Phoebe Judson was a young bride in 1853 when she and her husband crossed the plains from Ohio to the Puget Sound area of Washington Territory. She was ninety-five when this book was first published in 1925. The years between were spent in “a pioneer’s search for an ideal home” and in living there, when it was finally found at the head of the Nooksack River, almost on the Canadian border. Phoebe Judson’s account of the journey west is based on daily diary entries detailing her fear, excitement, and exhaustion. At the end of the trail, the Judsons encountered hardships aplenty, causing them to abandon a farm and business in Olympia before their arrival in the Nooksack Valley. During the Indian Wars they holed up in a fort at Claquato. In time, Phoebe overcame her fear of the Indians, learned the Chinook language, and won their friendship. All this is told in vivid detail by a woman of great dignity and charm whom readers will long remember. Susan Armitage, professor of history at Washington State University, calls A Pioneer’s Search for an Ideal Home a “classic pioneering account,” important for its woman’s point of view.

Sixteen generations later, the same old winding roads and blazed trails throughout the three novels lead us all back home to nostalgic dishes and the worlds from which they came. Upon arrival at the old home place, we quickly find our favorite room: Mamas kitchen. The familiar sounds of pots and pans and aromas of old-time country cooking float in and out of our senses. Suddenly, visions of chocolate pies swirled high with meringues cooling on the kitchen window sill are as clear as yesterday. The sizzling sounds of Mama frying chicken on the old wood-stove remind us that her kitchen offered southern hospitality at its best. The trip down memory lane of days gone by rekindles the true meaning of Home Sweet Home. As we stop and reminisce, hot tears blur our vision and we ask ourselves where did all the years go?

Depictions of the American west in literature, art and film perpetuate romantic stereotypes of the pioneers--the gold-crazed '49er, the intrepid sodbuster. While ennobling the woodsman, the farmwife and the lawman, this tunnel vision of American history has shortchanged the whaler, the assayer, the innkeeper and the inventor. The westward advance of the trailblazers created demand for a gamut of unsung adventurers--surveyors, financiers, politicians, surgeons, entertainers, grocers and midwives--who built communities and businesses in the wilderness amid clashes with Indians, epidemics, floods, droughts and outlawry. Chronicling the worthy deeds, ethnicities, languages and lifestyles of ordinary people who survived a stirring period in American history, this book provides biographical information for hundreds of individual pioneers on the North American frontier, from the Mississippi River Valley as far west as Alaska. Appendices list pioneers by state or country of departure, destination, ethnicity, religion and occupation. A chronology of pioneer achievements places them in perspective.

In the first book to focus on relations between Indians and emigrants on the overland trails, Michael L. Tate shows that such encounters were far more often characterized by cooperation than by conflict. Having combed hundreds of unpublished sources and Indian oral traditions, Tate finds Indians and Anglo-Americans continuously trading goods and news with each other, and Indians providing various forms of assistance to overlanders. Tate admits that both sides normally followed their own best interests and ethical standards, which sometimes created distrust. But many acts of kindness by emigrants and by Indians can be attributed to simple human compassion. Not until the mid-1850s did Plains tribes begin to see their independence and cultural traditions threatened by the flood of white travelers. As buffalo herds dwindled and more Indians died from diseases brought by emigrants, violent clashes between wagon trains and Indians became more frequent, and the first Anglo-Indian wars erupted on the plains. Yet, even in the 1860s, Tate finds, friendly encounters were still the rule. Despite thousands of mutually beneficial exchanges between whites and Indians between 1840 and 1870, the image of Plains Indians as the overland pioneers’ worst enemies prevailed in American popular culture. In explaining the persistence of that stereotype, Tate seeks to dispel one of the West’s oldest cultural misunderstandings.