The Pioneers: The Heroic Story Of The Settlers Who Brought by David McCullough.

“For many Europeans(and Americans as well), the term ‘pioneers’ probably evokes images of covered wagons and homesteaders on the vast prairie, of immigrants settling the west, amber waves of grain, perhaps even an anachronistic bit of John Ford. That is not this book.

David McCullough puts the story much earlier, with the founding of what became the state of Ohio, and ends it during the Civil War.

At the Treaty of Paris in 1783, ending the American Revolution, the Americans led by future president John Adams insisted on the cession of the lands north west of the Ohio River to the Mississippi, the ‘Northwest Territory’. Settlement began in 1788.

Those first settlers were the foremost pioneers in both the literal and figurative sense, facing hard work clearing land for agriculture, the threats of disease and war with Native Americans, among other dangers.”