Search This Blog

Tuesday 28 February 2017

Pioneer

A "pioneer" was originally a 16th century military rank, meaning people who advanced first into enemy territory to cut down forests, clear trails, make roads and bridges etc, so the actual troops could march through after. Pioneer has the same French root as pawn or peon, meaning foot soldier.

HISTORY

American pioneers established in 1788 the town of Marietta (in modern Ohio), the first permanent American settlement outside the original Thirteen Colonies. The first group of these early American pioneers to the Northwest Territory is sometimes referred to as “the forty-eight” or the “first forty-eight”, and also as the “founders of Ohio."

This group of pioneers disembarked from the ‘Adventure Galley’ at the mouth of the Muskingum on April 7, 1788. Within fifty years of their coming, Ohio had a million and a half of people,

Arrival of Rufus Putnam and the pioneers at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers on April 7, 1788

The first major wagon train heading for the Pacific Northwest set out on the Oregon Trail with a thousand pioneers from Elm Grove, Missouri on May 22, 1843.

The Oregon Trail, which stretched 2200 miles, was the longest of the land routes used in the Western expansion of the United States.

On July 24 1847, the Mormon pioneers under Brigham Young arrived in Salt Lake City to begin settling Utah.

HOME LIFE

When the pioneers pressed westward, they built log cabins. But in the treeless Great Plains, they built houses of sod bricks cut from the prairie.

Settlers of the American frontier in the 19th century sometimes fell victim to prairie madness, in which social isolation and other hardships of life on the prairie caused them to develop mental illness.

In America knitting was an important craft for frontier families. Many pioneer and farm families depended upon the women in the household for knitted clothing.

American Farm, Museum of American Frontier 


FAMOUS PIONEERS

Daniel Boone (1734-1820), a key figure in American pioneer history, settled in Kentucky, when that "Dark and Bloody Ground" was still undeveloped.

John "Johnny Appleseed" Chapman (1774 - 1847) wandered the country planting apple trees, teaching the Bible, telling stories, and befriending Native Americans, wild animals, and other settlers.

US frontiersman Davy Crockett (1786-1836) is commonly referred to in popular culture by the epithet "King of the Wild Frontier." He was killed defending the Alamo.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series, published  in 1932-1943 but set in the 1870s and 1880s, typified later depictions of pioneer families.


Source Comptons Encyclopaedia,

No comments:

Post a Comment