Learn how the U.S. government once gave away millions of acres of free land under the Homestead Act. In many cases, the "free" land wound up costing many pioneers much more than they had bargained for, causing some financial ruin and even death. This volume explains the hazardous challenges of daily pioneer life, such as finding the food, water, and fuel that people needed to survive. Book jacket.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David McCullough rediscovers an important and dramatic chapter in the American story—the settling of the Northwest Territory by dauntless pioneers who overcame incredible hardships to build a community based on ideals that would come to define our country. 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 pioneer in American science. They and their families created a town in a primeval wilderness, while coping with such frontier realities as floods, fires, wolves and bears, no roads or bridges, no guarantees of any sort, 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. This is a revelatory and quintessentially American story, written with David McCullough’s signature narrative energy.

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.

Who owns the West? -- Buffalo Bill and Karl May : the origins of German Western fandom -- A wall runs through it : western fans in the two Germanies -- Little houses on the prairie -- "And then the American Indians came over" : fan responses to indigenous resurgence and political change -- Indians into Confederates : historical fiction fans, reenactors, and living history.