GEORGE ROGERS CLARK Selected Papers From The 1985 And 1986 George Rogers Clark Trans-Appalachian Frontier History Conferences

Between 1754 and 1800 the military frontier did not correspond with the settlement frontier because the military population was sometimes in front and occasionally to the rear of the most western civilian settlements. [1]

Throughout the forty years from 1755 to 1794 strategists presumed that offensive operations were more effective against Indians than defensive operations, although frontier settlers often disagreed. The defensive alternative — the use of forts in a series forming a perimeter parallel to the enemy's front — was only practical if soldiers could range back and forth between the posts to intercept the enemy. There were never enough troops for that type of patrolling. [2]

Some strategists held that a series of forts roughly forming a column which led — like a series of stepping-stones — into enemy territory was the most desirable system even though the forts might be in the wilderness or in areas inhabited by subdued or hostile civilians. The stepping-stones arrangement was an application of the "Protected advance," a theory presented to the military world in the 1750s by the French soldier Count Turpin de Crissé. [3] Thus, such campaigns as Bouquet's 1764 Ohio expedition and Wayne's Fallen Timbers campaign were related to the systems of forts constructed by Duquesne at the beginning of the French and Indian War and by Forbes in 1758 and 1759 across Pennsylvania. Duquesne's and Forbes' forts were intended to be permanent strongholds, whereas Bouquet's protected camp sites and most of Wayne's forts were not. However, all four were inspired by the strategy of advancing toward the enemy along a series of protected stations.

The contrasting theories about arranging forts, the stepping-stones and the perimeter, were just theories, of course. Forts tending to lie in a perimeter pattern might have been built primarily to shelter civilians; a line of posts pointing toward the enemy's center-of-concentration might have been intended merely to control adjacent areas. [4] The defeat in 1763-1764 of the Indian nations who acted in concert with the Ottawa Chief Pontiac was a triumph for the stepping-stones arrangement of forts because the Indians spent their fury in sieges and assaults on British strongholds far west of the settlement lines. [5]

This paper examines the recurrence of events during two periods, 1754 to 1774, and 1784 to 1800. The British imperial system, including the governments of its colonies, is placed in the same relationship to the frontier community during the first period as the United States' government is in the second. Also, French support of the Indians in the first period is equated to British support after the Revolution. The reoccurrences fall under eleven headings, in chronological sequence. Thus, it is argued that a cycle occurring in the late colonial period repeated itself after the Revolution. The first occurrence of the cycle determined the fate of lands situated between one hundred and two hundred miles to the east of the area in dispute during the second occurrence. These are the eleven points in the cycle:

1. Initially Indian groups were provoked by land cessions made by unauthorized and irresponsible Indians to the governments that were politically responsible for the white settlers. Thus the Iroquois sale to Pennsylvania, in July 1754, of land stretching from the western edge of the previously purchased area to the unsurveyed western limit of William Penn's charter grant, and their sale of the Wyoming Valley to the Susquehannah Company angered many Indians, throwing them onto the French side in the French and Indian War. [6] The post-Revolutionary cycle began with the treaties of forts McIntosh, Stanwix and Finney. These were based on the false assumptions that the Indians recognized that they had been defeated in the Revolution, and that they would willingly yield land to compensate the frontier settlers for atrocities perpetrated during the Revolution. [7]

2. Major military expeditions against the Indians were defeated in wilderness areas into which the society sought to expand. Thus, Braddock's Defeat was an event similar to the defeats of Josiah Harmar and Arthur St. Clair in 1790 and 1791. [8]

3. A "play off' system — the traditional Iroquois diplomatic technique defined by Professor A. F. C. Wallace — was practiced by many Indian nations, although during both periods the Indians did not have as much to bargain with as they thought they had. By "play off" Wallace meant that until 1761 the Iroquois bargained with the French and British by playing off one against the other. [9] Each European power tried to please them to prevent them from falling under the influence of the other. "Play off" may be used to describe the policy of Indians other than the Iroquois, and it was at work after the defeat of the French in the French and Indian War and after the British defeat in the Revolution. [10] During the Revolution various tribes were again in a position to choose between two national armies. Following both the peace settlements with the French — from the surrender of Quebec to the Peace of Paris — and the Definitive Treaty with Britain in 1783, many Indians were unwilling to believe that they had lost their ally. [11]

4. Either because "play off" was not reliable, or simply because the Indians wanted to strengthen themselves against advancing white settlement, steps toward intertribal unification occurred during both periods. There are contrasting explanations of these unification efforts. [13]

5. Despite the desperation of the Pennsylvania frontier society to meet the Indian menace after both Braddock's and St. Clair's defeats, popular internal upheavals occurred in frontier communities located immediately to the rear of the most western settlements. How curious that a society apparently strained to the limit to defend itself could afford the luxury of internal discord. Should not the desperation to save itself from the common enemy have quelled discord and fostered solidarity?

