"A great romantic novel, written with striking brilliancy and power, in which one sees emerge a new country and a new people.... Throughout the story one has the sense of great spaces; of the soil dominating everything, even the human drama that takes place upon it; renewing itself while the generations come and pass away."—McClure's Magazine.

"The book is big in its conception and strikes many great live topics of the day—the feminist movement and the back-to-the-soil doctrines being two of the most conspicuous. There is a spirit of the open spaces about this story—a bigness that suggests that Miss Cather has taken more than her title from Whitman's hymn to progress, 'Pioneers, O Pioneers.'"—San Francisco Chronicle.