"As part of the Treaty of Paris, in which Great Britain recognized the new United States of America, Britain ceded the land that comprised the immense Northwest Territory, a wilderness empire northwest of the Ohio River containing the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. A Massachusetts minister named Manasseh Cutler was instrumental in opening this vast territory to veterans of the Revolutionary War and their families for settlement. Included in the Northwest Ordinance were three remarkable conditions: freedom of religion, free universal education, and most importantly, the prohibition of slavery. In 1788 the first band of pioneers set out from New England for the Northwest Territory under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran General Rufus Putnam. They settled in what is now Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River. McCullough tells the story through five major characters: Cutler and Putnam; Cutler's son Ephraim; and two other men, one a carpenter turned architect, and the other a physician who became a prominent figure in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as trees of a size never imagined, floods, fires, wolves, bears, even an earthquake, all the while negotiating a contentious and sometimes hostile relationship with the native people. Like so many of McCullough's subjects, they let no obstacle deter or defeat them. Drawn in great part from a rare and all-but-unknown collection of diaries and letters by the key figures, The Pioneers is a uniquely American story of people whose ambition and courage led them to remarkable accomplishments."--Dust jacket.

Perhaps you've heard the stories of the Adventist pioneers. However these are the stories that are not often told. The stories that bring out the human nature of each one. Heartwarming stories will give you a different perspective. You'll get to know the pioneers. None of them were perfect--but all of them did their best, by God's grace, to spread the message of Jesus' soon return and the good news of the seventh-day Sabbath. You'll laugh, cry, and celebrate the God who uses imperfect people to do His work. - A Word to the Reader; CHAPTER; 1 William Miller: "Today, Today, and Today, Till He Comes"; 2 Hiram Edson: Bible Student, Preacher, Healer; 3 Joseph Bates: Herald of the Saggath; 4 James White: "You Will See Your Lord A-Coming"; 5 Ellen Gould Harmon: Messenger of the Lord; 6 William Foy and Hazen Foss: One Who Willingly Obeyed, and One Who Refused to Obey; 7 Heman S. Gurney: The Singing Blacksmith; 8 James and Ellen White: They Worked Together; 9 Uriah Smith: "Yours in the Blessed Hope"; 10 John Nevins Andrews: "The Ablest Man in Our Ranks"; 11 Annie Smith: Poet, Artist, Editor; Bibliography

American Pioneers & Patriots will allow your 3rd and 4th grade students to explore America's past through the fictional accounts of typical pioneer families. Young patriots of today will gain an appreciation of the courage it took to build this great nation of ours!

Here are the moving stories of these young pioneers, told in their own words through letters home, diaries, and memoirs.

When the Bergson family leave their home in Sweden to travel to the United States in search of a better life, they, like many immigrants, are awed by the beautiful harshness of their new life in Nebraska. When their father, John Bergson, grows sick and dies, he leaves the farm in the hands of his eldest daughter Alexandra Bergson. Resourceful and determined, Alexandra devotes her life to her family's farm, determined to prosper even as her neighbors are overwhelmed by the unremitting demands of pioneer life. But when she falls in love with her childhood friend, Carl Linstrum, Alexandra must choose between her duty to the land, and to her heart. A spirited celebration of the immigrants who have shaped the United States, O Pioneers! is a masterpiece by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.

Following the lives of Molly and David, the 'young pioneers' who embark upon a journey to the West, this novel is a story of spiritual strength and family unity in the face of difficulty and hardship. Molly and David played together as children and said they would get married as soon as they were old enough. And sure enough, when she was sixteen and he two years older, they married, and together they set out for the West, where the country had not yet been settled and they might find good land to farm. David's father gave them a team of horses, a wagon and his blessing; Molly's parents gave blankets and pillows, a ham and a cheese and some maple sugar, a pot and a pan and a skillet, and a copy of Tennyson's Poems. With David's gun and fiddle, and Molly's needles and thread, they had all they needed. Snug in the dugout under the prairie, their baby boy was born on Molly's seventeenth birthday. Soon the wheat was ripe and high and full of promise for the baby's future, a future that would be warm and safe and bright. The grasshoppers wiped out that promise. Within two days there was no wheat left - no crop, no money, no horses, and no way of providing against the bitter winter. Simply and vividly told, this story grew out of real experience. This is a novel which has moved and fascinated readers for more than fifty years, and has been translated into twenty languages.

For more than a century, American communities erected monuments to western pioneers. Although many of these statues receive little attention today, the images they depict—sturdy white men, saintly mothers, and wholesome pioneer families—enshrine prevailing notions of American exceptionalism, race relations, and gender identity. Pioneer Mother Monuments is the first book to delve into the long and complex history of remembering, forgetting, and rediscovering pioneer monuments. In this book, historian Cynthia Culver Prescott combines visual analysis with a close reading of primary-source documents. Examining some two hundred monuments erected in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the present, Prescott begins her survey by focusing on the earliest pioneer statues, which celebrated the strong white men who settled—and conquered—the West. By the 1930s, she explains, when gender roles began shifting, new monuments came forth to honor the Pioneer Mother. The angelic woman in a sunbonnet, armed with a rifle or a Bible as she carried civilization forward—an iconic figure—resonated particularly with Mormon audiences. While interest in these traditional monuments began to wane in the postwar period, according to Prescott, a new wave of pioneer monuments emerged in smaller communities during the late twentieth century. Inspired by rural nostalgia, these statues helped promote heritage tourism. In recent years, Americans have engaged in heated debates about Confederate Civil War monuments and their implicit racism. Should these statues be removed or reinterpreted? Far less attention, however, has been paid to pioneer monuments, which, Prescott argues, also enshrine white cultural superiority—as well as gender stereotypes. Only a few western communities have reexamined these values and erected statues with more inclusive imagery. Blending western history, visual culture, and memory studies, Prescott’s pathbreaking analysis is enhanced by a rich selection of color and black-and-white photographs depicting the statues along with detailed maps that chronologically chart the emergence of pioneer monuments.