Excerpt: David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers, provides a sweeping narrative history of the Ohio Company and the men who settled what became Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. Manasseh Cutler, his son, Ephraim, and other colleagues from Massachusetts, including Rufus Putnam and Joseph Barker, formed a company to speculate in land that had not yet been ceded to the United States by the Native nations who called the region home.
