Pioneer Life Quotes

My people were homesteading in Colorado before Emancipation.

The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and being out of their time, settle themselves where land is to be taken up and will produce the Necessities of Life with little Labour.

I left Montana in Spring of 1866, for Utah, arriving at Salt Lake city during the summer.

The great medley of Oregon and California emigrants, at their camps around Independence, had heard reports that several additional parties were on the point of setting out from St. Joseph's farther to the northward.

My ideal of womanhood has always been the pioneer woman who fought and worked at her husband's side. She bore the children, kept the home fires burning; she was the hub of the family, the planner and the dreamer.

I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less.

We are pioneers and the history of pioneers is not that good.

Westward ho! Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? As many as eight young men of good character who can drive an ox team will be accommodated. Come, boys, you can have as much land as you want without costing you anything.

'West To A Land Of Plenty' shows a family heading west, first on board a train, and then going into areas as yet untamed by rail by way of an ox-drawn wagon.

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

Stagecoach is really my first Western-Western, the whole horses and gunplay. It was really fun. We shot it fast, too. We got lucky with the weather. If it rained, I don't know if we would have been able to finish it. We had like 12 shooting days for the whole thing.

I don't believe you know anything about a man like me or a country like this. It takes rough men, Miss Fair, to tame a rough country; rough men, but good men. Your father is in that class. As for you, I don't think you'd measure up, and you'll do well to leave it. You're a hothouse flower, very soft, very appealing and very useless...In the world you are going to, men want pretty useless women. They want toys for their lighte moments, and we have those women out here, too, only we have another name for them. We want women who can make a home, and if need be, handle a rifle.

Everything from the little house was in the wagon, except the beds and tables and chairs. They did not need to take these, because Pa could always make new ones.

So Pa sold the little house. He sold the cow and calf. He made hickory bows and fastened them upright to the wagon box. Ma helped him stretch white canvas over them.

I died in my boots like a pioneer With the whole wide sky above me.

It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.

I used to think I'd like to have been a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, experience untamed America.

A number of emigrants, consisting of families and young men who had convened there with the view of crossing the Rocky Mountains, and were waiting very patiently until their number should be so increased as to afford protection and insure the safety of all, when they contemplated setting out together, for their favorite place of destination, Oregon territory. The number of emigrants continued to increase with such rapidity, that on the 15th day of May, our company consisted of one hundred and sixty persons, giving us a force of eighty armed men, which was thought ample for our protection. Having organized, and having ascertained that all had provided themselves with the necessary quantum of provisions and ammunition, as well as such teams and wagons as the company had previously determined to be essential, and indispensable, and all things else being in readiness, on the 16th day of May, in the year 1842, all as one man, united in interest, united in feeling, we were, en route, for the long desired El Dorado of the West.

On every side, and at every hour of the day, we came up against the relentless limitations of pioneer life.

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey.

My own great-grandfather suffered so much from asthma that he had to walk a mile or two behind the covered wagons crossing the plains to avoid the dust. However, he always arrived at his destination and did his share of the work.

You cannot settle a new country without suffering, exposure, and danger. Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.

I read a lot of fantasy. I adored 'Anne of Green Gables'. But my favourite books as a child were probably Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House' series, about a pioneer family in the mid-19th-century American west. I often thought of them as I was writing 'The Last Runaway'.

Deadwood was a place created by a series of accidents. A kind of original sin.