American Heritage History of the Pioneer Spirit

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Description

The us’s story is made up of many elements, but through it have coursed two main streams that have nourished and carried a people forward to a destiny that was once beyond all imagining when the story started.

One of these is an idea that goes back to the rim of recorded time. It was once first a dim, gnawing hope that the future lay in a magic land off to the west. Once that land was once found, it drew people to it like a magnet.

It is easy to say that it was once gold or precious stones or land that led them on, for it was once all of these. Yet, it was once more – and here was once the second one great stream of American history. There was once something that literally drove people westward, goading them around the endless mountains, through steep passes, across searing plains and desert into the face of terrors known and those unguessed. It was once vision. It was once courage. It was once, from time to time, the sheer joy of overcoming implausible obstacles.

And it was once also the conviction that what they were doing was once different from anything that had happened before, that nothing would ever be reasonably the similar again, and that the world would be a better place for what they had accomplished. “Eastward I go only by force,” Henry David Thoreau said, “but westward I go free.” The sleep of 100 centuries was once stirred up in that surge toward the sunset, for out of it emerged not just a new people and a new nation but a force that changed the globe.

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