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AMAZING GRACE AND COURAGE

© Mary Trotter Kion

The tragic events that occurred on September 11, 2001 in New York City, Washington, D.C., and the Pennsylvania countryside were more than disastrous. We cannot turn back the clock with pre-knowledge of these events and change what has happened. But we can move forward and be extremely proud of those brave and hardworking people, this includes all of us, who must now suffer the consequences of events that will become a part of America's history. In future decades our children and grandchildren will study their country's history and feel proud of whom they are.

It is with this same vein of pride that we look back on the stories of our ancestors who came to this country, fleeing from religious and political oppression, searching freedom. In ships we today would hardly consider more than large boats, and doubtful of their seaworthiness, they beached in what is now New York and other eastern ports. As years passed, they increased in population, worked the soil, and made America home. After a time many could no longer contain their desire to have knowledge of what lay beyond the next hill and the next until, in the early years of the 1800s and beyond, they began to move westward across the Great American Plains.

It is obvious that the bravery and determination these people possessed has been handed down, generation after generation, to those of us who have survived World War One and Two, The Bombing of Pearl Harbor, Korea, the Cuban Crisis, Viet Nam, and now the events of this past week. Only the powers above can say where this space of history will take us into the future.

Our forefathers displayed this kind of courage as they ventured beyond the bounds of civilization into a land called Kentucky where dangers of every kind lurked. Like today these dangers were often without faces, but they had names. From Kentucky and on into Missouri these dangers were called cholera and smallpox, floods and droughts, and wild predators.

From Missouri these people faced what was then called the great desert. But they built sod homes on their homesteads. They plowed the earth and planted their crops, often to see vast prairie fires or hoards of locus consume a year's work in a matter of moments. Now they added starvation to their fears, but this fear had faces: the faces of their families.

As this desert was settled across Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Colorado and the Dakotas it blossomed and soon was referred to as the Great American Plains. But still the people weathered tragedies and disasters. Wars came to them: The Indian wars, Bloody Kansas, and the American Civil War, but bravely they survived all of them and continued on just as we today must. These people did not hang back in fear. They stood up straight and faced all of these things.

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