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.