Image from Philip Tome’s Pioneer Life, 1854
The more I explore the lives of my ancestors, the more I begin to question myself; what is it I’m looking for by reading these accounts of pioneers? Somehow, these stories are touching something in me, and they are doing this because, like anyone around the world, I contain in my mind a fundamental myth, a series of symbols, and a narrative of how we travel through life, what it means to live. I see myself, that is, in these stories. But what do they mean?
This is how my ancestors, the German pioneers in the backcountry of Pennsylvania, west of the Allegheny Front, become a kind of fairy tale for me.