Thus, four crises on the Pennsylvania frontier in the 1760s are equated to the Whiskey Insurrection of 1794. In the 1760s the British and provincial governments faced opposition from the Paxton Boys movement, the Black Boys movement, the Stump murder-indictment protest, and the resistance of the Redstone area squatters. [13] Although a protest against a whiskey excise has no obvious association with the movements of the 1760s, two recent studies make it possible to see points of similarity. [14]

6. Frustrated with the shortcomings of perimeter defense, the governments committed resources for new expeditions into the Indian heartland which were decisive. In the late colonial cycle this involved Bouquet's Ohio expedition of 1764 and, arguably, Forbes' 1758 campaign. [15] In the post-Revolutionary cycle Wayne's 1794 campaign was such an expedition.

7. In addition to virtually uninterrupted conflict with the Indians, and the popular rebellious movements, both Pennsylvania and the higher government to which it owed allegiance (the British Empire in the first period and the United States in the second) were faced with exogenous crises. Thus, the Stamp Act crisis and the gradual deterioration of imperial relationships overshadowed frontier problems in the late colonial period. [16] The movement to alter Pennsylvania's status from a proprietary to a royal colony was the most conspicuous of several reactions to external pressures. [17] In the 1790s the quasi-war with France and crises with Britain and Spain brought problems comparable in their impact to those of the 1760s.

8. Following the victorious expeditions in both 1764 and 1794, peace terms were dictated to the Indians. Both peace settlements left dangerous loose ends which led to subsequent discord. [18]

9. During both periods the policies concerning Indians generated at the highest government levels (Board of Trade, Secretaries of State, War Department and the Parliament in England in the 1760s; the President, Congress and the Secretary of War during the 1790s) were ambiguous and contradictory. [19]

10. In addition, the policy of whichever of the two imperial powers that was supporting Indian political autonomy and opposing expansion in western Pennsylvania and the upper Ohio Valley (France in the 1760s; Britain in the 1790s) involved duplicity and contradictions. [20]

11. Unresolved legal points concerning rights of big land companies, and of squatters and low-income individual farmers, held back the expansion of settlement during both periods. [21]

The American Revolution west of the Allegheny Mountains clearly did not follow the eleven-point cycle, but tendencies to repeat the same pattern existed. The treaty following the defeat of the Shawnees to Dunmore's War was the initial land acquisition, and the rivalry between perimeter defense and the protected-advance expedition was illustrated in both Kentucky and Western Pennsylvania. For two reasons the Revolution in the west provides an historical parallel to the French and Indian War: (1) in both periods the Indians had a true bargaining position between two rival civilized governments; (2) during both periods white population pressure to expand westward increased, and expansion was held back by the military and political situation.

The American Revolution in the west needs to be reinterpreted in view of the urban emphasis in both Gary Nash's The Urban Crucible (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1979) and R. Arthur Bowler's Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775-1783 (Princeton, 1975). Nash presents a thesis that Revolutionary ideology arose primarily in the three major seaports of the north — Boston, Philadelphia and, New York. He emphasized the point that the rural areas of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and the New York colony were essential to the economies of the seaports, and that the economic impact of pre-Revolutionary wars was the major determinant of growth in Boston, Philadelphia and New York. My conclusion derived from Bowler's work is that the war in the east inevitably had to come down to a contest for the major seaports because the British army could not continue without supplies brought in by sea. Whenever British army perimeters expanded too far from the ports the economy of the hinterland ceased to produce for it. Therefore, the army inevitably had to reduce the size of the area it occupied. [22]

It must be emphasized that the areas west of the mountains were not yet the economic or ideological hinterlands of the eastern cities. [25] Thus, Bowler's logistical limitation theory did not apply to the western war. Therefore, western campaigns, although much dependent on logistics, oscillated to a greater degree than the events in the east. In the long run, of course, the war had to be won or lost in the east. As for being an intellectual hinterland, it is clear that the west only slowly developed the patriotic ideology that had been spawned in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Although that statement may anger many current historians, transmontane westerners chose sides after guessing who would win the war, and many of them would have liked to have avoided the choice entirely. The coincidental deaths of two potential frontier leaders, John Bradstreet and Sir William Johnson, and the eclipse of George Croghan's influence left gaps in leadership; the initial ambivalence of potential leaders such as George Morgan, Simon Girty, Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott, was in line with the attitude of much of the western population.

