyond the Great American Desert, over mountains bigger than these mountains, and down to the Pacific Ocean. It's the biggest country in the world, and it was farmers who took all that country and made it America, son. Don't you ever forget that.

It was farmers that took all that land and made it America...It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung onto their land.

thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).