A Colony Sprung from Hell: Pittsburgh and the Struggle for Authority on the Western Pennsylvania Frontier, 1744–1794 by Daniel P. Barr (review)

Anyone tempted by a sentimental conception of the past, preferring the supposedly simpler “good old days” over the seemingly intractable problems of today, should read this fascinating but unsettling account of the complicated and tragic struggle among the multi-ethnic and fractious contestants for authority in colonial western Pennsylvania. This story is replete with duplicitous politicking, broken promises, tavern dissipation, and bloody massacres. British colonel Henry Bouquet, who for years unsuccessfully attempted to impose order in the region, aptly described his social environs as “a colony sprung from hell for the scourge of mankind” (p. 2).

American settlers who wanted land and the speculators who contrived to sell it to them, often on terms of dubious legality, are the primary agents in Daniel P. Barr’s account. Their insistence on surveying and settling on territory belonging to Delawares, Shawnees, Mingos, and other Indian groups provoked the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, and, more circuitously, the American Revolution, as well as countless other smaller conflicts. Fiercely loyal to Pennsylvania or Virginia when it suited them—and willing to switch allegiances when the other side offered easier land titles or military protection—settlers conspired against each other for personal advantage. The Pennsylvania Assembly and Virginia House of Burgesses refused to cede their claims in the West, but they were unwilling to commit the resources necessary to govern their unruly citizens who were moving there. The British Parliament and the American Congress, distracted by larger imperial and national concerns, did little more than issue proclamations that farmers, merchants, and regional political leaders ignored or manipulated for their own advancement. Only when the national government listened to frontier demands in the 1790s did settlers embrace the new American nation. This concession to localism not only brought some level of order to the region (and quelled the Whiskey Rebellion) but also established a national western policy, predicated on Indian elimination and an individualistic political ethos, that lasted through the nineteenth century.

This is political history, defined broadly to include Indians, settlers, and speculators who made their own rules and frequently scoffed at official policies. Barr’s illumination of the role non-elite people played in instigating American independence fits well with work by T. H. Breen and Woody Holton (whom Barr frequently cites), although Barr’s settlers evince no American nationalism and little interest in war against Britain without war against Indians. Barr makes exhaustive use of published (mainly) and unpublished primary sources while engaging the work of Lawrence Henry Gipson, Michael N. McConnell, Matthew C. Ward, Richard White, Patrick Griffin, and Peter Rhoads Silver. Barr is a masterful storyteller; in less capable hands the narrative could easily get tangled in the morass of shifting alliances, backdoor diplomacy, and disputed boundaries. This book should be read by historians of the American West and of the late-eighteenth-century American wars, and by laypersons nostalgic for a more virtuous past.