Frontier Country. Patrick Spero

three sons, Richard, Thomas, and John, inherited the proprietorship. They, more than their father, would have to deal with managing the expansion of a colony that lacked the means to do so.¹

      While Penn suffered, his colony thrived in his absence. Tens of thousands of colonists from Germanic principalities and the British Isles arrived in Pennsylvania beginning in the 1710s, at around the time of Penn’s stroke, and immigration further increased in the 1720s. In 1728 alone, between three thousand and six thousand people arrived from Ireland, while an annual average of one thousand migrants arrived from Germany between 1727 and 1740.²

      These numbers may appear small to modern readers, but placing these migration figures in their historical context shows how astounding the population growth was—and how dramatically such arrivals were changing colonial society. By 1740, recent non-English arrivals composed nearly half the population. Penn had expected, even hoped for, such growth. But “such numbers of strangers,” as the government referred to them, threatened to upend Pennsylvania’s dominant Quaker society and exposed the challenge of governing an expanding colony. In the 1720s, government officials responded to this dilemma by creating new administrative layers and laws to strengthen the colonial government in the east and protect the Quaker majority. In the west, however, governing officials faced different issues. Here the colonial government was just trying to establish its authority, and colonists took advantage of its weakness. Laws were ignored, and magistrates often lacked, often in violation of Penn’s diplomatic agreements, sufficient support to enforce policies. Colonists squatted near Indian lands. Indians and traders conducted deals; many did not adhere to colonial regulations. Some went smoothly, others less so.³

      Figure 4. Pennsylvania’s early western settlements, 1715–1730. Many new arrivals to Pennsylvania headed toward the Susquehanna River. These new settlements provided opportunity, but government control was far weaker and violence and disorder were more frequent. In 1727, Indians murdered a colonist outside of Snaketown during a trade deal gone bad. The incident revealed a number of governing challenges to those in Philadelphia who were tasked with managing the colony’s peaceful expansion.

      No person took better advantage of this situation than Indian trader John Burt, perhaps the most dangerous man in the colony. Indeed, Burt’s business dealings at a short-lived trading town called Snaketown led to a murder in 1727 that forced Philadelphia officials to reassess the government’s role in regulating areas of new settlement. Government officials knew that they had to address the troubles that arose because of men like Burt. The need to create policies aimed at better ordering the colony’s expansion also provided eastern-based policymakers an opportunity to further protect the Quaker and largely pacifist core of the colony. Through the distribution of land and the arrangement of new settlements, proprietary officials were able to redirect new colonists, many of whom were well versed in the violent warfare of Europe and had few qualms with the use of firearms, away from the predominantly Quaker regions and place them in areas that could become defensive frontiers in the event of war. This approach, on the one hand, helped address the problem of governing frontiers in a Quaker-led colony. But the distribution of new settlers also placed these colonists further from the strongest arms of the colonial government.

      “A Frontier in Case of Disturbance”

      On a late November day in 1724, Henry Hawkins sat in the Chester County jail, alone in the world, penniless, bruised, and battered. He waited for John Mitchell, one of the justices of the peace for the county, to arrive so he could plead his case. When he did arrive, Hawkins told him a story of his travels and travails through “the woods” of Pennsylvania that left many who heard it appalled. For us, Hawkins’s story provides a glimpse into the uncertainty that marked the lives of those who would in time become, in their own words, “frontier inhabitants.”⁴

      Hawkins arrived in Pennsylvania hoping for a new start in the new world. His prospects looked bright at first. Hawkins agreed to a five-year indenture to John Burt, an Indian trader who also claimed to be a gunsmith. Burt promised to train Hawkins in the gun trade, a skill in high demand, in exchange for five years of Hawkins’s life. From Hawkins’s perspective, in five short years he would be free to strike out on his own. Armed with his new skill and maybe some capital and social currency, Hawkins would have secured the foundation for a profitable and independent business, an opportunity unlike any that the old world offered. Hawkins probably felt like it was more of an apprenticeship than servitude, an investment for his future rather than the forfeiture of his personal freedom. Or so he thought.⁵

      Burt, it turned out, cared more about trading than making or repairing guns. Rather than learning the art of the firearm, Hawkins said he was “forced to go along with the said Burt Indian trading.” Worse still, when they returned from their journey into the woods, Burt still refused to train him. Instead, he sent Hawkins on another trading adventure, this time to Philadelphia to acquire “more goods to go trading again.” Burt placed his servant under the care of Jonas Davenport, a well-connected trader who had secured a tract of land in a Scots-Irish settlement called Donegal near Burt’s home. Davenport disliked Hawkins, who likely complained mightily that this was not the work he had signed up for. “Sorely beat and abused by said Jonas Davenport,” Hawkins refused to return to his master and instead stayed in Philadelphia.⁶

      Hawkins’s recalcitrance, however justifiable, nonetheless made things worse. Burt decided that Hawkins was too much trouble to bear and sold him to a local plantation. Hawkins now found himself a farmhand, laboring away in fields and learning little that would help him in the future. That job did not work out either, and he soon found himself again in the hands of Davenport, who then sold him to “an Indian.” The Indian, named Chickoekenoke, took Hawkins “back into the woods several hundred miles.”⁷

      Hawkins’s stay there was short too. Chickoekenoke grew frustrated with his servant, just as all his other masters had, and brought Hawkins back to Davenport seeking a refund. At Davenport’s place in Donegal, Hawkins saw an opportunity to escape and ran to seek a justice of the peace, hoping the law could provide some protection. An angry Davenport intercepted him, bound his hands, tied him to the tail of a horse, and “ha[u]ld [Hawkins] on the ground a considerable way through a thick muddy swamp.” The brutality of the public beating—which shocked a group of women onlookers—drew the attention of the law. Davenport, facing charges of abusing his servant, turned Hawkins over to the authorities, “sorely beat and bruised on the body and one eye almost beat out and like to have broken both arms.” Sitting in the jail, “destitute of friends,” Hawkins told John Mitchell his tale of woe and hoped the court could intercede in his case, to give him the freedom he so desperately wished he had never given up.⁸

      Hawkins proved a poor commodity because he possessed a strong spirit, and because of that, we have his story today. However unusual Hawkins’s tale may be, his travels are emblematic. Hawkins witnessed the Indian trade, once the economic foundation for those who lived in the western areas of Pennsylvania; worked on a farm, a new and bountiful industry that had recently begun to lay a new economic foundation for these western areas; traveled through the woods and saw Indian society, a culture whose history predated William Penn’s arrival; stayed in a small trading enclave with Burt; and spent time in Donegal, a burgeoning and bustling Scots-Irish community formed in 1720 of recent immigrants like himself. It was a rough-and-tumble world where the only certainty was imminent danger. It was also a fluid society in which Indians and colonists interacted easily and regularly; Hawkins, for instance, was sold as an indentured servant to an Indian, a transaction that would be considered unusual in a few decades. And, as Hawkins’s story ends with him racing to find the protection of a justice of peace, it was a world in which the law was a presence but hard to reach, a figment of what it should be. Government officials, from high proprietary officials stationed in Philadelphia like James Logan who expressed dismay and surprise at Davenport’s actions, to the local justice of the peace John Mitchell, who indicted Davenport for his abuse of Hawkins, knew that this world on the fringes of Pennsylvania existed. They hoped to put an end to it, for the disorder, violence, and uncertainty it bred threatened their hopes for peace.⁹

      Hawkins, meanwhile,