Pioneer Voices: From Plymouth to Breckenridge, by Cynthia Peabody Anderson
Oversized soft cover in good condition. Signs of wear along bottom of front cover. 
 
About
Illustrated with nearly 100 historic photographs & sprinkled with numerous diary accounts, Pioneer Voices delves into the stories of eleven generations of Peabody pioneers. This dynamic chronicle appears against a backdrop of America's vibrant history, including early Plymouth daily life, Native Americans, pioneer women's experience journeying west, the Colorado gold rush & early day ranch life. Pioneer Voices is also a story about the dehumanization of people. As seekers of a better life, the colonists sometimes treated their fellow human beings with the same contempt that drove them from Europe. Both the New England colonists of the 1600's & the Western pioneers of the 1800's viewed the new territories as uninhabited. Each group considered the Native Americans who occupied these lands as aborigines & savages. They saw them as sub-human. Since no persons lived on the land, it was theirs for the taking - guilt free. Other groups were also dehumanized. Colonial women lived in subservience to their husbands & had no public voice. Likewise, women traveling by wagon train in the 1800's stoically accepted their husbands' decisions to uproot their families & transplant them in the west. In Colorado's gold rush mining camps, both the Chinese & the African Americans experienced contempt. Pioneer Voices shows the complexity of the lives of our early pioneers.