This analysis has not only described the geography and demography, the politics and economics of the Fair Play settlers; it has also examined the basis and structure of this society, including the value system which undergirded it. The results have pictured the religious liberty extant in a frontier society isolated from any regular or established church, a liberty of conscience which left each man free to worship according to the dictates of his own faith. This freedom, this right to choose for himself, made the Fair Play settler surprisingly receptive to other groups and their practices, practices which he was free to reject, and often did.[19] This analysis has also pointed up the class structure and its significance in promoting order in a frontier community. And finally, an examination of the value system of these Pennsylvania pioneers has provided an understanding of why they behaved as they did.
The last major aspect of this investigation concerned the nature of leadership. Determined by the people, and thus essentially democratic, it had certain peculiar characteristics. In the first place, the top leaders tended to come from the Fair Play community in its broadest social sense, but not from the Fair Play territory in its narrow geographic sense.[20] Secondly, the political participation of the Fair Play settlers, if office-holding is any criterion, emphasizes the high degree of involvement in terms of the total population.[21] And last, this leadership appeared to be overextended when faced with the problem of defending its own frontier and the new nation which was striving so desperately for independence. Consequently, it was forced to turn to established government for support. This may have been the embryonic beginning of the nationalism which the frontier fostered in later generations.
What then, is the meaning of this particular study, an ethnographic interpretation of Turner's thesis? Turner himself, gave the best argument for ethnography. He said that
... the economist, the political scientist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the geographer, the student of literature, of art, of religion--all the allied laborers in the study of society--have contributions to make to the equipment of the historian. These contributions are partly of material, partly of tools, partly of new points of view, new hypotheses, new suggestions of relations, causes, and emphasis. Each of these special students is in some danger of bias by his particular point of view, by his exposure to see simply the thing in which he is primarily interested, and also by his effort to deduce the universal laws of his separate science. The historian, on the other hand, is exposed to the danger of dealing with the complex and interacting social forces of a period or of a country from some single point of view to which his special training or interest inclines him. If the truth is to be made known, the historian must so far familiarize himself with the work, and equip himself with the training of his sister-subjects that he can at least avail himself of their results and in some reasonable degree master the essential tools of their trade.[22]