of time. That institutional
pattern is described from the analysis of data concerning the political
and economic systems, and the social structure, including religion, the
family, the value system, social classes, art, music, recreation,
mythology, and folklore. Also, as noted in the first two chapters of
this study, geographic and demographic data have been analyzed in an
attempt to picture the area under observation and the people who
inhabited that region. It is believed that these various data present a
fuller view of the "way of life" of these people than the earlier
politico-military accounts of nineteenth-century historians.

Of course, there are certain limitations in this particular analysis.
This study is not meant to be typical of the frontier experience or
necessarily representative of frontier communities. However, it would
have broader implications if a similar study were made for Greene County
in western Pennsylvania, where a group composed mainly of Scotch-Irish
Presbyterians also set up a "Fair Play system."[3] Furthermore, it is my
interpretation of Turner's thesis which is being tested, not the
validity of the thesis.

Despite the fact that the Fair Play settlers and their "system" have
been referred to by both Pennsylvania and frontier historians in the
twentieth century, neither the settlers nor their system has been
studied in depth.[4] Meginness and Linn, the foremost historians of the
West Branch, were both nineteenth-century writers, and, unfortunately,
twentieth-century scholars have not considered the Fair Play settlers
worthy of their study. Biographical studies are limited to the work of
Edwin MacMinn on Colonel Antes, completed in 1900. As a result, there
has been a definite need for an investigation collating the researches
of these earlier historians and based upon the available primary data.
This study is an attempt to fill the void.

The seeming paucity of primary source materials is a further
complication to the student of Fair Play history. However, letters,
journals, diaries, probate records, tax lists, pension claims, and court
records offer adequate data to the inquiring historian, although the
extra-legal character of the settlement seriously reduced the public
record. Nevertheless, the broad scope of ethnography provides the kind
of study for which the data supply a rather full picture of life on this
frontier. Political, economic, and social patterns are discernible,
although