And we are delighted that over the years he has done such an admirable job in continuing the “American Heritage style.” I had found what I wanted to do in my life,” he says. I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research McCullough got his start in 1964 as an editor and writer for American Heritage, his “graduate school” as he's called it. In his new book, The Pioneers, David McCullough tells the extraordinary story of the first settlements in the vast wilderness of the Northwest Territory. The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, by David McCullough “There were no roads as yet anywhere in all this wilderness, no bridges, no towns, churches, schools, stores, or way-side taverns.

The resulting anger among the Americans, after they had fought a succession of bitter wars against the French-speaking Catholics in Canada, was one of the factors pushing them to revolt against the King a few years later. In 1774, the British Parliament voided their claims to the territory in the controversial Quebec Act and declared the Ohio territory part of Quebec. But it continued to be very much on the mind of many American colonists. The land to the north of the Ohio remained largely wilderness. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768 ceded the land to Virginia and by the 1770s early settlers were following Daniel Boone into what would later become the state of Kentucky. To its south lay territory claimed by Virginia, stretching to the Mississippi. The Ohio River was also an important boundary. However it was described, the Ohio River became the primary means to venture west for the early European settlers, allowing them to float through largely roadless forests from Williamsport or Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania to the Mississippi, and then on down to New Orleans and the land of the ten-dollar bank note known as “le Dixie.” He was painted a few years later in 1788 by Mather Brown. In the negotiations to end the Revolution, John Adams insisted that the Ohio territory must belong to the new nation.

Thomas Jefferson echoed their sentiments, calling the Ohio “the most beautiful river on earth” in his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, even though he had never seen it. When French explorer La Salle first saw the Ohio in 1669, he described it as La Belle Rivière, ' the Beautiful River.

The Seneca Indians called it the Ohi:yo’ (pronounced oh-hee-yoh), literally the “Good River.”

There was still not a single legal permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory when the U.S.

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