The early pioneer, particularly if he was Scotch-Irish, generally came into the area from the Cumberland Valley, the "seed-plot and nursery" of the Scotch-Irish in America, the "original reservoir" of this leading frontier stock, via the Great Shamokin Path.[3] Since there were no roads, only Indian trails, the frontier traveler customarily followed the Indian paths which had been cleared along the rivers and streams. The Great Shamokin Path followed the Susquehanna from Shamokin (now Sunbury) to the West Branch, then out along the West Branch to the Allegheny Mountains.[4] Loading his wife and smaller children on a pack horse, his scanty possessions on another horse, the prospective settler drove a cow or two into the wild frontier at the rate of about twenty miles a day.[5] This meant that a trip of approximately two days brought him from Fort Augusta to the Fair Play country.
Indian paths were the primary means of ingress and egress, although supplemented by the waterways which they paralleled. In addition to the Great Shamokin Path, there were paths up Lycoming Creek (the Sheshequin Path), and up Pine Creek, besides the path which followed Bald Eagle Creek down into the Juniata Valley. These trails and adjoining water routes were usually traveled on horseback or in canoes, depending upon the route to be followed. However, the rivers and streams were more often passages of departure than courses of entry.
Established roads, that is authorized public constructions, were not to reach the West Branch region until 1775, although the Northumberland County Court ordered such construction and reported on it at the October term in 1772.[6] Appointments were made at the August session of 1775 "to view, and if they saw cause, to lay out a bridle road from the mouth of Bald Eagle Creek to the town of Sunbury."[7] It was not until ten years later that extensions of this road were authorized, carrying it into the Nittany Valley and to Bald Eagle's Nest (near Milesburg, on the Indian path from the Great Island to Ohio).[8]
Travel was usually on horseback or on foot. Canoes and flatboats, or simply rafts, were used on the rivers and creeks where available. Wagons, however, appeared after the construction of public roads and were seen in the Great Runaway of 1778.[9]
The problem of communication between the frontier and the settled areas was a difficult one compounded by the natural geographic barriers and the fact that post and coach roads did not extend into this central Pennsylvania region. As a result the inhabitants had to depend upon occasional travelers, circuit riders, surveyors, and other Provincial authorities who visited them infrequently. Otherwise, the meetings of the Fair Play tribunal, irregular as they were, and the communications from the county Committee of Safety were about the only sources of information available. Of course, cabin-building, cornhusking, and quilting parties provided ample opportunities for the dissemination of strictly "local" news.
Newspapers were not introduced into the upper Susquehanna Valley until around the turn of the century. The Northumberland Gazette was published in Sunbury in 1797 or 1798.[10] The first truly West Branch paper was not circulated until 1802, when the Lycoming Gazette was first published in Williamsport.[11] On the eve of the Revolution there were only seven newspapers available in the entire Province, none of which circulated as far north as the Fair Play territory.[12] As a matter of fact, there were only thirty-seven papers printed in all thirteen colonies at the beginning of the Revolution.[13]
The Fair Play settler was an "outlaw," a squatter who came into this central Pennsylvania wilderness with his family and without the benefit of a land grant, and who literally hacked and carved out a living. The natural elements, the savage natives, and the wild life all resisted him; but he conquered them all, and the conquest gave him a feeling of accomplishment which enhanced his independent spirit.
If the story of the Great Plains frontier can be told in terms of railroads, barbed-wire fences, windmills, and six-shooters,[14] then the cruder tale of the West Branch frontier can be told in terms of the rifle, the axe, and the plow. The rifle, first and foremost as the weapon of security, was the basic means of self-preservation in a wild land where survival was a constant question.[15] The axe, which Theodore Roosevelt later described as "a servant hardly standing second even to the rifle,"[16] was the main implement of destruction and construction. It was used for clearing the forest of the many trees which encroached upon the acreage which the settler had staked out for himself, and for cutting the logs which would provide the rude, one-room shelter the pioneer constructed for himself and his family. The crude wooden plow was the implement which made this frontiersman a farmer, although its effectiveness was extremely limited. However, the soil was so fertile, and the weeds so sparse, that scratching the earth and scattering seeds produced a crop.[17]
A contemporary description of squatter settlements in Muncy Hills, some twenty-odd miles east of the Fair Play territory, but in the West Branch Valley, gives a vivid picture of the nature of these early establishments: