Reading The Pioneers in place, and reading my place in The Pioneers

I was reading David McCullough's new book, The Pioneers, which has become required reading locally because he spent significant time on my campus to research materials in my favorite library and because it deals with the history of this area, exploring the lives of characters hailing from New England (my people! my people!) who led the way toward establishing Marietta as the first organized settlement in the Northwest Territory, and while my response was mixed, I experienced a little frisson of pleasure when I saw my insignificant little creek mentioned right there in print.

There it is on page 250: William Cutler's 1846 journey to Columbus to serve in the state legislature is impeded by a flooded bridge over Big Run, the creek that runs past my property. That bridge has long since been washed out and replaced with a modern highway bridge, but it crossed the creek where it intersects with what has long been the main road following the Muskingum River north, so I should not be surprised that the bridge played a part, however minor, in local history.

And how would I rate McCullough's presentation of that history? Mixed. I keep reminding myself that McCullough is primarily a storyteller, and so I should not be surprised that The Pioneers glosses over some complex issues and relies heavily on cliches (most disturbingly in his portrayal of Native Americans, an issue that has been dealt with in other forums, such as this New York Times review). Any book subtitled "The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West" is going to promote a particular perspective on history. I was delighted to see so many of my colleagues and my favorite librarians warmly credited in the acknowledgements, and I gained a greater sense for the various motivations that led early settlers to bushwhack their way to my neck of the woods. (And I also learned a definition of bushwhack that I'd never before encountered: "to pull a boat upstream from onboard by grasping bushes, rocks, etc.," as dictionary.com puts it.)

I was most surprised by the narrow margin by which Ohio and the Northwest Territory remained free of slavery. McCullough describes Manasseh Cutler's intense struggle to assure that the Northwest Ordinance proscribed slavery from the entire territory, a hard-won victory; and later, he shows how Cutler's son Ephraim diligently worked to make sure Ohio came into the union slavery-free, casting the tie-breaking vote to keep slavery out of the state. Imagine the impact on our nation's history if that vote had gone the other way.

Mostly I was impressed by the way McCullough breathes life into some interesting and little-known characters, like Rufus Putnam and Samuel Hildreth and various members of the Cutler family, all hardy New Englanders who packed their bags with determination, grit, and a fair share of personal flaws before heading for what they considered the howling wilderness. He also briefly brings some more illustrious characters on the scene, like John Quincy Adams, Aaron Burr, and the Marquis de Lafayette, whose name still graces the historic Lafayette Hotel down at the waterfront. 

And of course he mentions my creek, which flowed through this territory long before any Heroic Settlers arrived and will continue to flow long after we're gone. It has seen a lot of history, my little creek, and the book helps me understand the broad outlines of that history even if it skimps a bit on nuance. My creek is just an obstacle that briefly blocks the path of those Heroic Settlers, but I wonder: if Big Run could speak, what kind of story would it tell?