Rating: 4 out of 5
Since reading my first McCullough’s last year, I’ve been a fan. I normally don’t go too far into the blurbs with authors that I like because I feel that I’ll like most of what they’ve written. I do normally come up with a few ideas of what the book will say, and for some reason – possibly linked to the much more well-known pioneers of James Fenimore Cooper – I was expecting this to take place in the Great Prairies or further west.
It was therefore a surprise for me that this took place mostly on the upper reaches of the Ohio, an area I had never really investigated previously in my reading. This was a touch off-putting to begin with, but actually by the end I appreciated the story of how Ohio was made much more than I would have thought so previously. In the end, today it is almost unremarked how the first settlers crossed the Appalachians and what they had to live through there.
The building of the small houses of these outpost towns, the enhancement of trade, the slow build-up of a mercantile fleet on rivers previously reversed only by canoes… And in this manner we get to what is effectively the founding of a university and the establishment of a system of education, a basic privilege of civilization. There’s can’t be a more comprehensive story of civilisational progress than this, especially when one considers the small time horizon that the book actually covers: barely fifty years. And this in a time when it took at least two or three months, if one was lucky, to travel from these newly settled lands back to New England (where many of these folks came from).
Thus my original hesitation, from when I understood where the opening lines placed us in time and space, was replaced both by awe towards the people who managed the difficult tasks that the founding of such colonies demanded as well as towards the author who made it come alive.
