"The land was ours before we were the land's," the poet said, and it seems apropos of this moment in history.[41] Fair Play territory, possessed before it was owned and operated under de facto rule, would be some time in Americanizing the sturdy frontiersmen who came to bring civilization to this wilderness.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Carl L. Becker, Beginnings of the American People (Ithaca, N. Y., 1960), p. 182.
[2] Turner, Frontier and Section, p. 51.
[3] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1963), p. 9.
[4] E. B. O'Callaghan, Documentary History of the State of New York (Albany, 1849), I, 587-591.
[5] Henry Steele Commager, Documents of American History (New York, 1958), I, 49.
[6] An earlier twentieth-century historian misinterprets the first Stanwix Treaty in much the same manner as earlier colonial historians erred in their judgments of the Proclamation of 1763. Albert T. Volwiler, George Croghan and the Westward Movement, 1741-1782 (Cleveland, 1926), p. 250, really overstates his case, if the Fair Play settlers are any example, when he claims that the Fort Stanwix line, by setting a definite boundary, impeded the western advance. Establishing friendships with the Indians and then persuading them to sell their lands proved valuable to more than speculators, whose case Volwiler documents so well, as West Branch settlements after 1768 will attest.
[7] The extension of Provincial authority to Pine Creek would have taken in three-fourths of what we have labeled Fair Play territory.
[8] John F. Meginness, Otzinachson: A History of the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna (Williamsport, 1889), p. 106. The full passage from the Bethlehem Diary (now in the Moravian Archives) was translated by the late Dr. William N. Schwarze for Dr. Paul A. W. Wallace, historian of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, as follows: "In the afternoon [June 8, New Style] our brethren left that place [beyond Montoursville] and came in the evening to the Limping Messenger on the Tiadachton Creek, where they spent the night." In the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, II (1878), 432 (hereafter cited as PMHB), Zeisberger's account is translated in this manner: "In the afternoon we proceeded on our journey, and at dusk came to the 'Limping Messenger,' or Diadachton Creek Otzinachson (1889), p. 106. Referring the passage to Vernon H. Nelson of the Moravian Archives, through Dr. Wallace, resulted in a clarification of the translation and the affirmation of the "Limping Messenger" as a camp on the stream. In the Bethlehem Diary, under June 8, 1754, the sentence appears as follows: "des Nachm. reissten unsre Brr Wieder von da weg u kamen Abends zum hinckenden Boten an der Tiatachton Creek, u lagen da uber Nacht." In the original travel journal the passage reads: "des Nachm. reissten wir wieder von da weg, u kamen Abends zum hinckenden Boten an der Tiatachton Crick u lagen da uber Nacht." De Schweinitz in his Zeisberger further confused the issue in his description of the journey. He takes the adventurers (Zeisberger, Spangenburg, Conrad Weiser, Shickellamy, and Andrew Montour) through the valley of the Tiadaghton Creek on the Sheshequin Path to Onondaga (Syracuse). There was an Indian path up Pine Creek, but it led to Niagara, not Onondaga.