David McCullough

Biogphy

• McCullough was born in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Pittsburgh, the son of Ruth and Christian McCullough, of Scots-Irish descent.

• One of four sons, McCullough had a "marvelous" childhood with a wide range of interests, including sports and drawing cartoons. His parents and his grandmother, who read to him often, introduced him to books young and often talked about history, a topic he says should be discussed more often.

Biography

• In 1951, McCullough began attending Yale, where he considered it a "privilege" to study English because of such faculty members as John O'Hara, John Hersey, Robert Penn Warren, and Brendan Gill.

• He occasionally ate lunch with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Thornton Wilder who taught him, says McCullough, that a competent writer maintains "an air of freedom" in the storyline, so that a reader will not anticipate the outcome, even if the book is non-fiction.

• At Yale, he became a member of Skull and Bones and earned his bachelor's degree in English, with honors, intent on becoming a fiction writer or playwright.

• "Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life."

Biography

• After graduation, he worked for Sports Illustrated in New York as a trainee and later as an editor and writer for the US Information Agency in Washington. He then worked as a writer/editor for American Heritage where he wrote in his spare time for three years.

• After 12 years' work, he "felt that [he] had reached the point where [he] could attempt something on [his] own. Although he "had no anticipation that [he] was going to write history," he stumbled upon a story that [he] thought was powerful, exciting, and very worth telling"—the Johnstown Flood.

• The Johnstown Flood, a chronicle of one of the worst flood disasters in US history, was published in 1968 to high praise by critics. John Leonard, The New York Times, said of McCullough, "We have no better social historian."

Biography

• After the success of the Johnstown Flood, two new publishers offered him contracts, one to write about the Great Chicago Fire and another about the San Francisco earthquake. Simon & Schuster, publisher of his first book, also offered McCullough a contract to write a second.

• Trying not to become "Bad News McCullough," he decided to write about a subject showing "people were not always foolish and inept or irresponsible." He remembered the words of his Yale teacher: "[Thornton] Wilder said he got the idea for a book or a play when he wanted to learn about something. Then, he'd check to see if anybody had already done it, and if they hadn't, he'd do it."

• McCullough decided to write a history of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he had walked across many times. He also proposed, from a suggestion by his editor, a work about the Panama Canal; both were accepted by the publisher.

Biography

• Five years later, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal was released. The book won the National Book Award in History, the Samuel Eliot Morison Award, the Francis Parkman Prize, and the Cornelius Ryan Award.

• Later, in 1977, McCullough travelled to the White House to advise Jimmy Carter and the United States Senate on the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which would give Panama control of the Canal. Carter later said that the treaties, to hand over ownership of the Canal to Panama, would not have passed had it not been for the book.

• McCullough's fourth work was his first biography, reinforcing his belief that "history is the story of people." Released in 1981, Mornings on Horseback tells the story of 17 years in the life of Theodore Roosevelt. The book won McCullough's second National Book Award and his first Los Angeles Times Prize for Biography and New York Public Library Literary Lion Award.

Biography

• Next, he published Brave Companions, a collection of essays, written over twenty years.

• With his next book, McCullough published his second biography, Truman (1993) about the 33rd president and won his first Pulitzer for "Best Biography or Autobiography," and his second Francis Parkman Prize.

• And, after working for seven years, he published his third biography, John Adams (2001). One of the fastest-selling non-fiction books in history, it won McCullough his second Pulitzer Prize. He started it as a book about back-to-back presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but dropped Jefferson to focus on Adams.

• McCullough's 1776, tells the story of the founding year of the United States, focusing on George Washington, the amateur army, and other struggles for independence.

Biography

• Because of McCullough's popularity, its initial printing was 1.25 million copies, many more than the average history book and quickly became a number one best-seller.

• McCullough considered writing a sequel to 1776, but signed a contract with Simon & Schuster to do a work about Americans in Paris between 1830 and 1900, The Greater Journey, published in 2011.

