Lawrence Welk Quotes

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.

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.

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

I've grown up watching a lot of Western genre films on TV, and America is not just a country, but it's one of the most important countries in the world, and examining the process of how this nation came to be, it's an important thing, even for outsiders.

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.

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

When I was a girl, the West was still young, and the law of force, of physical force, was dominant.

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.

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.

Frontiersmen good and bad, gunmen as well as inspired prophets of the future, have been my camp companions. Thus, I know the country of which I am about to write as few men now living have known it.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable.

The States which form the northern border of the United States westward from the Great Lakes to the Pacific coast include an area several times larger than France and could contain ten Englands and still have room to spare.

Westward, ever westward.

It being perhaps the only large tract of country and certainly the first which lying out of the boundaries of the Union will be settled by the people of the United States.

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

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

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.

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.

I like stories in specific time periods. 'The Revenant's' era of American history was fascinating because it was this lawless no-man's land. It defined the idea of the American frontiersman as man conquering nature. In a way, the story of Hugh Glass is about man dominating nature.

I think coming from the Northwest is something that's born in your blood. On my mom's side, I'm, like, a sixth-generation Oregonian. My family came over in the covered wagons, 'Oregon Trail'-video-game style. Maybe the pioneer mentality runs in my blood because they were all pioneers.

I'm very interested in the early American history, the time when the country came together.

Most of those old settlers told it like it was, rough and rocky. They named their towns Rimrock, Rough Rock, Round Rock, and Wide Ruins, Skull Valley, Bitter Springs, Wolf Hole, Tombstone. It's a tough country. The names of Arizona towns tell you all you need to know.

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

We live in the United States. British settlers founded the first colony in North America. And English is our language.