While this writer's approach is dominantly Turnerian, this study does not necessarily contend that this Pennsylvania frontier was typical of the general colonial experience, nor that this ethnographic analysis presents in microcosm the development of the American ethos. However, on this farmer's frontier there was adequate evidence of the composite nationality, the self-reliance, the independence, and the nationalistic and rationalistic traits which Turner characterized as American.
In his famed essay on "The Significance of the Frontier," Turner saw the frontier as the crucible in which the English, Scotch-Irish, and Palatine Germans were merged into a new and distinctly American nationality, no longer characteristically English.[2] The Pennsylvania frontier, with its dominant Scotch-Irish and German influence, is a case in point.
The Fair Play territory of the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna River, the setting for this analysis, was part of what Turner called the second frontier, the Allegheny Mountains.[3] Located about ninety miles up the Susquehanna from the present State capital at Harrisburg, and extending some twenty-five-odd miles westward between the present cities of Williamsport and Lock Haven, this territory was the heartland of the central Pennsylvania frontier in the decade preceding the American Revolution.
The term "Fair Play settlers," used to designate the inhabitants of this region, is derived from the extra-legal political system which these democratic forerunners set up to maintain order in their developing community. Being squatters and, consequently, without the bounds of any established political agency, they formed their own government, and labeled it "Fair Play."
However, despite the apparent simplicity of the above geographic description, the exact boundaries of the Fair Play territory have been debated for almost two centuries. Before we can assess the democratic traits of the Fair Play settlers, we must first clearly define what is meant by the Fair Play territory.
The terminal points in this analysis are 1768 and 1784, the dates of the two Indian treaties made at Fort Stanwix (now Rome), New York. The former opened up the Fair Play territory to settlement, and the latter brought it within the limits of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, thus legalizing the _de facto_ political structure which had developed in the interim.