• The book covers 19th-century Americans, including Mark Twain and Samuel Morse, who migrated to Paris and went on to achieve importance in culture or innovation. Other subjects include Benjamin Silliman, Morse's science teacher at Yale, Elihu Washburne, the American ambassador to France during the Franco-Prussian War, and Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the United States.

• In 2015, McCullough's The Wright Brothers was published, and in 2019, The Pioneers, the story of the first European American settlers of the Northwest Territory.

Publications

• Widely acclaimed as a "master of the art of narrative history," David McCullough has published 23 books:

  • Johnstown Flood (1968)

  • The Great Bridge (1972)

  • Path Between the Seas (1978)—Panama Canal

  • Mornings on Horseback (1982)—Teddy Roosevelt

  • Brave Companions: Portraits in History (1991)

  • Truman (1992), Pulitzer Prize

  • John Adams (2001), one of the most praised and widely read American biographies of all time. Pulitzer Prize

Publications

• Widely acclaimed as a "master of the art of narrative history," David McCullough has published 23 books:

  • 1776 (2005), “a classic”

  • The Course of Human Events (2005)

  • In the Dark Streets Shineth (2010)—Christmas story

  • The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (2011), also a #1 bestseller, “dazzling . . . history to be savored.”

  • The Wright Brothers (2015), #1 New York Times bestseller (9 months)

  • The American Spirit (2017)—collection of speeches

  • The Pioneers (2020)

Sources

• In 2004, David McCullough was asked to give the commencement address at Ohio University, about which he "knew relatively little." But in doing his research, he "learned that the oldest building on campus was called Cutler Hall. This led me to the story of the amazing Reverend Manasseh Cutler, a figure I had never heard of, and that eventually would lead me to Marietta, Ohio, and the Legacy Library at Marietta College."

• What excited him, when he began his research, was "the realization that I now had the opportunity to write about a cast of real-life characters of historic accomplishment who were entirely unknown to most Americans—to bring them to life, bring them center stage and tell their amazing and, I felt, important story."

Sources

• The papers of General Rufus Putnam and those of the Ohio Company of Associates were all there, no fewer than forty-five hundred items. There, too, was the Ephraim Cutler Family Collection, numbering some five thousand items; and the Samuel Hildreth Collections, which include not only his letters, journals, and daily notes on the weather, but his voluminous natural history notes, articles, speeches, in addition to his notes and papers related to the history of the Ohio Valley.

• The main body of Manasseh Cutler’s journals and correspondence, beginning as early as 1765, was published in two volumes in 1888, but the Marietta College Library collection also includes some 350 original manuscript sermons, three original diaries from the 1820s, and fifty items of original correspondence.

Sources

• Included also in the Marietta collection is an extensive collection of books and newspaper articles, maps, drawings, landscape paintings, and superb oil portraits of the principal characters done from life, a treasure in themselves.

• He also discovered the drawings of Dr. Samuel Hildreth. He writes:

• What a wonderful moment! To think that a young physician struggling with all he had to contend with there in the wilderness was also capable of doing works of art so superb.

Marietta Ohio (from Ohio History Central)

• Marietta was the first permanent settlement in the territory north and west of the Ohio River.

• Originally known as Adelphia, meaning "brotherhood," Marietta was the first settlement founded by the Ohio Company of Associates in the Northwest Territory in 1788. The company's investors renamed the community after Queen Marie Antoinette of France, in honor of France's contributions to the U.S. victory in the American Revolution.

• The first settlers were led by Rufus Putnam, one of the Ohio Company's early investors. He chose a site along the Ohio River at its junction with the Muskingum River, not far from Fort Harmar. Originally, settlers from New England made up the population of Marietta. People from Virginia and Kentucky later moved to the area as well.

Marietta Ohio (from Ohio History Central)

• Putnam and the settlers tried to recreate the type of community that they had left in the East. They included a school and a church. The town was laid out much as communities were organized in New England. Settlers received both a lot in town and a lot outside of town for agricultural purposes. There were four common areas throughout the community. The wide streets were planted with mulberry trees. The people of Marietta left some of the local Indian mounds intact, including one that stood in the center of the town cemetery.

