The Indian Menace in David McCullough's The Pioneers

Abstract

David McCullough has written a history of Ohio almost entirely devoid of Native history. He ignores the long and complicated history of the Northwest Indian confederacy, and their struggle to retain their homeland in the face of an aggressively expansive American republic. Instead, he imagines Ohio and the Northwest Territory as an "unsettled wilderness." And he imagines the history of Ohio as the story of the settlement of this territory by white settlers, struggling to bring "the American way of life" into the North American wilderness.