The chapters here follow the moves in the American language game that comes to be known as Pragmatism, specifically, the method of thinking described by William James in his 1907 volume. My argument opens by tracing the conceptual framing of America's native philosophy out of an earlier form of thinking brought to the New World by seventeenth-century Puritan ministers, beginning its adaptation in conditions belonging to what William Bradford called “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” The impelling theological motive to build “a city upon a hill” was informed and sustained at its deepest level by the practice of typology, the manner of reading the Old Testament as prefiguring the New, extended naturally, as it were, in a strange and frightening landscape, to reading all facts, all things, as signs of continuing Divine Providence. The settlers recorded their notations in journals, sermons, and poems. What happened to the idea of Providence thus construed represents the first stirring of the mind's life in America as it pursued its Reformation project. Being lost amidst signs, in a native and naive semiotic experiment, was prerequisite to reform, if not reform itself. Spiritual conversion was to be amazed by grace and performative utterance its testimony. Truth as what happens to an idea was lived experience in this new world long before being inscribed in its philosophical method.