New Left Review I/41, January-February 1967

H. B.

‘Pioneer America’

John R. Alden: Pioneer America Hutchinson. 30s.

Pioneer America is a survey of the British North American colonies and the United States from 1607, when the London Company established a colony at Jamestown, Virginia, to 1865, when the Civil War ended. Obviously the author has set himself an immense and difficult task; even so, the difficulties recognized, it must be confessed that this book is a disappointment. Other than a few conventional pieties about the hardships confronting colonist and frontiersman, little sense of the real experience, the real problems, drives, and conflicts, the unreal but potent myths of Pioneer Americans is communicated. In retrospect, Pioneer America seems almost a misnomer; this is just an oldfashioned tale of personalities (‘Stephen Austin, a scholar, a performer upon the flute, and an introvert, was also intelligent, generous-minded, and honest’), legislation at Government level, battles, and belligerent escapades.

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