Some Pioneers and Pilgrims on the Prairies of Dakota or, From the Ox Team to the Aeroplane

There has been an often expressed desire on the part of the sons and daughters of the immigrant pioneers that those brave men and women of a generation ago who left home, friends, and the graves of a hundred generations of ancestors, to go to a land which they knew not, there to toil and sacrifice that we, their children might have a better chance, should not be forgotten. For their lives went into the deep and often overlooked foundations, material and spiritual, without which our larger opportunities and comforts of today would be impossible. Like the pioneer Abraham they had a large faith and went out in search of a Promised Land, not knowing what would be in store for them, for they saw it afar off. Like Moses, most of them died without themselves enjoying the fruits of the land or seeing the promise fulfilled.

How little the young people of this generation can appreciate the hard toil, and even less, the heartaches and the tragedies which were the price paid by our fathers and mothers, for our better future! It has been the fashion of some small and provincially minded "Americans" who constituted themselves, as it were, into the original and only Americans, to sneer at the immigrant, to affect certain superior "airs" in relation to him. This self-appointed superiority, however, did not seem to bar them from taking undue advantage of him because of his lack of knowledge of the new country and its ways and methods. How little this class of self-appointed Americans were capable of understanding, not to speak of appreciating, the physical and mental contribution, not to speak of the moral and spiritual the soul which these immigrants brought to the land of their adoption. They established schools for their children, meeting in private houses before there were any public schools. They built churches for the worship of God while they themselves still lived in shacks and dugouts.