This story is unusual but true--as told by eyewitnesses or by those whose lives overlapped those eyewitnesses. The story is about the lives of four generations of ancestors beginning in old Europe and then coming to America in the 1800s with a wave of other immigrants. They moved westward, lured by the promises of homesteads. They became the last of the pioneers as they reached the wilderness frontiers of Canada in the far West. They had been held back by the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression but then escaped to something better in California. These family lines were linked by a trusted belief system that informed them and gave them hope. There was an unpredictable series of good things and bad things that happened to them on a daily basis. Their Christian worldview and trust in God saw them through these many struggles. Keith E. Andersen was born in Alberta, Canada, in 1932. He graduated from high school in Kelseyville, California, in 1949. He then served four years in the United States Air Force from 1950 to 1954. He graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelor of Arts Degree and a Masters Degree, together with teaching and school administration credentials. He taught in the public schools for five years before serving as school principle for thirteen years. He served as Assistant Superintendent until retiring in 1990. He served for more than thirty years in public education. The author has served in his local church for over fifty years as adult Bible teacher, elder, deacon, and other roles. He is active in the distribution of bibles through Gideons International. The author and his wife of 58 years live in Napa, California and have four adult children and six grandchildren.

#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.

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When the young Swedish-descended Alexandra Bergson inherits her father's farm in Nebraska, she must transform the land from a wind-swept prairie landscape into a thriving enterprise. She dedicates herself completely to the land—at the cost of great sacrifices. O Pioneers! [1913] is Willa Cather's great masterpiece about American pioneers, where the land is as important a character as the people who cultivate it. WILLA CATHER [1873-1947] was an American author. After studying at the University of Nebraska, she worked as a teacher and journalist. Cather's novels often focus on settlers in the USA with a particular emphasis on female pioneers. In 1923, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the novel One of Ours, and in 1943, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.