Excerpt: This essay will argue that in contrast to better-known monuments in the Far West, which largely featured “cowboys and Indians” memories of the Old West or solo pioneer mothers embodying Euro-American civilization, most midwestern monuments erected between the 1890s and 1930s emphasized the process of U.S. westward expansion or White homemaking.1 Midwestern pioneer monuments, which outnumbered those in the Far West, celebrated the family values long associated in popular memory with America’s supposed rural heartland.