The western Revolutionary operations were not tied to the eastern seaports, but they were much influenced by sites that became major inland cities. The war appropriately linked the predictable economic potential of Pittsburgh, Louisville, Detroit and Niagara with the established economic power of Boston, Philadelphia and New York.

CITATIONS

1. Geographer John Florin describes expansion in Pennsylvania with the military sector, as he delineates it, factored out. Fiorin, "The Advance of Frontier Settlement in Pennsylvania, 1690-1870." Thesis, Pennsylvania State University, 1966.

2. Preference for offensives was often expressed. Robert Dinwiddie to Washington, 26 July 1755, W. W. Abbot, ed., The Papers of George Washington, Col. Series (Charlottesville, 1983 — ), 1:344; William Pitt to colonial governors, 30 December 1757, Gertrude S. Kimball, ed., Correspondence of William Pitt (2 vols., London, 1906), 1: 141; Daniel Brodhead to Washington, 21 March 1779, Louise P. Kellogg, ed., Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio (Madison, 1916), Wisconsin Historical Society Collections, 23: 262-263; Thomas Gage to Henry Bouquet, 4 April 1764, British Library Add. Mss. 21638, f. 293; Henry Bouquet to James, Livingston, 11 June 1764, ibid., f. 256.

To have made Virginia's perimeter of forts impenetrable in 1755-1756 the Virginia Regiment would have had to have had more men than the government provided, or have been supplemented by more militia. See Douglas Southall Freeman et. al., George Washington (7 vols., New York, 1948-1957), 2: 212-220.

3. Lancelot, Count Turpin de Crissé's Essai sur l'Art de lad Guerre, published in Paris in 1754, its German translation published in 1756, and Joseph Otway's 1761 English translation were the basis for spreading the tactical doctrine known as the "Protected Advance." I have read the Otway translation at the U.S. Army Military History Collection, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. It may be said to be the model for both Bouquet's and Wayne's expedition. J. A. Houlding concludes that the work was read by Forbes, Bouquet, Wolfe and (as early as 1761) Washington. Turpin was a colonel of French hussars from 1747 to 1761, and by 1792 a lieutenant general. Houlding, Fit for Service: The Training of the British Army, 1715-1795 (Oxford, United Kingdom, 1781), 201-202n. It is my conclusion that "protected advance" was basically a form of the "stepping-stones" pattern. The original purpose of Forbes' series of forts leading to Pittsburgh was a single campaign, and the British were undecided until January 1759 whether to continue to maintain them. For more on Turpin see King Lawrence Parker, "Anglo-American Wilderness Campaigning 1754-1764: Logistical and Tactical DevelopmentS" (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1970), Chapter VII.

4. The perimeter of forts built in Pennsylvania following Braddock's Defeat was too far east by the time it was completed to be tested in combat. There had been plans for a ranging system, but the shelter the forts provided to settlers was their only practical application. See William A. Hunter, Forts on the Pennsylvania Frontier (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1960), Chapters 7 and 8; Robert Hunter Morris to William Shirley, 9 February 1756, Charles H. Lincoln, ed., Correspondence of William Shirley (2 vols., New York, 1912), 2: 388-390. The French forts in the Great Lakes region and the west were arranged neither as perimeters nor as stepping-stones pointed at an enemy center. When the English decided in 1760 to occupy them, however, they may be said to have formed a line directed into areas where French influence was still strong.

5. This assumes that if the forts had not been there Indian destructiveness in Virginia and Pennsylvania would have been much greater. Of course, it could be argued that the number of forts that fell was the measure of British defeat. See James T. Flexner, Mohawk Baronet, Sir William Johnson of New York (New York, 1959), 256-274. But the British returned to most of the same forts after the war. They made certain, however, that garrison strengths did not drop as low as in 1763. The futuristic military recommendations in [William Smith], Historical Account of Bouquet's Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764 (Philadelphia, 1765), Appendix I, proposed that forts be deliberately maintained in Indian areas as shock absorbers.

