Excerpt from The Pioneers: An Idyl of the Middle-West Thermopylae and Marathon but turned back for a time the barbarian hordes which would invade the fair fields of Greece to devastate and ruin, while the pioneers, by the peaceful arts of agriculture and ih ternal improvement, subdued state after state, and made the wilderness to blossom as the rose in very truth. When they first entered upon their new possessions, the country was in a state of nature. The seeds of civilization had to be sown, farms brought under the plow, villages and cities founded, dwellings, school-houses and churches built, society evolved. Such was the task before them, and grandly did they accomplish it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.