Benjamin of Ohio: A Story of the Settlement of Marietta
1977
Benjamin of Ohio: A Story of the Settlement of Marietta
1977
The year is 1788. Fourteen-year-old Benjamin leaves his Massachusetts home with his family, joining a band of pioneers heading into the Ohio wilderness. Their destination: Marietta, where the Ohio Company of Associates plans to build the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. Benjamin carries more than baggage - he carries the weight of ambition, the fear of the unknown, and the desperate hope of a young man who wants to matter in the founding of something new. This is a boy's-eye view of the edge of civilization: the brutal journey over mountains and rivers, the arrival at a forest where Marietta's cannons will one day fire, the first terrible winter in crude shelters, the slow birth of a town. James Otis wrote for young readers who could handle hardship on the page, and Benjamin is neither a saint nor a sneak - he is a real boy, sometimes frightened, often brave, always wanting to prove himself useful to the men building America's western edge. The book remembers what many forget: that settlement was not glory, it was mud and sickness and loneliness and the terrible silence of a forest that had never known an axe. For readers who want to understand where America actually started, this is it - not the myth, but the small, stubborn, human beginning.
