People Dreamed of Ohio

I read David McCullough's The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West on my Kindle, in dreamish fragments, late at night when I could not sleep-- and this dreamlike state is appropriate for a place that stern New Englanders warned about-- they didn't want folks to fall prey to "Ohio Quixotism," but according to McCullough, after some initial despair and violence and death-- due to war between the settlers and the Native American tribes-- things settled down and became heroically civil, especially in Marietta-- the center of the narrative-- and education and experimentation and agriculture and society ruled the day, and all this without slavery, and eventually, the trains and the riverboats connected Ohio to many other parts of the country but this is a great reminder of what occurred before these modern technologies-- and while McCullough doesn't focus on this, also what civilization was lost when the settlers moved in and displaced the indigenous people . . . the book really does get across what an epic and wild and life-changing adventure it was to travel what is now a day's journey by car-- back then it was a place from which you might never return.