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For a long time, that is how most people thought about the great American West. It is the picture that I grew up with as I watched my favorite cowboy shows on television. But that exciting Wild West show only happened in the movies.
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The truth is a much more interesting story of the real people who braved harsh winters and burning summers, disease and disaster, to head west in search of a dream come true. Sometimes those dreams ended in a nightmare. And for the people who already lived in the West-the native Americans, or Indians-the coming of the pioneers meant the end of their way of life.
Can you imagine walking thousands of miles, sometimes barefoot? Seeing grasshoppers eat an entire field of your corn? Crossing the Rocky Mountains without a map of a winter coat? Of course, you had to do it on foot, not in a comfortable air-conditioned car with a bag full of chocolate chip cookies to much. In fact, the only chips you might get as a pioneer were "buffalo chips," which you might want to burn but certainly would not want to eat. Life for boys and girls in the pioneer days was so different from our life today, that it is hard to imagine how they survived. But with courage and determination, hundreds of thousands of these pioneers did.
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