• The early settlers also built a fortification known as Campus Martius to protect themselves from American Indian attacks. Marietta's residents hoped that their community would become a model for future western settlements.

Marietta museum

• According to the Campus Martius website:

  • Their "Exhibits present the pivotal role of Marietta’s founding (1788) and the creation of the Northwest Territory (1787) in our nation’s history. The new territory represented the first expansion of the United States beyond the original thirteen states."

  • The museum shows "how the Continental Congress and enterprising leaders created the new territory."

Book structure

• Chronological, from the early days in the founding of Marietta through its development into a city.

• Focus therefore primarily on the Harmer lives of the characters who built the town.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Putnam was born on April 9, 1738, in Sutton, Massachusetts. His father died when Putnam was seven and his mother apprenticed him to a millwright.

• In 1757, he fought for the British in the French and Indian War. When the war was over, he lobbied the English government to provide veterans with land bounties along the Mississippi River. Fearing conflicts between its colonists and the Native Americans residing west of the Appalachian Mountains, England issued the Proclamation of 1763 that prohibited any English colonist from living west of the mountains. The English government denied Putnam's request.

• At the start of the American Revolution, Putnam enlisted in the Continental Army, preparing defenses for the Americans who surrounded English soldiers in Boston. He also assisted George Washington in preparing New York's defenses. By the war's conclusion, he had risen to the rank of brigadier-general.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Throughout the American Revolution, Putnam advocated for junior officers and enlisted men. But America's first government had limited powers and faced tremendous difficulty meeting its expenses, including the men in their army.

• The Confederation Congress promised to give these men land grants in the Ohio Country, but the Congress was slow to act.

• In 1783, Putnam helped draft the Newburgh Petition. In this document, many of the officers in the Continental Army demanded payment immediately in land grants or they would even contemplate replacing their government. General George Washington was able to prevent an uprising.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Following the American Revolution, Putnam was a surveyor for the Confederation Congress and used this knowledge to make land purchases.

• In 1786, a group of men from Massachusetts founded the Ohio Company of Associates to purchase land in the Northwest Territory. The company first chose Samuel Holden Parsons to represent their interests before the American government. When he was unsuccessful in his mission, the company replaced him with the Reverend Manasseh Cutler.

• Cutler worked with Treasury Secretary William Duer and president of the Congress Arthur St. Clair to negotiate an arrangement for the purchase of the land. The Ohio Company purchased 1,500,000 acres of land, agreeing to pay $500,000 immediately and another $500,000 payment once survey work was finished.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Congress allowed the company to pay for part of the land using military warrants, a favorable arrangement for investors. In the end, they paid about 8 ½ cents per acre.

• To encourage settlement and create a buffer between white settlements and Native Americans, Congress also gave the Ohio Company 100,000 acres, which came to be known as the Donation Tract. In the tract, any adult white male would obtain one hundred acres of free land.

• Ohio Company investors were also required to set aside land in each township for education and religion as well as three sections for future government purposes. In addition, two townships were set aside for a university.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Putnam established the first Ohio Company settlement at Marietta. To protect the settlement from Native American attacks, the settlers built a fortification known as the Campus Martius. Because many of the early settlers came from New England, they tried to establish similar institutions and communities to those they had left in the East.

• In 1808, the company established Ohio University on the land set aside for that purpose. In its early years, the university offered only the equivalent of a high school education and enrollment remained low for a number of years.

• The population continued to grow in the late 18th and early 19th centuries but New England settlers often disagreed with frontier settlers coming from Virginia and Kentucky who had different visions for the region.

Cast of characters—Rufus Putnam (from Ohio History Central)

• Putman did succeed in preventing slavery from becoming legal in Ohio with passage of the Northwest Ordinance.

• He died on May 4, 1824, in Marietta.

Rufus Putnam House

• One of the earliest examples in the Midwest of the simple frame houses built by Puritans in 17th century Massachusetts, though it was both larger and more comfortable than the frame houses usually associated with early frontiersmen.

