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Chapter 7 “Artful Deceivers” Yankee Notables and the Resolution of theWyoming Controversy In rural communities across early America, a few leading inhabitants stood above their neighbors in terms of wealth and social status. In Northeast Pennsylvania , one such man was Bartlett Hinds. A Revolutionary War veteran who often went by the title “Captain,” Hinds was no ordinary frontier settler. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, he came to the Susquehanna Valley in 1800. Once there, he developed a four-hundred-acre tract along Wyalusing Creek that he had purchased from the one-time governor of Connecticut Samuel Huntingdon and, in the capacity of a resident land agent, promoted Huntingdon’s efforts to sell and settle thousands of additional acres he held in Pennsylvania under the Connecticut claim. Hinds did not migrate to the frontier alone but brought his wife, daughter, three sons, a brother, and half-a-dozen other families with him. He soon emerged as the chief inhabitant of a growing backcountry community known as “The Hinds Settlement.” In keeping with his position as a leading man and revolutionary veteran, Captain Hinds organized his settlement’s Fourth of July celebrations. One year he even orchestrated an ingenious thirteen-gun salute (one for each of the rebellious colonies) to America’s independence. Using a technique practiced by frontiersmen to clear land, Hinds cut a line of thirteen trees until they were just ready to fall. Then, with the stroke of an ax, he caused the first, “driver,” tree to topple which, in turn, caused the other trees to fall with a thundering crash that resembled “the roar of cannon.”1 175 1. Emily C. Blackman, History of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1873), 287–89. For an example of how Hind’s tree-felling stunt was used by settlers to clear land, see In the early nineteenth century, Northeast Pennsylvania began to shed its raw frontier character and start down the road to becoming a market-connected agricultural hinterland. This process of improvement enhanced the position of a group of local notables whose reputation, wealth, and authority placed them above other settlers and made them key players in the region’s struggle for property and power.2 Samuel Preston, land agent to Pennsylvania landholder Henry Drinker, penned a letter to his employer in 1803 outlining the central role Yankee notables played in the Wyoming controversy. Preston divided the Connecticut claimants who occupied Drinker’s lands into two categories: a few leading men who were resident proprietors of the Susquehannah and Delaware companies and a much larger number of ordinary settlers. He described the former as “swindlers” and “artful deceivers” who sought to profit from their investments in the Connecticut claim and the latter as the “ignorant deceived” who, though they were primarily concerned with protecting their individual holdings, were cajoled into supporting their leaders’ more extensive claims. In sum, Preston believed that Yankee notables were essential to the maintenance of settler resistance and the pivot point on which the course of events in Northeast Pennsylvania would turn.3 Yankee notables may have occupied a pivotal position but it was not an easy one. Leading men found that they had to reconcile self-interest with what was best for their communities. On the one hand, the power and influence of leading men was rooted in their locales. It rested in their neighbors’ willingness to recognize their authority and was contingent on their ability to protect and promote their neighbors’ interests. On the other, Yankee notables formed a rising class of backcountry entrepreneurs who at times went beyond their communities to secure wealth, power, and legitimacy. These overlapping identities did not always coexist in harmony. This was especially true in the first decade of the nineteenth century when Pennsylvania and hard-pressed Yankee settlers forced them to decide between the two. Intentionally or not, the choices they made helped to pave the way to the final settlement of the Wyoming dispute. 176 Wild Yankees Alan Taylor, Liberty Men and the Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement of the Maine Frontier , 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), 64. 2. For a discussion of the role of leading men in the revolutionary frontier’s agrarian disturbances , see Taylor, Liberty Men, 155–77; and Richard M. Brown, “Back Country Rebellions and the Homestead Ethic in America, 1740–1799,” in Tradition, Conflict, and Modernization: Perspectives on the American Revolution, ed. Richard M. Brown and Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, 1977), 87–91. 3. Samuel Preston to...

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