Wild Yankees: The Struggle for Independence along Pennsylvania's Revolutionary Frontier

1. “Among Quarrelsome Yankees, Insidious Indians, and Lonely Wilds”: Natives, Colonists, and the Wyoming Controversy

Chapter 1 “Among Quarrelsome Yankees, Insidious Indians, and Lonely Wilds” Natives, Colonists, and theWyoming Controversy On July 20, 1775, the Reverend Philip Vickers Fithian prepared to set out from Sunbury, Pennsylvania, up the north branch of the Susquehanna River. Fithian, a New Jersey native, graduate of Princeton, and one-time tutor in the employ of the powerful Virginia planter Robert Carter, had received a license from the Presbytery of Philadelphia the previous December to make missionary tours through western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. It was on one of these tours that the reverend made his way up the Susquehanna Valley. Fithian, contemplating the road before him, wrote in his diary: “I must now away up this long river, sixty miles higher, among quarrelsome Yankees, insidious Indians, and, at best, lonely wilds.”1 Fithian journeyed into a revolutionary frontier in the making. His diary entry , besides expressing his foreboding of the trip that lay ahead, alludes to some of the peoples and processes that were instrumental to its formation. The reverend ’s reference to “insidious Indians” serves as a reminder that Native peoples occupied the eastern woodlands long before the arrival of European colonists and that the farmer’s American Revolution was, in part, a product of IndianEuropean conflict. Next, Fithian’s allusion to “quarrelsome Yankees,” though specifically aimed at the Connecticut claimants who contested Pennsylvania’s authority in the upper Susquehanna and Delaware valleys, brings to mind the 13 1. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, 24 vols. (New York, 1999), 8:44–45; Extracts from the Diary of the Rev. Philip Vickers Fithian, July 20, 1775, SCP 6:329. thousands of determined and factious Euroamericans who both settled and unsettled the frontier. Finally, Fithian’s mention of “lonely wilds,” though it ignores the fact that the backcountry was hardly a virgin land before the arrival of Europeans, suggests the importance of the land itself to the story of the revolutionary frontier, for possession of the land was the axis of contention between colonists and Indians and, later, among the whites who invaded, claimed, and occupied America. Like Fithian’s diary entry, events in the opening decades of the Wyoming dispute illustrate that the struggle for independence along the revolutionary frontier was born of, and shaped by, an earlier battle for land and power fought between Indians and colonists. The controversy highlights that land disputes between colonies and colonists were both products and catalysts of Indian dispossession . Indeed, one of the earliest casualties of the legal maneuvering and violence that marked the Wyoming dispute was Indian soil rights. Exploring the origins of agrarian unrest in Northeast Pennsylvania also reveals how a distinct culture of violence took root among the region’s white inhabitants, which was, in part, an undeniable legacy of bitter, racially charged conflict between Indians and colonists. One of the most enduring links between Indian-European contact and the struggle over property and power in the Wyoming region was a brutal brand of violence that settlers first deployed against Native adversaries and, later, against competing groups of whites. The Origins of the Wyoming Controversy The Wyoming controversy grew out of the land and jurisdictional disputes that were endemic in British America. Imperial officials, who often possessed little knowledge of the American landscape they parceled out, issued vague or inaccurate patents that frequently interfered with earlier grants or encroached on competing claims. In addition, Indians, with their decentralized political systems, their own jurisdictional controversies, and their distinctive cultural definitions of property rights, commonly resold the same piece of land to different purchasers. Colonists, desiring to claim for themselves as much New World territory as possible , actively abetted imperial officials’ geographical fictions and Indians’ problematic land transactions. As a result, colonies and colonists who assumed that royal grants and Indian deeds ceded clear and absolute ownership of land often became embroiled in territorial disputes.2 It was this set of circumstances that 14 Wild Yankees 2. For a discussion of Indian attitudes toward property, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, 1983), 54–68. Examples of how disputes over royal charters and Indian deeds fueled land disputes can be found in: Alan Taylor, Gnadenhütten Shamokin/ Ft.Augusta N 0 0 40 20 60 km 30 20 10 40 mi Susquehannah Company’s purchase Delaware Company’s...