The ~Christian Country Farm~

WHO WERE THE PIONEERS?

08:19 AM, Aug. 6, 2006 .. 0 comments .. Link

      WHAT IS A PIONEER???

   A pioneer is a trailblazer-someone who leads the way for others to follow. There are pioneers of invention, like Thomas Edison. There are pioneers of ideas, like Martin Luther King Jr., and Susan B. Anthony. But when we talk about the pioneers, we usually mean the thousands of men, women, and children who moved to the North American West between about 1840 and 1890 to build homes, farms, and eventually cities. They were families and single men and women. They were grandparents and newborns, blacks and whites, Mormons and Jews, Americans and newcomers from around the world.

   With their adventurous spirits and their sharpest axes, these pioneers built much of the United States of America we know today.

     WEREN' T THERE PEOPLE ALREADY LIVING IN THE WEST 150 YEARS       AGO???

       There sure were. Hundres of Indian tribes had been living there for thousands of years. Europeans also lived on western lands claimed by Spain, Great Britian, and France. Yet even before the United States was born, people from the east coast of North America began pushing west. They took the frontier, or the boundary between settled lands and wilderness, with them.

     The first frontier stooddddddd at the Appalachian Mountains. After Daniel Boone led settlers through a gap in the mountains in 1775, pioneers spread to Tennessee, Kentuckey, and Ohio, then farther west to the Mississippi River. When the United States bought the Louisianna Territory from France, pioneers began looking all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Many Americans came to believe it was the fate, or "Manifest Destiny", of the United States to strectch from sea to shinning sea.

     DID PIONEERS CALL THEMSELVES PIONEERS???

No. They called themselves "emigrants", meaning people who leave their own country for another. That's because many of the places the pioneers were going weren't part of the United States yet. When the first pioneers set out in the 1840's, the United States ended at the Missouri River. Beyond that was unorganized territory, home to Indians. And beyond that, both Great Britian and the United States claimed the Oregon Territory, which included present-day Oregon, Idaho, Washington, western Canada, and parts of Montana and Wyoming. California and the Southwest belonged to Mexico, and Texas was its very own country.

Well that is all for this post on Pioneers. All the facts in this post was taken from, "The Pioneers" by Kenneth C. Davis

Kelly KJV
Deuteronomy 6:5-9*Proverbs 31:28*Titus 2:5*
Psalm 19:14*Joshua 24:15*I Corinthians 15:58