David McCullough's Ohio River Book, "The Pioneers‪"‬ The 981 Project Podcast

The other night, my spouse and I were scrolling through the channels and came upon the 1972 pilot of M*A*S*H. Matt and I had watched the CBS reruns on a black-and-white TV every night as we pulled a meal together in his tiny college apartment. We loved the show’s zany characters and its stick-it-to-the-man pacifism and didn’t notice (much less mind) the laugh track. So we curled up on the couch to relive the experience. Here’s the pilot’s plot line: The Swamp’s Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon, gets accepted to study at Hawkeye’s alma mater, but he has to pay to get himself there. The camp raises money by raffling a weekend in Tokyo with a nurse, much to the chagrin of Hot Lips and Burns.
Wow. How did we overlook this in the eighties?
It didn’t end there. The original cast featured a third doctor in the Swamp with Hawkeye and Trapper John named “Spearchucker” Jones. Yep, he was Black. Our heads swiveled from the TV to each other fast enough to warrant a chiropractic visit. Spearchucker? That was a bridge too far. M*A*S*H will just have to remain a fond college memory in chez Rich.
Why did I lead with this little “woke” anecdote when the headline promised a book review? Because the taste and experience of any reviewer grounds their review, and tastes change over time. David McCullough’s approach to his subjects is of a style that no longer appeals to me. He was one of America’s most decorated historians and that alone is reason to read The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West. To his credit, the title clearly tells us he will center WASP men in telling the history of settling the Northwest Territory. I could have chosen not to read it, but I’m not narrow minded. After a lifetime of reading history books that do the same thing—not noticing the bias any more than I noticed “Spearchucker” in M*A*S*H forty years ago—I see it everywhere now and have recalibrated the bar for historians writing today.

If McCullough were submitting this manuscript to his publisher in 2024, I’d like to think he would have used his prodigious skills and massive platform to tell a more fulsome version of history. For example, The Pioneers could have included philosophical and religious differences in how native people and white settlers viewed the land. And if he didn’t want to go that broad, I’d have appreciated a good grounding in the scriptural interpretations of New Englanders who “settled” the “untamed wilderness.” Surely, the author came upon transcripts of sermons justifying the murder of fellow human beings in the process of establishing the first white settlement in the Territory, Marietta, Ohio, as a “City upon the Hill.”
You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden.
~Matthew 5:14

Criticism aside, I learned a great deal from reading The Pioneers. McCullough emphasized throughout the book how these early settlers worked tirelessly to establish the Northwest Ordinance’s three “remarkable conditions” into their new communities:
* Freedom of religion
* Free universal education
* The prohibition of slavery.
I should say that these are New England values, not those of Virginia, which claimed much of the Territory before the Revolution and whose land and government bordered the southern shores of the Ohio River after the Northwest Ordinance. New Englanders settled southeastern Ohio first, but the Virginians entered soon after and started flexing.
Meet the five pioneers of McCullough’s title:
* Manasseh Cutler was a Yale-educated New England minister and a leader of the Ohio Company of Associates. This land company bought a large tract in what is now southeast Ohio from the United States after the British ceded it at the end of the Revolutionary War. He vigorously pushed for the Northwest Territory to be slavery free.
* General Rufus Putnam also a founder the Ohio Company of Associates and led the first group of settlers in fou