MixedThe Washington PostThe Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough is a master of triumphal tales that celebrate Americans’ personal fortitude and achievements. His most recent book...is very much in that upbeat tradition ... The heroes are so upstanding that, somewhat unexpectedly for a McCullough book, the villains are more compelling ... casting the Ohio Company as a vehicle of higher ideals is a feat too difficult even for a writer as skilled as McCullough ... McCullough glides over these unpleasantries and focuses instead on Cutler’s role in lobbying to exclude slavery from the Northwest Territory ... McCullough’s treatment of the Native Americans whom settlers encountered in Ohio is equally blinkered. To McCullough, the natives were little more than impediments to progress. He cannot bring himself to say that those whom the settlers dislodged had rights to their lands in Ohio ... Rather than wrestle with the moral complexities of western settlement, McCullough simplifies that civic lesson into a tale of inexorable triumph.