6. Not only were the non-Iroquois angry because those non-resident masters had sold without their consent, but the individual Iroquois who made the two sales were dishonest by the standards of either Indian or European culture. C. Hales Sipe, The Indian Wars of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, 1929), 172-178; Roger B. Trask, "Pennsylvania and the Albany Congress, 1954," Pennsylvania History, 38 (1960), 281-283. A. F. C. Wallace, King of the Delawares: Teedyuscung, 1700-1763 (Philadelphia, 1949), 59-62; William R. Shepherd, History of Proprietary Government in Pennsylvania (New York, 1896), 112-113.

7. Reginald Horsman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (Lansing, Michigan, 1967), 12.

8. When Chief Shingas asked Braddock on 27-28 May 1755 what he meant to do with the land after the French were driven out of the Ohio Valley, he replied "the English should inhabit and inherit the land." Quoted in Francis P. Jennings, "Miquon's Passing: Indian-European Relations in Colonial Pennsylvania, 1674 to 1755," (PhD. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. 1965), 450. In July 1753 Iroquois from Logstown were convinced that the English intended to settle in the area, unlike the French who merely wanted to trade. Ibid., 439. Harmar's and St. Clair's expeditions, of course, were intended to make settlement practical under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

9. Anthony F. C. Wallace. The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca (New York, 1970), 111-114.

10. The French factor in Indian relations after the fall of New France is implicit in the concern General Thomas Gage. Sir William Johnson and others expressed on the subject. E.g.. Gage to Johnson, 25 April 1773, James Sullivan et al., ed., The Papers of Sir William Johnson (13 vols. and index, Albany, 1921-1965), 8:778-779; Johnson to John Blackburn, 11 December 1771, ibid., 8: 341: same to same, 20 January 1774. ibid., 8; 1007-1008. French collusion contributed to Pontiac's movement. Howard H. Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, 1947), 97-107 passim.

Many Indian groups relied on British support for many years after the Revolution. The United States government was sufficiently convinced that the British were willing to increase the amount of support they gave the Indians. Thus, the Indians were able to exploit the polarization that existed between the United States and Britain.

11. Randolph C. Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio (Pittsburgh, 1969), 119-120, 277-278.

12. Anthony F. C. Wallace assumes that the Iroquois' control over nations other than the Six Nations was more than a traditional formality. He states that when the Shawnees were dispossessed by Iroquois bargaining at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1768) they secretly joined with the western Indians in a confederation which rivaled the Iroquois system. Wallace, Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, 122.

Randolph C. Downes traced an attempt by the Iroquois to ally with the Cherokee to make war on the western Indians in 1769. This was thwarted by Sir William Johnson's intercession. Then, a secret Shawnee joint effort with the Seneca war faction led by Gaustarax sent war belts to the western nations calling for a surprise attack on the English colonies. Johnson learned of it and again intervened, but the western Indians would neither parley nor surrender the belts. Therefore, Downes relates that Johnson isolated the real troublemakers, the Shawnees, by allowing the western Indians (Wabash and Illinois) to fall back under the influence of the French while pampering the Delawares and Iroquois with presents in the east. This set the stage for Dunmore's War. Downes, Council Fires, 145-151. The Indian confederation after the Revolution was spontaneous, founded at a conference held at Sandusky in September 1783. Its strength rose and fell, but it was the central force defending the Ohio River boundary until 1795. Ibid., 282 et seq.

J. Leitch Wright, while not denying that an organization of western Indians arose from the Sandusky conference, states that the Shawnees and Cherokees were catalysts for tendencies to unite all Indians, north and south as well as east and west. In the Old Northwest the Indians' confidence in their ability to defend the Ohio River line grew after St. Clair's defeat, but the prompting of John Graves Simcoe and other British officials who wanted an independent trans-Ohio River Indian buffer state lay behind much of the effort for a real Indian confederation. This effort arose when the Nootka Sound crisis broke, and subsided after Fallen Timbers and other world events of 1794-1795. More than any of the other historians discussing confederation efforts, Wright emphasizes that the Cherokees and often the Creeks thought in concert with the northeastern and western nations. The next confederation movement, the one that fully materialized, was, of course, the powerful system developed by Tecumseh. J. Leitch Wright, Jr., Britain and the American Frontier, 1783-1815, (Athens, Georgia, 1975), 49, 61-63, 74, 79-83, 88-90, 95, 97.

Isabel Thompson Kelsay's biography of Joseph Brant gives much detail about Indian confederation activities. She especially emphasized Brant's metaphor "the dish with one spoon," the principle that all Indian nations should hold as one people and share equally the vast areas west of United States' control. He made this principle the basis for his type of confederation and stood against divisiveness among the Indians. His willingness to accept a boundary line at the Muskingum River, yielding the Ohio River line, placed his position between those Indians afraid to go to war again and the extremists, mostly from the western nations, who insisted on the Ohio. Kelsay, Joseph Brant, 1743-1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse, 1984), 410, 415-439, 502.

