Young Pioneers (film)
Young Pioneers is a 1976 American Western television film which aired in March 1976 on ABC. Elements of novels Let the Hurricane Roar and Free Land by Rose Wilder Lane (daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder) were used as the basis for the movie, with Roger Kern and Linda Purl starring as the focal characters David and Molly Beaton. Although produced as a TV series pilot by ABC Circle Films and ranked #7 in the Nielsen ratings for the week it aired, the movie was not immediately picked up by ABC as a series. A second pilot attempt was made in December 1976 with Young Pioneers' Christmas, but ranked lower at #37 in the Nielsen ratings. In 1978 The Young Pioneers (miniseries) was broadcast. Plot David and Molly Beaton, 18-years-old and 16-years-old respectively, marry and leave their native Iowa to make a life for themselves as homesteaders in the Dakota Territory of the early 1870s. The U.S. Government Homestead Act offers applicants 160 acres of land in undeveloped areas. Those who stay on the land for five years become the official owners. The young couple manages to survive government and railroad corruption, and perseveres through blizzards, a grasshopper invasion, crop destruction,