The people of Perry County love their history, and for good reason. Change comes slowly to these parts.
Looking out at Blue Mountain from my favorite rocking chair on the back porch, there’s very little from modern times to see. In fact, there’s a lot more to put one in mind of centuries past. There’s the beehive-shaped mud oven, sitting in the shade of its humble post-and-beam lean-to; there’s the old hand-dug well, a crumbling testament to the early 19th century homesteaders who built the log cabin at the core of the house. Even our neighbor’s fence looks like a relic of a bygone era, thanks to its weathered locust posts.
There are times you might think you were lost in the centuries if it weren’t for the distant whine of a jet plying the federal airway overhead or the faint grinding of gears of a big rig coming down off the mountain.
There have been white settlers on this side of Blue Mountain since the 1730s, and perhaps even longer than that. Two hundred and eighty years of settlement sounds like a good long stretch, but the arrowheads you can find along Shermans Creek bear witness to a much deeper past. Native Americans lived here for thousands of years – perhaps even tens of thousands – before the first white explorers and traders came over the mountain from what was then called the “North Valley.”
Lately I’ve been researching the clash of civilizations that ensued when settler met native. A few weeks ago, I wrote of the wealth of so-called “captive narratives” from those early days, best-selling accounts of whites captured and either imprisoned in native villages or adopted into the tribes. The native raiders, understandably, are the villains in those stories: fiercely painted braves on the warpath, killing and pillaging without pity.
But it’s important to note that the earliest white settlers here were trespassers. The land that would become Perry County was a great prize to the natives, on account of the superlative hunting. The hunting grounds north of “Kittatinny,” or Blue Mountain, were deliberately excluded from land sales to the colonial authorities.
But by 1740, as the North Valley filled with settlers, the legal nicety of treaties with the natives came into direct conflict with the settlers’ impulse to push westward. The Six Nations, presided over by the Iroquois, filed official complaints about the squatters. Their complaints were examined by the colonial authorities and found to be valid.
A series of evictions followed. Every few years, colonial officials would cross Blue Mountain and oust the white settlers, relocating some, paying off others, and putting their rough-hewn cabins to the torch.
But the forces of westward expansion were simply too great. In 1754, the treaty of Easton established the right of white settlers to stake a claim north of the mountain. The land office was instantly flooded with applications from squatters eager to legitimize their homesteads.
Ironically, in 1755, the same year that many hard-working homesteaders finally owned the land under their feet, the territory became a hotly contested front in the world war that had broken out, primarily between the French and the English. The French unleashed their Indian allies on the Susquehanna Valley, and once again, the settlers were evicted, this time by terror tactics.
Recently, one of my most devoted readers – Wade Fowler, the eagle-eyed editor of this newspaper – mentioned a novel, Jason McGee (Harper & Row, 1979), that might help me understand this fascinating period of Perry County’s history. The fact that Jason McGee was written by Wade’s father, Robert, who once owned and published the Perry County Times, among many other publications, only deepened my curiosity.
As a novel, Jason McGee owes a heavy debt to the imagination, but its author was a serious historian. Mr. Fowler’s impeccable research makes for a very lively and thorough picture of life in the 1750s in the Pennsylvania territory.
The story begins in a little homestead next to Sherman’s Creek, where Jason’s family is trying to eke out a living. Jason’s mother and sister are killed in a violent Indian raid, and his elder brother is kidnapped. It won’t spoil the story to say that the major adventure in the story is Jason’s quest to find his brother and bring him home. Along the way, as Jason comes into manhood, he discovers that the Pennsylvania territory is an extremely complex and subtle place, matched only by the motivations of the settlers, tribes, and nations competing to master it.
Jason McGee is currently out of print, but there are plenty of copies available on Amazon.com and eBay. Mine cost less than four dollars, shipped.
Hm. A historical novel about a little homestead next to Sherman’s Creek.
Wish I’d thought of that.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 26 May 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
