But the real “people we haven’t heard of” are the Shawnee, Miami, Wyandot, and other Native peoples who, at the beginning of The Pioneers’ narrative action, had already weathered decades of white incursion, come together in confederacies and alliances, moved from place to place, and fiercely debated among themselves what was to be done. The marketing material for The Pioneers stresses the idea that people won’t have “heard of” the main characters and episodes in this book, and that this “unknown” quality makes the book interesting. The Delaware camped across the river from the settlement have “hellish Pow-wows” that keep settlers awake: “I have no doubt in my mind that Psalmody had its origin in heaven,” settler John May wrote, “and my faith is as strong that the music of these savages was first taught in hell.” In a letter, leader Rufus Putnam calls the Mingo, Shawnee, and Cherokee “a set of thievish murdering rascals.” (Putnam admires the long-dead Hopewell builders of the mounds in Marietta, though as McCullough ceaselessly reminds us, these founders were “intellectually curious.”) We get little flashes of evidence, from the settlers’ point of view, that are paranoid, entitled, and fearful. They appear mysteriously and do irrational things the settlers are never quite clear what they want (though the answer should be obvious). Native peoples hover around the edges of the first section of the book, a cartoonishly threatening presence to the good New England transplants who founded the town of Marietta on the banks of the Ohio River in 1788.

The Pioneers by David McCullough