• The first town meeting in the Midwest was held at the house and Putnam managed the affairs of the Northwest Territory from his home until the arrival of the first governor, General Arthur St. Clair.

Rufus Putnam House

• The Rufus Putnam House, also known as Campus Martius or Campus Martius Museum State Memorial, is an historic building in Marietta, Ohio. It was built as part of the Campus Martius fortification by General Rufus Putnam, during the early settlement of Ohio by the Ohio Company of Associates.

• Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, it is also a contributing property of the Marietta Historic District.

• The building is the only surviving part of the Campus Martius fortification and has been enclosed inside the Campus Martius Museum building.

• The house has been called "the most outstanding architectural combination of New England tradition and frontier necessity preserved in Ohio today."

Northwest Ordinance (from Wikipedia)

• The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio and also known as the Ordinance of 1787), enacted July 13, 1787, was an organic act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States.

• It created the Northwest Territory, the new nation's first organized incorporated territory, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the territory's western boundary. Pennsylvania was the eastern boundary.

Northwest Ordinance (from Wikipedia)

• In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain yielded the region to the United States. However, the Confederation Congress faced numerous problems gaining control of the land such as the unsanctioned movement of American settlers into the Ohio Valley; violent confrontations with the region's indigenous peoples; the ongoing presence of the British Army, which continued to occupy forts in the region; and an empty U.S. treasury.

Northwest Ordinance (from Wikipedia)

• The ordinance superseded the Land Ordinance of 1784, which declared that states would one day be formed within the region, and the Land Ordinance of 1785, which described how the Confederation Congress would sell the land to private citizens.

• Designed to serve as a blueprint for the development and settlement of the region, the 1787 ordinance lacked a strong central government to implement it. That need was addressed shortly with the formation of the U.S. federal government in 1789. The First Congress reaffirmed the 1787 ordinance and, with slight modifications, renewed it with the Northwest Ordinance of 1789.

• Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation.

Northwest Ordinance (from Wikipedia)

• It also set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands.[4] The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the authority of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 within the applicable Northwest Territory as constitutional in Strader v. Graham,[5] but it did not extend the ordinance to cover the respective states once they were admitted to the Union.

• The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the geographic divide between slave states and free states from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, an extension of the Mason–Dixon line. It also helped set the stage for later federal political conflicts over slavery during the 19th century until the American Civil War.

Cast of characters—Manasseh Cutler (from Ohio History Central)

• Although he did not spend much time in the state, Manasseh Cutler was a major figure in the settling of Ohio in the years after the American Revolution. He was born on May 13, 1742, in Connecticut. Descended from a long line of clergymen, Cutler entered Yale to become an attorney and broke with family tradition. He graduated in 1765. Upon receiving his degree, Cutler became, first, a schoolteacher, then a store clerk, and finally, an attorney.

• Disenchanted by his life, Cutler eventually pursued the clergy as his career, becoming the minister of the Congregational Church in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1771, where he would remain until his death on July 28, 1823.

• The American Revolution caused serious economic problems in Massachusetts, and Cutler's parishioners faced great difficulty in paying their minister's salary. To supplement his income, Cutler began to study medicine.

Cast of characters—Manasseh Cutler (from Ohio History Central)

• When a smallpox epidemic struck Massachusetts in 1779, Cutler cared for as many as forty patients at a time. He also studied astronomy and provided the first detailed account of plant life in New England, identifying roughly 350 different species.

• In 1786, Cutler joined several other Revolutionary War veterans, including Rufus Putnam and Winthrop Sargent, in forming the Ohio Company of Associates. These men hoped to secure from the Confederation Congress the right to develop land in the Ohio Country.

• When Samuel Parsons failed to secure the land grant, Cutler negotiated with Congress on behalf of the Ohio Company. Present while the Congress debated the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Cutler played a vital role in that document's eventual adoption.

• Some scholars claim that Cutler was responsible for this document's anti-slavery provisions.

Cast of characters—Manasseh Cutler (from Ohio History Central)

• Cutler also secured from the Congress the Ohio Company's right to purchase up to 1.5 million acres of land in Ohio for roughly 8 ½ cents an acre.