Dr. Greg Dowd takes a different approach to the origins of pan-Indian movements in "Sacred Power: American Indian Nativism, 1745-1775," a paper presented at the Philadelphia Center for Early American Studies Seminar, 10 January 1986, and cite here with his permission. (I have not read Dr. Dowd's dissertation.) Feeling powerless because white culture overshadowed their own in so many ways, Indian thought came to look upon sacred power as their salvation. A group of influential religious prophets flourished from 1745 to 1775, and emphasized united Indian efforts against white culture as the road to spiritual salvation. The Shawnees led this pan-Indian movement because (as Wright also said), they had so many kinship ties to other nations by virtue of having fled so often and often having been fragmented. Thus, for Dowd, it was not merely military defeat or resentment against white farmers embracing what had been Indian hunting grounds that pulled the Indians together; it was a deeper, more complicated process.

13. For the Paxton Boys movement see Brooke Hindle, "The March of the Paxton Boys," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 3 (1946), 461-486; James Kirby Martin, "The Return of the Paxton Boys and the Historical State of the Pennsylvania Frontier, 1764-1774," Pennsylvania History, 38(1971), 117-133; and Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., The Paxton Riots and the Frontier Theory (Chicago, 1967). For the Black Boys movement see Samuel Hazard, ed., Pennsylvania Archives [First Service], (12 vols., Philadelphia, 1852-1856), 4:218-248; Neil H. Swanson, The First Rebel (Rahway, New Jersey, 1937); and Eleanor M. Webster, "Insurrection at Fort Loudoun in 1765: Rebellion or Preservation of the Peace?," Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, 47 (1964), 124-139. For the Stump protests see Gail S. Howe, "The Frederick Stump Affair, 1768, and its Challenge to Legal Historians of Early Pennsylvania," Pennsylvania History, 49 (1982), 259-280; and Linda Ries, "'The Rage of Opposing Government': The Stump Affair of 1768," Cumberland County History, 1 (1984), 21-45. For the Redstone squatters see Downes, Council Fires, 136-138; Franklin Ellis, ed., History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1882), 57-63; and Clarence E. Carter, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Gage (2 vols., New Haven, 1933), 1:139, 2: 45.

14. Dorothy E. Fennell, "From Rebelliousness to Insurrection, 1765-1802," (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 1981); Thomas P. Slaughter, "Liberty, Order and the Excise: The Origins of the Whiskey Rebellion and the Context of Frontier Unrest in Early America," (Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1983). Fennell finds a continuing theme of symbolism in colonial violence beginning with the Black Boys' practice of blacking their faces. She also includes incidents of objection to the state whiskey excise which predated the federal excise, and she establishes that the big western Pennsylvania distillers favored the excise because it eliminated their smaller competitors. Slaughter views the rebellion as a point of crisis in the development of two opposing attitudes in colonial America, liberty and order. He argues that the average westerner lived in grinding poverty. After the settlers had been left unprotected to Indian violence since Harmar's defeat, the federal excise was a last straw touching off open insurrection. His historiographical essay is very important for understanding the period. Slaughter's The Whiskey Rebellion; Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (Oxford, United Kingdom, 1986) has just reached our library.

It is remarkable that so many surveys of the events of 1794 fail to look for associations between the Indian war and the Whiskey Insurrection. Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword (New York and London, 1975), however, places them side by side in Chapter 8, "Two Uses of Force." In 1792 Hugh H. Brackenridge linked the two events when he argued against the excise tax on the frontier. He pointed out that that area had many other problems, the threat of Indian conflict among them. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection (reprint, New Haven, 1972), 48. This suggests Slaughter's explanation.

15. Fort Duquesne, Forbes' objective, was a center for supporting Indian war parties that devastated the Pennsylvania and Virginia settlements. It may be said that the expedition of 1758 was primarily against the French and was not the type of operation that would have been launched against the Indians alone. The fort was abandoned by the French because the logistical passage from Lake Erie was too cumbersome and because Christian Frederick Post's diplomacy caused many Indians in western Pennsylvania to defect from the French before Forbes reached Fort Duquesne. See Alfred P. James, ed., Writings of General John Forbes (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1938), and S. K. Stevens and Donald H. Kent, eds., The Papers of Henry Bouquet, 2. The Forbes Expedition (Harrisburg, 1951).

