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

In the heyday of the American steel industry, observers sometimes described western Pennsylvania, as Daniel Barr reminds us in A Colony Sprung from Hell, as “Hell with the lid off” (271). The fires of political and ethnic conflict that burn throughout Barr’s account of the region’s earlier, eighteenth-century history were more metaphorical than real, but they burned just as brightly. Indians and European settlers fought to determine who could call the upper Ohio Valley home, French and British and American soldiers fought over whose flag would fly over Pittsburgh, and Pennsylvanian and Virginian officials and land speculators maneuvered to control the district’s institutions and resources. Out of this cauldron came something like a democratic polity, but not until after fifty years of bloodshed and misery. If western Pennsylvania was, as the author suggests, the archetype of the American frontier, then the frontier was a dreadful place to live.

The masters of the long political chess game for control of the upper Ohio Valley, we learn from Barr’s deeply researched narrative, were speculators in Virginia and Pennsylvania, both of which claimed the region under their colonial charters. In their contest for land and wealth, men like John Murray (Earl of Dunmore), George Washington, and Samuel Wharton used imperial officials and armies as their bishops and knights, and white settlers as their pawns. In the mid-1750s Governor Robert Dinwiddie picked a fight with the French to neutralize Pennsylvania’s claims and justify an (abortive) Virginian conquest of the Ohio Forks. Pennsylvania expansionists, like Benjamin Franklin, countered by backing Edward Braddock’s ill-fated 1755 expedition, hoping that the imperial army would supersede both Virginia’s authority and the Penn family’s land monopoly. Their plans came to grief, with backcountry settlers suffering the most as French-allied Indians destroyed their settlements. Both parties of speculators returned to the chessboard after the Seven Years’ War: merchant Samuel Wharton and his associates formed the Indiana Company and opened direct negotiations with Britain to outflank the Penns, while Virginia’s venial governor, Lord Dunmore, “wove…[a] tapestry of war” (p. 159) between his colony and the Shawnees to smother Pennsylvania’s claims.

By 1775 the two colonies were in a state of undeclared war. Their struggle temporarily abated during the War for American Independence, as Congress and the Continental Army injected their own weak but measurable authority into western Pennsylvania. It did not end, however, until 1779-80, when the two rebellious states’ governments permanently established Pennsylvania’s western boundary and cleared the Keystone State’s claims west of that line. Essentially, Virginia swapped western Pennsylvania for a stronger claim to Kentucky, which soon drained the region of some of its more disaffected settlers: disgruntled Virginians moved to Kentucky after Pennsylvania declined to endorse their land warrants, and ex-rebels fled there after the Whiskey Rebellion.

Decades of conflict and contested authority made western Pennsylvania’s white settlers a distrustful and ungovernable lot, even without factoring in the psychic damage that Native American raiders inflicted in three successive wars. The Delawares, Iroquois, and Shawnees hoped that burnt cabins and dismembered bodies would persuade Anglo-Americans that Native nations were not to be trifled with. Unfortunately, the imperial governments to whom they addressed their bloody messages either declined to listen or lacked the power to restrain white Pennsylvanians, who wanted vengeance and security and made no distinction between the two. Pennsylvania settlers murdered Indian men and women in the 1760s, and in the 1770s and ‘80s, American officers who wanted settlers’ support learned that the best way to get it was to set them against Native Americans, plundering their towns and (in the case of James Marshal’s Gnaddenhutten raid) smashing in their heads. Eventually even elitist Federalists learned, as Eric Hinderaker first noted in Elusive Empires (1997...