• In December 1787, Putnam led the first group of settlers to Ohio. In April 1788, where the Muskingum River flows into the Ohio River, the Ohio Company established Marietta. Cutler visited the settlement later that year, investigated, and concluded that the mounds of earth were created by a pre-contact American Indian civilization centuries earlier.

• He returned to Massachusetts in 1789 and played an active role in Massachusetts's government for the next two decades. In 1795, Washington offered him a position as judge in the Northwest Territory, but Cutler refused. He did not return to Ohio.

• He is the father of Ephraim.

Cast of characters—Ephraim Cutler

• Ephraim Cutler was born in Edgartown, Massachusetts, on December 13, 1767. He spent his early years training to become a lawyer, but also developed other interests, including farming, ranching, storekeeping, and real estate speculation.

• During the early 1790s, he and his father sold roughly fifty percent of the 1.5 million acres of land granted to the Ohio Company by the Confederation Congress. In 1795, he left Massachusetts and moved to Ohio. In 1801, he was elected to the territorial legislature and served as a delegate to the Ohio Constitutional Convention.

• The Democratic-Republican Party favored an economy based on agriculture and small family farms. Federalists preferred a more diverse economy. Cutler favored a decentralized economy but was a champion of the common person. He took the lead at the constitutional convention in banning slavery and other forms of involuntary servitude in Ohio.

Cast of characters—Ephraim Cutler (from Ohio History Central)

• In the early 1800s, Cutler became one of the first Ohioans to seek broader markets for the state's produce. He routinely sent herds of Ohio cattle eastward to Virginia. There, Cutler fattened the cattle after their hard journey over the Appalachian Mountains and then sold them for a sizable profit in eastern cities.

• He continued to serve as a member of the state legislature and fought for state funding for canals and a state school system. In 1825, due to his efforts, Ohio approved a property tax to finance public education.

• Cutler also became a charter member and first librarian of the Coonskin Library in 1804. The library originally had fifty-one books purchased with animal pelts. Many of the original books are now housed at the Ohio History Connection. Cutler was co-founder of Ohio University. He died at Constitution, Ohio, on July 8, 1853.

Dr. Samuel Hildreth (from Ohio History Central)

• Samuel Prescott Hildreth (1783–1863) was a pioneer physician, scientist, and historian, authoring numerous scientific and historical works. His history books are largely based on first-person accounts and primary documents, providing insight into the early settlement of Marietta, Ohio, and the Northwest Territory and the lives of early pioneers.

• He began medical studies under his father, completed studies under Dr. Thomas Kittredge of Andover, and received his diploma in 1805 after examination by the Massachusetts Medical Society. He subsequently practiced medicine in Hampstead, New Hampshire, until relocating to Ohio in 1806.

• His father, Samuel Hildreth, was a shareholder in the Ohio Company and had considered moving to Ohio. Since he was a boy, Samuel Prescott Hildreth had a desire to see the Ohio Country; he acted on his desire at the age of 23, traveling by horseback to Marietta, Ohio during September and October 1806.

Dr. Samuel Hildreth (from Ohio History Central)

• He spent about nine weeks in Marietta, then traveled 15 miles down the Ohio River to Belpre, Ohio. In August 1807, he married Rhoda Cook in Belpre and they resettled to Marietta in March 1808.

• Subsequently, during 1810 and 1811, Dr. Samuel Prescott Hildreth served on the Ohio legislature. His father, Dr. Samuel Hildreth of Massachusetts, died while visiting him in Ohio during 1823 and was buried at Mound Cemetery in Marietta.

