Page 18 - 2015_Cabin Days curriculum booklet

But then how many pioneers knew how to work a computer, how to find their way around a
shopping mall, how to manage a two-career family.

We need to understand pioneers as ordinary people behaving in ordinary ways for their time
and place, not heroic conquerors of wilderness and builders of civilization. They were not
extra-humans with uncommon virtue or courage or brilliance. They were not superheroes.

Their most human qualities come through in one of the driving ambitions of pioneers. They
did not want to be pioneers. They wanted to become something else, to move beyond that
stage. They wanted to live in frame houses, not drafty and damp log cabins. They wanted
an iron cook stove, not a fireplace. They wanted store bought nails, coffee, sugar, cloth, and
on and on.

To be a successful pioneer was to be on the way toward something else, as quickly as
possible. In this they were ordinary people.

To celebrate them as heroic demigods does a disservice to their humanity. And it places an
impossible burden on us to live up to their imaginary achievements and mythic greatness.
And thereby it sets us up for disillusionment and distrust, for cynicism and whining about
our own times.

If we can see pioneers succeeding and failing and if we can understand the ambiguity and
complexity of their lives, then we do justice to them and to ourselves and perhaps to the
generations to come which will write the history of our times. Here is my final point. If I am
right that these were ordinary people, if I'm right that their lives were filled with ambiguity,
if I'm right that we go wrong when we celebrate them as superheroes, then is there nothing
we can learn from pioneers? Is there no pioneer legacy?

I think there is. First, I think we learn from pioneer Hoosiers the wisdom of nurturing a
common sense appropriate to time and place. Second, we learn to respect the difference
between their time and ours, without denigrating their time or our time. A one-room log
cabin made sense in 1830; a computer makes sense in 1996.

More important, I think we can learn optimism from pioneers. Sure there were pessimists
among them. But the generation that pioneered in Indiana was above all optimistic:
optimistic that things could be better and that they could collectively help things get better.

The best example of that generalization is the Internal Improvements Act of 1836. It is the
most daring and optimistic piece of legislation ever passed by the Indiana General
Assembly.