The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 | Page 8

Evans and John Adlum followed actual visits to the region and say nothing to favor the Pine Creek view.
Perhaps the Indians were merely accepting an already accomplished fact at the meeting in 1784. Dr. Paul A. W. Wallace says that this would have been expected from the subservient, pacified Indian. Regardless, the Provincial leadership made no effort to settle the lands in what some called "the disputed territory" until after the later agreement at Stanwix; in fact, they discouraged it.[37] The simple desire for legitimacy gives us very little to go on in the light of more than adequate documentation of the justice of the Lycoming view.
This evidence might suggest changing the name of the long-revered "Tiadaghton Elm" to the "Pine Creek Elm" and bringing to a close the vexatious question of the Tiadaghton. However let us strike a note of caution, if not humility. Indian place names had a way of shifting, doubling, and moving, since they served largely as descriptive terms and not as true place names. It is not at all unusual to find the same name applied to several places or to find names migrating. The Tiadaghton could have been Lycoming Creek to some Indians at one time, and Pine Creek to others at the same or another time. Consider, for example, that there were three Miami rivers in present Ohio, which are now known as the Miami, the Little Miami, and the Maumee. It hardly makes any real difference to the geography of the Fair Play territory, or to the delimiting of its boundaries, which stream was the Tiadaghton. Actually, it was the doubt about it which drew in the squatters and created Fair Play. These settlers justified their contention that the Tiadaghton was Pine Creek by moving into the territory and holding onto it. This may be reason enough for calling the famous tree the Tiadaghton Elm, even if early travelers and the proprietary officials said that the Tiadaghton was Lycoming Creek.[38]
The topography of the region also influenced the delineation of what we call Fair Play territory. The jugular vein which supplies the life-blood to this region is undoubtedly the West Branch of the Susquehanna River. This branch of the great river, which drains almost fifty per cent of the State, follows a northeasterly course of some forty miles from the Great Island, which is just east of present Lock Haven, to what is now Muncy, then turns southward.[39]
The West Branch of the mighty Susquehanna, which has plagued generations of residents with its spring floodings, was the primary means of ingress and egress for the area. Rich bottom lands at the mouths of Lycoming, Larrys, and Pine creeks drew the hardy pioneer farmers, and here they worked the soil to provide the immediate needs for survival. Hemmed in on the north by the plateau area of the Appalachian front and on the south by the Bald Eagle Mountains, these courageous pioneers of frontier democracy carved their future out of the two-mile area (more often less) between those two forbidding natural walls. With the best lands to be found around the mouth of Pine Creek, which is reasonably close to the center of this twenty-five-mile area, it seems quite natural that the major political, social, and economic developments would take place in close proximity--and they did.[40]
Thus, an area never exceeding two miles in width and spanning some ten miles (presently from Jersey Shore to Lock Haven) was the heartland of Fair Play settlement. Lycoming Creek, Larrys Creek, and Pine Creek all run south into the West Branch, having channeled breaks through the rolling valley which extends along the previously defined territory.
"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