Part 1 Chapter 1 Summary

Both sets of Harry S Truman's grandparents were frontier settlers who came to Jackson County, Missouri, for its fertile farmland. They were part of the great western migration of the early nineteenth century. Most of these settlers were young, Baptist, anti-Roman Catholic, Democrat, and of Scotch/Irish descent.

Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young went west in 1841 from their farm in Kentucky taking a steamboat down the Ohio River to the Mississippi. Paying $1.25 an acre, Solomon bought 80 acres for a farm. By 1850 he was a wealthy man who owned over 5,000 acres.

Anderson Shippe Truman arrived in 1846 by horseback, probably because he could not afford a boat ticket. He was married to Mary Jane Holmes, a young woman who had defied her parents by marrying a man of lesser education and background.

In this era Truman's hometown of Independence, Missouri, was booming with...