• In Marietta, Dr. Samuel Prescott Hildreth served as the town's doctor and pursued the study of local history, botany, and geology. Dr. Hildreth was noted as one of the first pioneers of science in the country west of the Alleghany Mountains.[

• Dr. Samuel Hildreth (from Ohio History Central)

• He exhibited "a remarkable genius in drawing. Insects and plants were represented with scrupulous accuracy, and engravings made from them have a permanent value.“

• "Dr. Hildreth was distinguished for his industrious research, and his numerous and well-received publications on professional topics; on natural history; on the antiquities, the modern history, and the resources, of his Western home.“

• In addition to serving in the Ohio legislature, he also served on the Ohio Geologic Survey. Dr. Samuel Prescott Hildreth died in Marietta, Ohio on July 24, 1863 and was buried at Mound Cemetery in Marietta, along with his father and with many Revolutionary War soldiers and founding pioneer settlers of Marietta and the Northwest Territory.

Dr. Samuel Hildreth (from Ohio History Central)

• Dr. Hildreth authored several books about the early days of Ohio and the Northwest Territory, including:

  • Original Contributions to the 'American Pioneer', J. S. Williams, Cincinnati, Ohio (1844).

  • Pioneer History: Being an Account of the First Examinations of the Ohio Valley, and the Early Settlement of the Northwest Territory, H. W. Derby and Co., Cincinnati, Ohio (1848).

  • Biographical and Historical Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, H. W. Derby and Co., Cincinnati, Ohio (1852).

  • Contributions to the Early History of the Northwest: including the Moravian Missions in Ohio, Poe and Hitchcock, Cincinnati, Ohio (1864).

• The book Pioneer History provides the early civil history of the Northwest Territory, while the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio provides biographies of the earliest settlers.

Cast of characters—Joseph Barker

• Born in Newmarket, New Hampshire in 1765, Joseph Barker moved his family to Ohio in 1789. After practicing carpentry in Marietta and serving in the militia during the Northwest Indian War, in 1795 he settled along the Muskingum River, about 7 miles above Marietta. The family soon returned to that village, as their property and all of their stores were destroyed by fire in the following winter.

• Undaunted, they returned northward, becoming one of the first families to settle in Wiseman's Bottom along the river. Barker became a prominent member of local society with important skills. Besides being a carpenter, he was a capable architect and shipbuilder. 

Burr Expedition

• By 1805, Burr had begun to seek his fortune in the western territories. Some of the people that Burr met became convinced that he was planning a rebellion against the United States. They thought that he was working to break away the western part of the United States to form a new country that he would lead. Burr later denied that he was planning any sort of rebellion against the United States.

• Burr convinced Ohioan Harman Blennerhassett to participate in his ventures. In September 1806, Blennerhassett ordered the construction of fifteen boats. Burr and Blennerhassett would use the vessels to transport up to five hundred followers. Blennerhassett spent much of his fortune paying for the planned expedition.

Burr Expedition

• The United States government heard of the uprising and took the rumors seriously. Governor Edward Tiffin of Ohio dispatched the state's militia to the convergence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers. The militia was to stop all river traffic traveling down the two rivers. The United States government also sent a detachment of Virginia militia to seize the Blennerhassetts' home on an island in the Ohio River.

• Burr was arrested and was charged with treason, but later found innocent in a trial presided over by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The trial set a number of important precedents in American law, most notably a very narrow definition of treason under United States law.

Questions for discussion

• This history focuses particularly on the political beliefs and activities of these men, as well as their business interests. It’s a focus on accomplishments.

• It includes much less information about their personal lives, or daily activities, despite the availability of personal journals and trip diaries. We don’t see them “splitting logs.”

• So, ultimately how did they see themselves, and how has McCullough depicted them?

Breakout room question

• Last week we discussed dime novels and their representation of the west. We get a much different picture from David McCullough.

Breakout room question

• And last week, we discussed the essay by John Williams on the lack of any notable Western novel. He says instead that:

  • Beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.

  • What has been widely accepted as the “Western” myth is really a habit of mind emerging from the geography and history of New England and applied uncritically to another place and time.

  • Viewed in a certain way, the American frontiersman—whether he was hunter, guide, scout, explorer or adventurer—becomes an archetypal figure, and begins to extend beyond his location in history. He is 19th century man moving into the 20th century; he is European man moving into a new continent; he is man moving into the unknown, into potentiality, and by that move profoundly changing his own nature.

• What do you think?