Exploration and eventual settlement of the West has long had a romantic aura, of pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps individualism, and respect for nature’s wonders.
Author David McCullough, a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, paints a starker — yet still inspirational — portrait about settlement of the sprawling Northwest Territory in The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West.
The Pioneers focuses on the small town of Marietta in the Ohio Valley through the eyes of five men and their families: the minister Manasseh Cutler and his son Ephriam, General Rufus Putnam, carpenter and architect Joseph Barker, and physician Samuel Hildreth.
The book’s narrowed view allows the narrative to see how in the fledgling American Republican, the work of founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson can be traced to important deeds of frontier men.
McCullough’s work highlights the best of America and her ideals: the promise of a better life through hard work and the equality of rights among all men as set out in the Declaration of Independence.
Manasseh Cutler was able to secure the passage of the Northwest Ordinance, which prohibited slavery in the new territory while guaranteeing freedom of religion and the promotion of education. Later, Ephriam Cutler would be elected to office in Ohio and fight to guarantee these same liberties.
The settlement of the Ohio territory was not without its trials, though. Typhoid fever, Indian raids, and economic depressions were all struggles the new pioneers would face in their attempt to colonize the wilderness.
“Ohio, with its promise of the Garden of Eden, had suddenly become Hell on Earth,” McCullough describes the aftermath of the battle known as St. Clair’s Defeat, a defeat “worse than any suffered by the American army during the entire Revolution, and the greatest defeat of an army at the hands of natives until then.”
The promise of a new life also brought in hucksters looking for new victims to pawn. In one of the most exciting parts of the story, the disgraced former Vice President Aaron Burr, fresh off of killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, shows up in the territory convincing a handful of gullible settlers to join a plot to invade Mexico to raise an army and declare the American West an independent confederacy. Burr would later stand trial for treason in Richmond, Va.
Despite the many struggles, the toil proved fruitful. “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,” concluded the latest book by McCullough, author also of Truman, John Adams, The Wright Brothers, and many others.
In much the same way, McCullough’s book helps shine the light on the same American vision these men sought to advance.
