promised to indemnify Denny from any loss which he might sustain from the prosecution by the Proprietaries of his bond.

While General Stanwix, proceeding to Bedford, was having trouble in securing the necessary horses and wagons for his march to the westward, the retreat of the French from Ticonderoga and Crown Point, their surrender of Niagara after it had been stormed by the British, and the rout of 1,200 French from Detroit, Venango, and Presque Isle coming to the relief of Niagara, and the adhesion of the Indians to the peace, brought about the evacuation and destruction of the French forts in Pennsylvania: Venango, Le Boeuf, and Presque Isle. This was made permanent by the capture of Quebec and the building of a more substantial fort at Pittsburgh.

F

CHAPTED XVII.

THE MEN OF THE FRONTIER

ROM Holme's map of the first purchases, Davis's History

of Bucks County, and Smith's History of Delaware County, if not from what we have said in the preceding chapters, the reader can gather that down to the death of William Penn all of what is now Bucks beyond Newtown, all of Montgomery beyond Norristown, and all of what is now Chester would have been called the frontier. After or contemporary with the religious communities of which the works of Sachse have given details, and which made settlements along the northern side of the Schuylkill and at Ephrata, came new emigrants from Wales, mostly Baptists, to the northern end of the colony. The Quakers spread little except from the increase of families. The ScotchIrish soon after Penn's death led the way to the Susquehanna. James Logan, secretary, receiver-general and surveyor-general previous to the mortgage of 1708, was one of the attorneys for the mortgagees and the most active trustee for the sale of the Pennsylvania lands appointed in Penn's will. Sir William Keith made some effort to take the control of this land business out of Logan's hands. Keith's interference, althought it was not legal, advanced the outposts of the cavalry in three ways, viz., the invitation to the Germans to settle at Tulpehocken, of which we have spoken; the procuring of a survey, by virtue of an old right which he had bought, of a tract on the western bank of the Susquehanna, where he established a plantation called Newberry,

after his wife's maiden name; and the establishment of a manor of 70,000 acres for Springett Penn and called Springettsbury adjoining Newberry on the south (in York county). Any right which Springett Penn took by this was probably as trustee for the Proprietaries, and assigned to them by his brother William's release. Many years afterwards the manor was resurveyed with different dimensions. The enormous immigration of Germans induced the Anglo-Saxon majority in the Assembly in 1729 to impose a protective tariff, not on goods, but on persons, of so much a head. In 1730, it is said, there were about 15,000 adherents of the German Reformed confession in Pennsylvania. Thomas Penn attempted to make sales, once by a lottery scheme, at the very edge of the Indian purchases on the Delaware.

As the Moravians entered the Indian country with gospel work as one of their chief purposes, they are not included by us with the belligerent people at the foot of the Blue Mountains when we speak of frontiersmen, although they were the northernmost settlers at the time of the arrival of Denny.

The German Lutherans had begun to congregate before 1743, when the Rev. Henry Melchior Mühlenberg established the Augustus church at Trappe (Montgomery county). Not long afterwards he organized a Lutheran synod. He married a daughter of Conrad Weiser. We have seen how the frontiers receded during the French and Indian war, and the white man's country may be said not to have extended beyond the present Franklin and Cumberland and the southern half of the present Dauphin, Lebanon, and Berks counties at the time at which the last chapter closes. Beyond were a few forts, Pitt and Augusta being the most important. The land for miles within this border was occupied by detached settlements of Germans and Scotch-Irish. The change of the aforesaid Mühlenberg's son from preacher to gencral in the pulpit, which was one of the striking incidents of the Revolution, had been often less dramatically paralleled among the descendants of the Covenanters in this earlier war. The

statues of John Peter Gabriel Mühlenberg and Robert Fulton, although one took up arms in Virginia, and the other started a steam boat in New York, represent the two dominant elements of the interior population of the State which presented the statues

Situated near Wilkes-Barre, 100 feet from the river; erected 1770; rebuilt in 1777. Engraved for this work from a print in Wyoming Historical and Geological Society

to the Capitol at Washington. These elements were separated ecclesiastically from the element which bore sway in the older settlement, where William Allen, the only holder of important office, was a Presbyterian. Since the Swedes element had become insignificant, political power was shared between the Quakers and the adherents of the Church of England. Then also,

while Allen was the richest inhabitant of Pennsylvania, the other rich men were Quakers or Churchmen. One fact about social conditions in Colonial Pennsylvania must be noted. Among the first purchases while the Founder was in England there had been some tracts of 5,000 acres, and Dr. Nicholas Moore and the Growdons had located theirs respectively in one place; and the Free Society of Traders, of which Moore was president, had larger tracts in several places, and some right to exercise baronial jurisdiction, its so-called manor in Chester county becoming many years later the property of Nathaniel Newlin: but the abrogation from the first of the law of primogeniture, the application of a decedent's land to the payment of debts, and the temptation to sell by the rapid demand for smaller quantities, caused these tracts to be subdivided, and when various members of the Penn family aside from the Proprietaries themselves received large quantities of land and sold them to single purchasers, the latter, buying on speculation, soon sold off pieces. Thus the real estate in any given locality owned by a resident there, aside from the Proprietaries themselves, amounted at the most to large farms held in fee. There were no great estates occupied by a landed gentry remote from the chief city, as in Virginia and New York. The rich men of Pennsylvania and those who deemed themselves its aristocracy were nearly all merchants or merchants' sons. Growdon of Bucks county and William Logan of Philadelphia county were the only members of the Council not residents of Philadelphia, unless we count Hamilton, who lived just beyond Vine street. We have seen that the councillors were the representatives of the Proprietaries. Originally all being members of the Society of Friends, it was a long time the policy that an equal number should be taken from that Society and the Church of England, but latterly most of the ostensible Friends were of the variety who believed in defensive war, and Logan, Shoemaker, and to some extent Growdon were the only ones in sympathy with the mass of attendants at Meeting. In the Assembly, however, after the excitement 513

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