Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Chapter 2: "Devoted to Hardships, Danger, and Devastation"

In 1787, politician Timothy Pickering described the Pennsylvanian frontier ’s Wyoming Valley as home to a wild and brutish people: “The natural instability of . . . that settlement, where during so many years they have lived in anarchy—where they have been taught to abhor the government of Pennsylvania . . . warrants the suspicion that a large number of [settlers] would again easily be wrought up to a pitch of violence.”1 The alleged miscreants were Connecticut migrants who had begun to settle in the Indianinhabited Wyoming Valley under extraordinary colonial charter claims during the 1750s.2 A special congressional court had awarded Pennsylvania jurisdiction over Wyoming Valley in late 1782, which emboldened Pickering to denounce the contemporarily termed Connecticut “Yankees” who continued to refuse to relinquish many of their claims to the land.3 But contemporaries as well as modern historians have misrepresented the competition for Wyoming Valley as rampantly violent by magnifying the moments when resistance escalated to bloodshed. Indeed, the claims dispute is an early example of Appalachian mountain dwellers being erroneously stereotyped as backward and lawless. As is so often the case, myth had partial grounding in reality: when confronting each other and their Pennsylvanian neighbors, Yankees and their Delaware Indian competitors did resort to killing under predictable circumstances: serious diplomatic failures; interference from well-known vigilante instigators; or formal conflicts, such as the Seven Years’ War, Pontiac’s Rebellion, and the American Revolution. But these moments merely punctuated a fifty-year land dispute during “Devoted to Hardships, Danger, and Devastation” Chapter 2 The Landscape of Indian and White Violence in Wyoming Valley, Pennsylvania, 1753–1800 53 Kathryn Shively Meier 54 Kathryn Shively Meier which the majority of settlers preferred to pursue diplomatic channels while intimidating their neighbors with restrained tactics, such as razing farms and buildings or threatening with makeshift militias, that did not claim lives.4 This argument confronts scholarly stereotypes regarding Appalachian residents, Indian and white. Historians have either left northern Appalachian settlers out of the history of the mountains altogether, or they have portrayed them as a homogenous people who internalized the surrounding untamed landscape and, in isolation from legitimized government, practiced vigilantism. Among the most famous scholars, Frederick Jackson Turner and Arnold Toynbee have labeled Appalachians as uncivilized or as “no better than barbarians.” Richard Slotkin has suggested that borderland Americans reflected the wildernesses they encountered by acting lawlessly.5 Historians have also carelessly labeled the Wyoming claims dispute as a typical mob action that had either escalated beyond the control of its leaders or was a manifestation of political protest.6 These portrayals, however, obscure the complexity of Yankee settlement strategies and reduce the region’s Delaware Indian inhabitants, who also resided in Wyoming Valley during the eighteenth century, to caricatures .7 Both Connecticut settlers and the Delawares operated within the confines of political reality rather than as unruly, anti-institutional mobs who embraced vigilantism in defiance of authorities. They desired legitimacy from the formal power structures governing them: the Delawares had been conquered by the Iroquois Six Nations, and the Yankees were citizens of the colony of Connecticut. Thus, white settlers and Native Americans were not responding to the isolation of the frontier, but rather fully comprehended their incorporation within the British and Indian power structures. The tide of Western settlement had swept them into contested land, where they hoped to build permanent homes and fruitful lives. Anarchy could not serve their goals. Yet neither could the strategy of intimidation permanently resolve the land dispute; settlers required a solution from powers beyond Wyoming Valley. Ironically, whenever claimants invited outside intervention, they also invited violence and suffering. In the northeastern belt of the Appalachian Mountains, within presentday Pennsylvania, sits Wyoming Valley. An adjacent triangular arm of New York separates the valley from the state of Connecticut. Wyoming itself is a crescent-shaped depression that accommodates part of the Susquehanna River, which drops in from the northwest and flows southwesterly for half “Devoted to Hardships, Danger, and Devastation” 55 of the valley, then southeasterly as it exits through a mountain gap. Though the river does not dominate, it enriches the land, making it fertile for agriculture . In October 1754, the Susquehannah Company, a land corporation that laid claim to Wyoming based on the latent Connecticut sea-to-sea charter, had accumulated eight hundred shareholders and begun to survey the area. The surveyors’ presence distressed two groups who also resided in Wyoming: Iroquois Indians...