For Bouquet's expedition see S. K. Stevens, Donald H. Kent, and Leo J. Roland, eds., The Papers of Colonel Henry Bouquet; Northwest Pennsylvania Colonial Series (19 vols., Harrisburg, 1940-1943), Series 21651, Series 21653, Series 21654 and Series 21655; Edward G. Williams, ed., The Orderly Book of Colonel Henry Bouquet's Expedition Against the Ohio Indians, 1764 (Pittsburgh, 1960); Williams, ed., Bouquet's March to the Ohio; The Forbes Road (Pittsburgh, 1975); and [Smith], Historical Account of Bouquet's Expedition Against the Ohio Indians in 1764, 16. The repeal of the Stamp Act deprived the British of the revenue necessary for the "Plan of 1764," the most comprehensive arrangement for controlling Indian trade in the colonies. Therefore, the Plan was never made official. Efforts of administrators to follow the principles involved in the Plan also failed. Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962), 23-24.

17. See James H. Hutson, Pennsylvania Politics, 1746-1770 (Princeton, 1972).

18. Peace terms following Pontiac's defeat were not fully settled until 1786. Most glaring of the loose ends left by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of that year was the unenforceable exclusion of the Shawnees from their Kentucky hunting grounds. See Downes, Council Fires, 140-159. The lingering problems following the Treaty of Fort Greenville are best presented in Reginald Horseman, Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812, Chapter 7.

19. The shifting policies of the British government are explained in greatest detail in Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1961). Glaring inconsistencies in Indian policies of the early United States included the use of war guilt rationale in the first treaties negotiated after the Revolution, and the false diplomatic peace profile maintained from January 1793 until the Battle of Fallen Timbers. For the latter see Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 149.

20. The French, having surrendered New France and then ended the Seven Years War, gave clandestine support to Pontiac's movement. British inconsistencies following the American Revolution include the various arguments given for continuing to hold the forts in the Old Northwest, the off-and-on support of the idea of an independent Indian buffer state, and deceiving the Indians into believing that they would provide them military support against Wayne. The inner workings of British policy in the post-Revolutionary period are lucidly explained in Wright, Britain and the Americans Frontier, 1783-1815, 21. For the big land companies that existed before the Revolution see Thomas P. Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York, 1937); Max Savelle, George Morgan, Colony Builder (New York, 1932); and Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1961). Problems of the small frontier land holder before the Revolution included the cost of the land and preemption rights. In the same year that the Pennsylvania Assembly enacted a death penalty for squatters its courts finally recognized preemption rights. The subject is lightly covered in Solon J. Buck and Mary Hawthorn Buck, The Planting of Civilization in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, 1939).

For the period following the Revolution see Elizabeth K. Henderson, "The North West Lands of Pennsylvania, 1790-1812," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 40(1936), 131-160; and Norman B. Wilkinson, Land Policy and Speculation in Pennsylvania, 1779-1800 (New York, 1979).

22. Louis M. Waddell, Review of Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775-1783, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 33(1976), 540-542. It is possible that I have drawn conclusions from statements in this book which go beyond the author's intentions.

23. In the process of correcting the agrarian myth upon which Richard Hofstadter and others based interpretations of Jeffersonianism, Joyce O. Appleby has questioned whether subsistence farming ever existed in America between 1788 and 1820, years when the European market for grain made farming in America very profitable. Appleby, "Commercial Farming and the 'Agrarian Myth' in the Early American Republic," Journal of American History, 68(1982-1983), 839-840, 842, 847. Perhaps the farming economic hinterland serving Philadelphia gave economic motivation to even the smallest farmer tilling the soil within its area, and only those farmers beyond the hinterland, i.e. at distance so great from the city that transportation costs forbid profits, were truly subsistence farmers. It would be interesting to trace the geographic limits of the hinterland of Philadelphia's economy in the Western Pennsylvania-Ohio Valley region. Such a study would help to explain behavior in the western area during the period with which we are concerned. The works of James T. Lemon — The Best Poor Man's Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania (Baltimore, 1972) and "Household Consumption in Early Colonial America And Its Relationship to Production and Trade: The Situation Among Farmers in Southeastern Pennsylvania," Agricultural History, 41(1967), 59-70, and Bettye Hobbs Pruitt, "Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 41(1984), 335-364, provide models of how statistical data may be brought to bear on the topic of agricultural self-sufficiency, though they do not consider features of the frontier environment or the impact of distance from the big city markets.