Calamity Jane Quotes

I left Montana in Spring of 1866, for Utah, arriving at Salt Lake city during the summer.

Early on the next morning we reached Kansas, about five hundred miles from the mouth of the Missouri.

For California Direct Extraordinary Inducements 35 Days to Gold Regions Steamship Nicaragua The Quickest, Safest, Cheapest Price of Passage Through: 90 Dollars

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives.

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.

Riding in advance, we passed over one of these great plains; we looked back and saw the line of scattered horsemen stretching for a mile or more; and far in the rear against the horizon, the white wagons creeping slowly along.

Pa did not like a country so old and worn out that the hunting was poor. He wanted to go west. For two years he had wanted to go west and take a homestead, but Ma did not want to leave the settled country.

Turn your face to the West and there build your homes and fortunes.

Move to California - my first impression of the Wild West.

In the early West, law and politics were parallel roads to usefulness as well as distinction.

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.

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.

When she was 16, my grandmother, Hannie Reed, drove a wagon in the Oklahoma land rush.

Westward, ever westward.

A long time ago, when all the grandfathers and grandmothers of today were little boys and little girls or very small babies, or perhaps not even born, Pa and Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie left their little house in the Big Woods of Wisconsin.

Westward ho! Who wants to go to California without costing them anything? As many as eight young men of good character who can drive an ox team will be accommodated. Come, boys, you can have as much land as you want without costing you anything.

Soon you’ll be whirled along by steam in a country now only inhabited by wild beasts and Indians

Every seaport as far south as San Diego, and every interior town, and nearly every rancho from the base of the mountains in which the gold has been found, to the Mission of San Luis, south, has become suddenly drained of human beings. Americans, Californians, Indians and Sandwich Islanders, men, women and children, indiscriminately.

But for the difference in habit of observation, why did Yankees, almost instantly, discover gold in California, which had been trodden upon and overlooked, by Indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries.

The great Pacific Railway is commenced... Immigration will soon pour into these valleys. Ten millions of emigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years... This is the grandest enterprise under God!

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

California, here I come, right back where I started from.

Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.