pioneers

Examines the life of seventeenth-century Quaker, William Penn, discussing his clash with the English government over his religious beliefs, his request for land in the New World, and his establishment of the colony of Pennsylvania.

Profiles the life and work of Roger Williams, the seventeenth-century minister who left England under threat of jail, and went on to found the colony of Rhode Island based on his belief in religious freedom and respect for Native Americans.

Presents the life of colorful Wild West frontierswoman Martha Jane Cannary, known as Calamity Jane.

Examines the history of the Oregon Trail, a path that stretched over two thousand miles from Missouri to the Pacific Northwest, discussing the experiences of the many immigrants who traveled west in the mid-1800s to start new lives.

At the height of the California Gold Rush in 1849, a wagon train of men, women, children and their animals stumbled into a one hundred-and-thirty-mile-long valley in the Mojhave Desert. Barren and hostile, with a dry and unearthly surface of white salts, they became hopelessly lost. After killing the oxen for food, they prepared to die until a twenty-nine-year-old hero, William Lewis Manly, volunteered to cross the desert and attempt to get help. Forty-five years later, Manly told his tale in a book first published in 1894. At his death in Los Angeles in 1903, he had been a miner, rancher, merchant, farmer, pioneer and adventurer and had helped to open the American West.

Travel with some of the most famous pioneers who opened up the West, from the explorers Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark to John C. Fremont and the trappers of Canada.

Describes what life was like during the 1800s for American pioneers settling in the West.

Near the end of her life, Mary Mann Hamilton (1866 - c.1936) began recording her experiences in the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta. The result is this astonishing first-person account of a pioneer woman who braved grueling work, profound tragedy, and a pitiless wilderness (she and her family faced floods, tornadoes, fires, bears, panthers, and snakes) to protect her home in the early American South.

Build a deeper understanding of the hardships American pioneers faced by examining the story of the ill-fated Donner Party, who were trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the harsh winter of 1846-1847.