Mat Kearney Quotes

Today, I honor the memory of those brave settlers of Oregon …. Some instinct drew them here, a fate a pulling, a desire for deep and lasting change in their lives. They embraced that change. They sought it out. Theirs was a quest for new horizons, for new beginnings. For a new homeland. They rode. They walked. They starved. They foraged. And they died. But they kept their eyes westward. They gave us Oregon.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

And yes, the Homesteaders, including my grandparents who left behind almost nothing, and arrived in Montana with nothing but the clothes on their back, high hopes, faith in God and dreaming of the future.

I come from pioneer stock, developers of the West, people who went out into the wilderness and set up home with nothing but a pair of oxen.

I used to think I'd like to have been a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, experience untamed America.

But the West of the old times, with its strong characters, its stern battles and its tremendous stretches of loneliness, can never be blotted from my mind.

My wife and I drove across America following the Oregon Trail, which the pioneers once passed along.

When people left on the Oregon Trail from St. Louis, they knew that only a fraction of them would make it to the West Coast. But they went anyway.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

It became a metaphor for the lives of the people in this film and for the Old West, for the abandonment that occurred in the early part of the 20th century.

It was my effort, in depicting the West, to depict it as it was.

Our forbears worked hard this difficult land, and their reward was the freedom and independence of self-sufficiency.

Part of the western movement is this desire that we, Americans, have to keep pressing on.

Well, pioneers always suffer. I don't care who is the first to embark upon things. For instance, settlers that settled the West, Western Canada and the U.S... they went though hell doing it, but it had to be done.

'West To A Land Of Plenty' shows a family heading west, first on board a train, and then going into areas as yet untamed by rail by way of an ox-drawn wagon.

Westward, ever westward.

When my parents first arrived there, North Dakota had just been admitted to the Union, and the country was still wild and harsh.

The West is the most American part of America....

Anyone who's done their homework knows that the West was a pretty rough-and-tumble place. People from all over the world were there - and when you were there, you had to be tough as nails.

Everywhere that Americans spread off the Eastern seaboard, heading west across this country, they put up the schoolhouse first, hired a schoolteacher, and put all the kids in school.

My grandparents were from Kentucky - I'm related to Daniel Boone. He was my great-great-great uncle.

[In 1889] the last big tract of Indian land was declared open for settlement, in Oklahoma. The claimants and the speculators mounted their horses and lined up like trotters waiting for a starting gun. The itchy ones jumped the gun and were ever after known as Sooners-and Oklahoma was thereafter called the Sooner State.

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.