The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West

Well written, researched, entertaining and engaging book. David McCullough delivers again.

Gives us a really good insight into what the lives of the early pioneers was like, with plenty of direct evidence obtained from letters and correspondence of the people who were actually there.

Whilst this is a story which focuses on five prime actors, the breath of what David McCullough describes is staggering. To put some perspective on the narrative, the American War of Independence, also known as the American Revolutionary War, which spanned the period from 19 April 1775, until the Treaty of Paris concluded the war on 3 September 1783, with the defeat of Britain and loss of its thirteen eastern seaboard colonies, together with what was known as the Northwest Territory, which is to say the area west of Pennsylvania, east of the Mississippi River, north of the Ohio River to the border with contemporary British Canada. It was a crushing blow for Britain, which some historians consider to be the end of the first British Empire. The Northwest Territory was a vast, lush wilderness, largely uninhabited land mass of some 260,000 square miles (670,000 square kilometres), home to approximately 45,000 indigenous Indian tribes and around 4,000 traders, the latter a mix of Canadian and British subjects. In the fullness of time this new land mass, almost one-third the total area of America would become the future states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. However, before all of that could take place, it would be the actions of a Massachusetts minister, Reverend Manasseh Cutler, co-founder of the Ohio Company of Associates who would, with Rufus Putnam, Ephraim Cutler (Manasseh oldest son), Joseph Barker House and Samuel Prescott Hildreth encourage a small group of intrepid pioneers to fulfil the intentions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 by making the long and perilous journey up the Ohio River to found the first settlement on the river, which they named Marietta. The story David McCullough so skilfully tells is one of adventure, daring, sadness and injustice, certainly from the standpoint of the indigenous Americans. Notwithstanding the moral issues - and they are significant - this is a narrative that adds new understanding of how Americans populated the Northwest Territory, how the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banned slavery within the territory, advanced public school education and perhaps above all else was a difficult but nonetheless great endeavour. This is a book which can engender a feeling of being part of this movement west. This is a highly recommended read.

In her superb review of David McCullough's latest book, Joyce E. Chaplin provides me with an excellent introduction to the situation on which McCullough focuses: "If every generation of Americans gets the visionary colonizer it deserves, we get Elon Musk, but people in the early Republic got the Rev. Manasseh Cutler. Musk wants to settle Mars. In the 1780s, Cutler set his sights on the Ohio Territory, the subject of David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers. Plans for Martian colonies dwell on technical feasibility; Ohio’s earlier colonization is a reminder that humans’ treatment of one another matters to such schemes, too. "Ohio has quite a history. The characters who passed through during its early phases as part of the United States could adorn a novel. Folks on the famous side include Lewis and Clark (headed west), Aaron Burr (post-duel and mid-conspiracy against the American government), John Chapman (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, sower of fruit trees) and Charles Dickens (visitor to Cincinnati). The less famous characters include Harman and Margaret Blennerhasett, Anglo-Irish newlyweds who lit out for the territory because they were uncle and niece; the Revolutionary War veteran Rufus Putnam, whose frontier library tellingly featured Milton’s Paradise Lost; and Cajoe, an enslaved Virginia man who gained his freedom in Ohio, preached the Gospel and lived past his 100th birthday. "McCullough tells the history of the Ohio Territory as a story of uplift, of what can happen when the doers of good are let loose upon a place. This is American history as a vision of our better selves. Lord knows we need it. And there are several inarguably admirable elements of Manasseh Cutler’s plan. "Cutler and his supporters wanted the Ohio Territory, and eventual state, to be nonslaveholding, free within a nation where slavery was still legal. Their goal followed the tendency of the states in the North to repudiate slavery — at least within their own borders. Prohibiting slavery in new states extended that revolutionary logic outward. As the Northwest Ordinance (1787) declared, 'There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.' Nor could the eventual states formed out of the Northwest Territory be admitted to the Union as slave states." With all due respect to the celebrities to which Chaplin refers, the characters of greatest interest to me are those who relocated -- or facilitated relocation -- to what was then identified as the Northwest Territory, consisting of what later became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The experiences of a physician, Samuel Prescott Hildreth, for example, are representative of what most pioneers encountered when relocating to the new territory, in this case to Marietta, Ohio: "The journey took twenty-five days, during which he experienced one violent rainstorm, lost his way several times, spent one night by the Susquehanna River in a bed that was not only highly uncomfortable but well-stocked with bugs, rode forty miles another day, passed another night in the Allegheny Mountains in which he judged to be the dirtiest house he ever saw, 'the beds most wretched and sheets very black.'" Although Marietta serves as the gravitational center of the narrative, McCullough gives it -- true to form -- a wider and deeper, comprehensive frame of reference within three sequential periods: 1787-1794, 1795-1814, and 1815-1863. Details about each period are best revealed within the narrative, in context, but no spoiler alert is required by my suggestion that McCullough is always at his best when helping his reader to understand major events of the past but also helping them to feel as if they were there when the events occurred. Long ago on radio and then on television, one of my favorite programs was "You Are There." For me, that talent is what sets him from almost all other great historians. After noting Hildreth's final days, here are David McCullough's concluding thoughts: "His was a complete life, he finished his work. But then it can be said, too, that those others of the foremost pioneers of Marietta had finished their work, each in his or her way, and no matter the adversities to be faced, propelled as they were by high, worthy purpose. They accomplished what they had set out to do not for money, not for possessions or fame, but to advance the quality and opportunities of life -- to propel as best they could the American ideals."

A rather well written story of the founding of Marietta, Ohio that could apply to just about any other city and town settled by their pioneers. Well worth the read.